The View from my Studio Window

It was a hot Sunday morning in June 1989 when I looked over this new view I had of Somerset.
We had just moved into the country - my previous studio had been in the attic of a terraced house in a city: my only view then of the changing years & weathers being through a murky skylight.
So as in a fairytale I now awoke to cows lowing below my window, skylarks wheeling in the sky above and the smell of new cut grass as I opened the window: what it was to feel  so spontaneously young & alive!
I had no more time than to dash off a quick oil sketch that morning of the fields & cottages I saw through that window -  the painting was eventually shoved down in a corner of the studio - until the other day when I was putting together some CDs of images for use on the FDL website.
Picking it up on a drizzly murky Wednesday afternoon, for the first time in ten, no, twelve years - it took me back to a younger man in a warmer place.
And a glad I was I painted it. As with the rest of England the relentless march of the dull builder has not left this village unsullied: they came a couple of years ago and stole away this view with two dozen little dwellings, and now the cottage in the picture is being knocked about and 'improved' to a state in which it will be unrecognizable.
Yet all things change: though when I painted this picture of what I then thought was the essence of eternal rural bliss I was in fact capturing a moment in time.

Spring in Somerset
	We asked our countryside correspondent, Mr. Woodbine, to write a few words on this stirring time of year: 'The Wood throstle warbles on the branch and the first of the Grummits have been coming out of hibernation: I look out from my window onto a valley made glorious by the return of green and song and flower. 'Tis a time of year when I often thinks of my old father, the last of the great Nightsoil Men. The only one of us who knew where the flies did go in winter. He would always turn his kale-eyed, cider-haunted face to me, smile a gummy smile and  say:
'Wit Grimmit o'er the grove,  The Mussock doth mist the wortle, If you canst see the grootle, Then frewmenty in the roooootttlllll..............'

.....well I never understood what he were on about (neither did he I think) - but 'e always did say it (till that spring when he had the accident with the muck spreader). How we all did laugh - still, as they say: 'In the Land of the Stupid the Halfwit is King'.

It warms me up this new born sun and all the lambs a-jumping in the meadow and the lark a-making of its nest shows life can indeed be reborn from the greyness of drear winter - and 'tis a joy to take off some of those layers for the first time in a good few months & have a good scratch. 
And blow me if next month won't be time to start thinking of having a wash! 
I've even put the first of the collywobbles on my grizzled head. How the seasons do come around!

The cat's bin frisky and has been catching mussocks and futtocks a plenty - yesterday even a tripebusterd. 
The little Dingledongle flowers are swaying lightly on the breeze and the Somerset hornet bee........  well the venomous fiend is beginning to buzz in the hedgerow, bringing fear and trembling back to the first born of every family (and those whose names begin with H or J, end in O or have more than three vowels or fourteen consonants. How the little blighter do know these things I do not know - but if one should have the mischance to find one of his victims, all swollen & black one fine morning 'tis a fact [mostly - or at least most sometimes] that his name, or one of his names, do obey this rule! I finds a good larruping of Tin Inn cider the only sure remedy against his onslaught - that or the skin of a tussocktodger - 
But that's another story....)

Still the garden is mostly rosey in this bucolic idyll - all is right with the world & God is in his Heaven. 
....And tomorrow we starts Gurmett poaching!

The Tin Inn
	Bob Orwell sits in the pub his usual gloomy self until a pint is bought for him & only then can he be spurred into an anecdotal reverie. It's worth it though. A native of the village, now in ripe & rancid old age, he has seen it all over the years: he cheerfully recalls the farmers, gentry &landlords come & go, their gruesome accidents, diseases & afflictions; the fields scourged by various plagues and misfortune and the seasons' cycle wreaking its havoc on man & beast alike.  'We're all a gonner in the end', he laughs.
But one thing abides, he told me: Cider. Cider, in these parts was once a vital part of every day life he says - and I learned from him that somewhere - at the top of the hill, was a semi-secret drinking den known as 'The Tin Inn' where the ferment is still brewed in ancient vats by the horny hands of sons of toil. No - it was not for the likes of me - an 'incomer' - to visit, but he would - if I gave him the necessary £2.50 ($4) get me a gallon of 'monkey' ( I think he called it this because it is prone to make a monkey of you!).  Sunday afternoons I would find a container on my doorstep: pale yelow, slightly effervescent with a vague scent of pig - a deceptively refreshing draught as it turns out which belays its content of 7.5% alcohol. Off and on I have enjoyed the various vintages until this Spring - when by surprise I found I had graduated into one of the honoured guests: it was asked -'Would I care to come along on a Monday evening'? (The day has changed & many of the very old regulars have moved on to better things...) But there I now sit as the frost bites outside, part of a select band, on sacks on barrels, surrounded by huge barrels drinking cider from middling sized barrels: the talk is of the village, of what has passed & anecdotes of before I was born. Rugged faces lit by a dim light laugh into the night. By late evening memories cloud over...

The villages in these parts are often to be found on what were once small islands of land, rising as they do from the flat 'Somerset Levels': an area which was, until fairly recent history, a vast impenetrable and dangerous bog. 
Expanses of pasture and willow, bisected by drainage 'rhines' with little clusters of houses dotted here & there gives some of the places hereabouts a very remote feel, and it is on one of the remotest of these islands that the 'pub that time forgot' can be found. 
I think its true name is the 'Rose and Crown' or 'The King's Head' or some such- no one I know calls it anything other than 'Dirty Maisie's'. Who Maisie was, or what she did to deserve such notoriety none can say - her existence is but a dim folk memory.

If one takes the main road out of Langport and then again one of the minor turnings, and strikes North, one passes along an ever narrowing track, past a still-working windmill and tumbledown farms where corn stooks can yet be seen standing, in their season, in the fields. One might be passing into a Ruritanian kingdom, so different does everything seem. After a few miles of hard walking, as one at last reaches the very edge of the spit of land, with miles of flooded moor below, and Glastonbury Tor in the distance we at last find the ancient alehouse.

Like entering the set from a Dickensian film of the 40's one passes into a warm, humid, smoky, dimly-lit hovel of friendly weather-worn faces at their leisured activities of discussing badgers, cider and the weather.
Then, having stumbled over furniture, dogs, sleeping objects prostrate upon the flagstones and other assorted slimey objects one enters the Tap room. Here there is no 'bar' as such at which to oder and be served - that, I think, would be considered a ' new fangled' invention and an unnecessary affectation. Instead one stands surrounded by barrels, bottles and pump handles and waits for some reaction. It is hard to know who is customer and who Publican. In the half light a robust, bearded man leans against a beer crate, gun dog at his gaitered feet and drinks from a battered pewter mug. A naked child wanders past eating a huge jam sandwich. Outside the cockerel becomes Sunday dinner. There is a murmuring in broad, indecipherable 'Mummerset'. Eventually a broad and ruddy-faced barmaid notices your thirsty gaze and in a cracked and crazed glass passes you a pint of the local vintage. It is cheap and delicious - modern fizzy ciders are a ludicrous parody of this noble drink.

Re entering the saloon one's eyes have become accustomed to the gloom and it is now one notices the fantastical decorations - the deposits and accretions of ages, like flotsam thrown up at random by a thousand disparate tides and then glued and nailed to the wall 'for posterity'. A fox's head is embellished with glasses and pipe, a poster of a winning football team (from 1973) takes pride of place. There are stuffed pike, dogs, mermaids; eel traps, man traps; jars of things edible, things poisonous; potions, lotions in ancient bottles; horse brasses and the hooves of horses. One is drawn easily into conversation for one is never considered an 'outsider' here - more a novelty or curio - to be congratulated for having had the fortitude to have made the journey.

As one leaves one notices in the backyard an extraordinary mountain of beer bottles some thirty feet high (some antique in the extreme, others sprouting rare and novel funghi of curious hue and possible relevance to the course of medical history ), half a car, a Jacobean armchair with a bag of pig feed on it, two sheep, a comode and three identical left footed boots.

The first visit I made was some years ago now and it lived up to all the tales I had been told. 
Alas last summer I made the return trip - the 21st. Century and the Health Inspector had at last caught up with Dirty Maisie. 
The plumbing is now new, as is the electric lighting and the garish wallpaper. All is clean, efficient and horrible. Worst of all, to add the 'authentic' rustic touch the saloon is now done out i n genuine picturesque PLASTIC oak beaming. 
Such is the folly of man!

	Time is called at Dirty Maisie's

The Village Games

This August will see the four hundred and twelfth Annual Ascott St. Mary-on-the-Moor Games. Last year saw the revival of the Ancient Sport of Shaggy Shafty. Mister Warplestone was beaten to a humiliating defeat by Maurice Meniscus riding Mister Stayawhile. It was a close run thing and oaths were exchanged in the final heat when a large salami-type pudding had to be hurled at their respective dogs who were expected to consume the  bruised & battered comestible whole. 'T'weren't fair!', Harry Warplestone was heard to later complain in the Cock in Hand public house,' Nobody told me of that final round' - to which his companions laughed heartily - for while the Meniscus/Stayawhile team had brought their massive Somerset Lurcher (a cross between the beast of Bodmin and Bigfoot) to complete the round our unsuspecting secretary had merely been accompanied by his little terrier 'Nipper'.

Nipper, being a valiant little thing, made a gallant attempt at consuming the boudin-vert and indeed, in time, succeeded - though it took the best part of three days & he has since had to go into early retirement, his nipping days at an end.

Bitter, feuding resentments are building on the Moors as a rematch of monumental importance is promised.

This 'success' of the games has prompted the revival of several other obscure and forgotten pastimes. 
We will bring you the results in the coming months of the following events:

Edible Marbles
Slapmenicely
Chidock Clumping
Throbbing Onions
Eat that!
Look at my one
Wicketty on the Donkey
Big Drawers
Toss it up!

Sweet as a Summer's Kiss

For this I am indebted to Old Mrs. Tottle, who having brought me a bottle of this delightful concoction for the past ten years, was finally persuaded to part with its secret & ancient recipe. The smell and taste of Summer is a magical & transient thing yet this Strawberry wine, if carefully made, captures the very essence of it. Take it on a Winter's night & it will evoke those warm Summer days by cool waterfalls or take it on a Summer's evening as the mists gather and bats fly and your senses will be full. But do be warned: it's jolly strong!

As this uses a lot of strawberries do ensure that those you pick are clean & fresh - it would be a pity to spoil all for the sake of second rate ingredients. Take a large & very clean bucket and mash the berries, mix the in the sugar & half (4pts.) of water. Cover with a clean piece of cloth, tied around the rim. Leave for 24-36 hours and then strain the brew into a fermenting vessel, using sieve & funnel. You will be left with a sugary pulp (excellent to put a dab of it on a bit of ice cream!) which should then be mixed with the remaining four pints of water. This will rinse out the remaining juices. So strain this  again (through a clean old stocking or fine meshed sieve) in a fermenting vessel and then add the tannin, acid, yeast & nutrient. Make the level up to 1 gallon. Place in a warm cupboard.

After a couple of months - or when a thick layer of sediment has formed - rack the wine into a clean jar. Allow to ferment until the wine is still - do not be tempted to bottle it too early - it should be ready by Christmas.

Bob Orwell, George, Josh and Little Freddy were roaring with laughter one evening when I entered 'The Cock in Hand' as they were retelling a favourite story about a village curiosity and a visitor. They shared the anecdote with me.

There is a strange gargoyle on the Northwest face of the church, though, if I were to be accurate it's not a Gargoyle at all (literally a 'water spout' from the Old French gargouille:throat) but (in the local phraseology) a 'Hunky Punk'. It is of an angry horned figure with a collar and chain about its neck, staring out at the Brendon Hills. Its origin and significance is now lost but so striking a thing is it that various stories have grown up about it and it has been dubbed 'Old Ned'. Anyway it was believed that if you went down to the church at midnight on a full moon and waited until the clock struck twelve the stone beast, on hearing the last chime, would become animate and go down to the dew pond below the church to take a drink. This was repeated as an entertainment for many years until one evening it was recounted to a traveler and stranger to the village who, in drink, took the whole thing very seriously.
'Hang it!', he cried, 'I'm going to see!'
And all stood amazed as he tottered unsteadily out the pub and along Church Row and into the darkness. A loud explosion of mirth and applause followed him down the lane.
An hour or so later the small group of reprobates that had inspired his adventure were overcome by curiosity and decided to discover the outcome. And sure enough they found him: cold and frightened but in great excitement. He was startled by their approach, but heartened on recognising the company.
'Any minute now he'll go - I've seen him move', said the unsteady stranger (chuckles from the assembly).
'Oh yes', says Bob, 'Why's that then?'
'Why because when he hears twelve struck he'll go down to the..''Be'um sure?', Bob asked
'Oh yes...looook! looook!', the gibbering stranger cried.
Bob took him by the arm and, looking him in the face with an expression of concern, let out the joke:
'But he can't hear twelve being struck.(more chortles)..you see..(louder guffaws)...his ears..(hilarity and laughter)..are made...of...(raucous comments)..STONE!'

A simple bit of humour I know - but true!

And in the next Edition:
Tragedy at Thrubnell Pluncknett
The Last of the Throstlevomits
The Vicar's Wig
Orpington, the Nowhere Place