Dave's blog

Writing your own publicity is a tricky business. It is fine if you have a leaning towards the supercilious or are comfortable with your own ego but, as a state school educated Englishman, I find the whole business thoroughly uncomfortable.  If I meet them in person, unless it comes up in conversation, I prefer not to tell people what I do.   Those with me don’t always feel the same and I often get, ‘He’s written a book you know’ accompanied by a nudge signalling my queue to start talking about my literary accomplishments.

So when I’m asked to write biographies (or ‘biogs’ as they are usually referred to) I can’t help but cringe a little.

I’m tempted to take the piss a little and use something like -

“What a piece of work is Dave Hamilton, how noble in reason, how
infinite in faculties, in form and gardening how express and
admirable, in digging how like an angel, in raising seedlings how like
a god!”

Or on the other end of the scale,

“Dave grows plants to eat. He also looks for plants to eat. He writes about both growing plants to eat and looking for plants to eat”

Or for more of my life story – “Crap School , Band, Crap Jobs, Travel, Failed Businesses, Back to Education, Grow Food, Website, Book, 30 Seconds of Fame, More Education, Second Book. “

Although this doesn’t really give a full picture, it is perhaps more accurate than most biogs I end up writing.

The amount of detail is the most difficult. I feel I’ve had two really distinctive periods in my life – one of going from temp job to temp job, struggling to make ends meet and the one I’m in now.  I didn’t ‘downsize’ or give up a corporate job to begin writing about self-sufficiency, I grew food because it saved me from the horror of endless shitty jobs. It’s not made me rich but it has certainly made me happy.   It wasn’t all that long ago I was an office temp at the bottom rung of a ladder I didn’t want to climb, with an allotment just to keep me sane.

Not long after I started really getting an interest in plants, I was stuck temping for a publisher. All I wanted to do was spend time on my plot, but instead, I spent my day typing in an endless pile of names, addresses, job titles and book preferences into a database. The job was like painting the Forth Bridge; as soon as I finished one pile a new one would reappear.  I found a way to streamline the job using a macro to programme book preferences with jobs, i.e. Nurses would automatically select titles on Nursing and Healthcare. This put me months ahead but still the pile of cards would never end.

At one point I thought I’d been recognised for my services to data-entry as one of the office seniors came over to my desk with a crate of wine. He banged down his fist right next to my mouse to gain the attention of the office, proclaiming in a loud voice how hard work did not go unnoticed at Reed Elsevier.  As I looked up at the senior member of staff a beam crept its way on my pale monitor burnt face and my grey lifeless eyes filled with all the life of a desert flower after the summer rain.  Much to my dismay, his eyes were not there to meet mine. Instead he grinned at every person in my vicinity except me. To add insult to injury he leant over me to hand the bottles to all those on my ‘team’ excluding myself. As he began to over-zealously clap I found myself ducking out of his way to avoid his managerial elbow in my face.

I left shortly after that and thought that would be my last brush with the publishing world.

1. Remove the heads of matches and sharpen them. Next attach flights made from pillowcase feathers so they resemble tiny arrows. Insert matches into various objects, including fruit and vegetables to give the appearance they have been attacked by miniature people.
2. Leave signs around town for lost cat, include a picture of a large Jaguar, Tiger or Lion. Give the cat a suitably small cat name such as Tiddles or Mr Fluffy and include a warning to say approach with caution as can be bad tempered
3. Collect dead flies and give them names (see picture)
4. Copy and paste the logo from website of local zoo or wildlife park to make your own version of headed paper. Write a letter to a friend saying ‘Thank you for your support in the adopt an animal campaign, we will drop round your …..(Elephant, Rhino, Blue Whale, Poisonous Snake etc) on 8^th October (or some date in the near future). Be sure to put your phone number on the letter so you can carry the joke on when they call.
5. Make it look as if a child has walked across a misty window – Press the side of your fist at regular intervals onto the misty glass to form the main foot filling in the toes with the tip of your fingers – your thumb can make the big toe.

I’ve made a decision this year on the advice of a old friend to just say bollocks to, not only the environment,but also to the way of life I’ve been used to.   He quite rightly pointed out that there really is no need for me to carry on doing what I’m doing and I would be much better off if I did something else.

I have a drawn up a 11 point plan to get me started.

1. Bin My Energy Saving Bulbs – It will be good getting back to the good old fashion type, they’re a lot brighter and cheaper to put in.
2. Stop Recycling – I’ll just bin all my plastic, paper, cardboard, glass, garden and kitchen waste. Not separating these out should save me at least 2 minutes a day.
3. Buy a wide-screen TV – One the same size as my living room wall, the biggest I can get with as many channels as humanly possible.
4. Stop walking – I tend to take at least one or  two walks a day, especially in the summer but instead I’ll get my exercise in front of a Wii wired up to my wall sized TV.
5. Stop growing my own and stop foraging – From now on all my food will come via a supermarket delivery service.  This also means I can spend more time playing on the Wii or watching TV. It will mean I no longer have to wait for the right season for my food, I can enjoy it all year round.
6. Bin the bike – I’ll learn to drive and get a car. It will be handy for those short trips to the shops.
7. Fly more – Perhaps I’ll fly to see my sister in Brussels next time I see her rather than get the Eurostar. She does live much nearer the train station than the airport but isn’t that what taxi’s were made for?  I’ll also try and squeeze in around 2-3 long haul flights a year, some of those resorts you don’t have to leave all week sound nice.
8. Turn the heating up – It can get cold in my house and there is no reason I should not be able to walk around my house in just my underpants in the middle of winter!
9. Start shopping for fun – I don’t have nearly enough things, I mean I only own 2 DVD’s for christ sake, how have I survived all year I must be in an entertainment deficit, I don’t even own a box set of anything!!!
10. Get a 9-5 job – This change in life-style doesn’t come cheap so I’ll have to give up my studies and get a full time job. I could get a job in a bank or go back to office temping, I did really enjoy my old job as a data entry clerk.
11. Take some medication – I might get a little down at first, this is inevitable when undertaking such a change in lifestyle.  I hear Seroxat is good for that kind of thing and it   has very little side-effects. Failing that, I’ll just drink heavily.

I’ve not had time to blog on trusty old Self-Sufficientish recently but I have a new wild food blog at http://www.popupforages.com/

So for a treat (or not) here are a few poems penned by Stephen Stranger back in 2007.

Cakes and Biscuits

It’s a large biscuit
But could be a cake
I don’t like cake
Biscuits are different
Thugs of the confectionary world
Dipping and dunking
They like things hot
A cake is a wimp
It will crumble at the first sign of trouble
Cakes are soft
Biscuits are hard
But they can break at any moment

Coffee for one

Coffee for one
I don’t drink coffee
Coffee for two
Is there any tea?
Just futility

Ducks are Dangerous

Ducks are dangerous,
Their little beaks can hurt you,
Not just physically
They seem innocent swimming in ponds
But keep an eye on the duck behind you

Ducks are dangerous,
They’re thieves with feathers
They won’t steal things from you
But you will notice something’s missing
When you’ve been near a duck

Ducks are dangerous
But geese are worse
Addicts of the bird world
They’ll take a drink without asking
Sometimes tea but they like a hard drink

It is often the last thing you expect
Out on walk in the country
A Muscovy duck is the worst
Not quite a duck or a goose
Steal its eggs, it won’t like it

The Sea weed

The sand was wet, the sea weed

Apart from one month in a caravan in South Wales, a month living in an attic in Olney in Buckinghamshire and a couple of weeks living in a cave on the island of Minorca (don’t ask) I have always been a town or city dweller.

Urban living is so embedded in me that even my surname ‘Hamilton’ means either ‘treeless hill town’ or ‘mountain town’. Where I was born and raised (Northampton) gets its name from two Saxon words ‘ham’ and ‘ton’ meaning small town or village and town respectively. I spent my formative years in this market town deemed the most demographically average town in the country leading to the strange phenomenon that it is often targeted by companies for product trials (the first place to have chip and pin, extended pub hours and various crisp flavours which never made it to the rest of the country).

So in other words I am David Mountain Town from North Town Town Town the most average town in the UK.

It’s been a while since I lived in Northampton but my other choices of where to live have always been leaning heavily on the urban side of things- Nottingham, London, Oxford and now Bristol.

So when my girlfriend suggested we should move to the countryside I was more than a little anxious. She has applied to do teacher training in Exeter but rather than live in the town she wants to move to the countryside. She was brought up in the countryside and unlike myself, has never really taken to life in a city.

We’re heading down to Exeter this week and when she goes for her interview I shall be exploring the countryside. The idea of the move is causing me to have a slight shift in consciousness and as a result I am now seeing Bristol with new eyes. I have started noticing all the fly tipping, the rats, and the paranoia that accompanies walking past gangs of ‘yoofs’ late at night. I’ve also began to look at the past in a different way and realised that despite being an urbanite I have always found whenever I had any free time I would be off into the green belts or woods of wherever I live. Even the few spells I had in London I would find myself wandering around the large parks or discovering green stretches of land such as Highgate woods or old railway lines long since abandoned and now turned into green corridors.

Does this mean I shall become a fraud, that being involved in the ‘urban guide to near self-sufficiency’ and we should change the tag line to our site? Have I just become another in a long line of people who are giving up the rat race and leaving the big city? Well hardly – I would have had to be in the rat race in the first place! Perhaps I should just stop being such a wimp and start looking forward to a more peaceful life!?

Last Years Successful Tap

It’s easy to miss the short window of time open for Birch tapping. The sap rises in the spring and if you miss it, that’s it for another year! The first tell tail sign is the new growth high in the canopy of the tree itself. When I was informed in late February the trees had started to bud early I knew I had to get on the case and get tapping. This year I was delighted to find not one but a whole row of Birches not far from my house. I thought my luck was in and this ear I would get a lot more than usual and could experiment with the stuff!
My girlfriend had been keen to get some sap and brew some birch sap wine so along with my brother Andy we went out with drill and bottles in hand to harvest some of the delicate fresh tree juice to play around with.
I use a hand drill rather than an electric one, it seems a much purer exercise and a bit kinder to the tree. The trick is to cut only a little passed the bark rather than deep within the tree. If you find yourself cutting deep into the tree without the sap oozing out then you’re either too early, too late. If this is the case and you should plug up the hole and try again later or the following year.

The three of us took it in turns to tap the trees and using string and parcel tape we attached bottles to the trees so the sap would drip into to collect in them. There are methods where you suspend a can on a nail dug into the tree or even make a container out of the tree bark itself. I have a box full of plastic bottles I keep meaning to take to the recycling bank, so it seemed pointless to spend all afternoon fashioning a vessel from tree bark.

Whilst tapping the final tree we noticed someone had been there before as they’d left a cork bunged into the trunk of the tree. If they were tapping it for sap there really is no need for the hole to be this big. The cork looked like one that would fit a demijohn and the hole only needs to be the diameter of a drinking straw!!!! Having said that cork is one of the best ways to seal up the tree as it expands to fit the size of the hole and can be removed for next years tap.
Without cork to hand I use a twig and sometimes tap it in with a hammer to make sure it is a proper seal.

It is important to reseal the hole as the sap would simply leach from it and never reach the canopy to feed the tree for the year to come, thus the tree would literally ‘bleed’ to death.

We left it over night and came back the following afternoon. I looked down the line of trees and all our containers looked empty. Sap seemed to ooze down the tree but not into our containers. I looked more closely and it looked like they’d all been tampered with. Spotting a large hole nearby it seems a fox; badger or even rabbit could have seen the containers and out of curiosity knocked them all.

Well this is what I thought until I closely examined container 5. Instead of the characteristic clear watery colour birch sap the milk bottle was full of a yellowy brown liquid*See Note.  Now this is where the small mammal theory breaks down! For a fox to disturb all five containers, and then jump on it’s hind legs and piss into a recently emptied one would be a feat even for an anthropomorphic animal with the dexterity of a Wind in the Willows or Pooh bear character! Even Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox wouldn’t be skilled enough to aim into a milk carton half way up a tree.

One assumption from this situation is that foragers might at times be very territorial, pissing in my bottles could be a sign for me not to go near their patch. Either that or some kids thought it might be funny to knock a load of bottles around then piss into one. Either way, I’m finding slightly less urban birches to tap!

Note - As a forager or indeed in any aspect of life you are constantly revising what you’ve learned.  I have since found out if the sap comes yellow or yellow/brown then there is a bacteria present in the sap and you should not drink it.  Also the downy birch looks very similar to the silver birch but the sap has a bitter taste and therefore it is not advisable to tap a downy birch.

It’s funny how your allotment neighbours can have beautifully well tended plots that must take hours and hours to maintain; yet you never see them! I can go for three days straight working without seeing anyone on either side, yet neat rows of roots and leaves still taunt my tatty half rows. I work like a dog sometimes but the weeds still win at times and I feel I’m growing nothing more than a slug farm.

Just before Christmas, around the solstice, I wandered up to my little piece of land, dressed in my thermals to plant out my garlic. The old garden lore is to plant around the winter solstice and harvest around the summer one – plant on the shortest day harvest on the longest.

If you’re reading this as I’ve posted it (around February) don’t worry about missing the boat, garlic can also be planted in the spring.

With garlic in hand I arrived at my plot only to realise I should perhaps de-weed the area where I wanted to plant the garlic and clear the last of the now stringy looking broccoli.

I took my time, enjoying the feeling of being wrapped up warm in the winter air. The ground was quite cold and wet, so I tried not to disturb the soil too much as I pulled out the old broccoli stems. A bramble had somehow found its way in under the brassica net and I took a while untangling it, cutting my hand as I did so. I always get little nicks and scratches on the allotment and I’ve become so used to it, I don’t always notice if my whole arm is dripping with blood.

By the time the plot was cleared the sun was quickly beginning to set and if not for the moon it would have been completely dark. I broke up the bulbs carefully and started inserting the bulbs into the ground using my finger as a dibber.

Just over my head I heard the flutter of wings and felt a chill run down my spine. I looked up but couldn’t see what had made the noise. It was a little late for birds and it was quite a way to the train tunnel the local bats live in. I wasn’t used to being out in this light and everything had an eerie edge; the sound could have been anything, I reassured myself.

Half way through planting my first bulb I was pulled out of my daydreams by the sound of the shed next door being opened. The figure of a gaunt, pale man dressed almost totally in black emerged, holding a hoe in one hand and a wave in the other.

‘Hullo’ he muttered quietly.

I looked up and nodded.

He wandered over for a proper greeting.

‘You look like you’ve cut yourself’ he said smiling and moving his head towards my hand to investigate.

‘I know, I can barely see to plant all this garlic’, I said waving a bulb in front of his face.

He recoiled back and seemed to almost hiss as he did so.

‘Er, sorry, I’m really not a big fan of garlic’

I felt a little embarrassed by my actions, not everyone likes the smell of the stuff and I moved away from my plot to chat to him on his.

He told me he only came down to the plot at night, which is why I never saw him. He also informed me he actually had an allergy to all alliums, not just garlic. I felt even worse about my actions and thought I’d make it up to him by pulling up a couple of parsnips before I left.

We actually got on really well and even joked about the number of people who have worked the plot next to him and how it must be cursed. I remember talking to the allotment rep about the very same thing. People just seem to vanish without a trace from plot 33, no forwarding address, nothing, all very strange.

I dug up two of the biggest parsnips I could find and handed them to my new friend.

“Why thank you”, he grinned, “they still have a little of your blood on them”

I reached for the roots, “I’ll give them a little wash for you”.

He must have really wanted the parsnips as he clutched them to his chest at this remark, mumbling there really was no need, a little blood wouldn’t put him off some lovely fresh parsnips. He took a nibble at one of my offerings.

“Perhaps you should come at night again soon, I always like a little bite on the allotment”, he said grinning from ear to ear revealing a mouth full of bloody parsnip stuck to his protruding canines.

My chest-freezer has been full to bursting since the summer with all the fare Andy and I have procured at the various literary festivals we’ve attended this year. It seems these days it’s hard to go anywhere in world of books without finding a plump, organic fed celebrity chef touting his or her latest ware.

So having bagged five of them throughout the year, this Christmas I intended to make a meat extravaganza of a chef within a chef within a chef…. Etc.

The recipe is based on a delightful British culinary tradition of a bird within a bird, in which a small bird such as a pigeon, quail or even blackbird is stuffed inside a larger bird such as a chicken or duck. These two birds are then stuffed inside a much larger bird such as a goose or a turkey. The combination of textures and flavours results in a luxurious dish where the diner can consume a week’s food in a single meal!

The chef within a chef recipe is even more indulgent as the diner attempts to eat a months worth of meat in a single sitting.

Ingredients

• Five celebrity chefs of increasing sizes boned and gutted
• One bottle of nettle beer (preferably Stinger)
• A ‘flavour shaker’ full of home-grown herbs and spices (preferably grown by a professional gardener in your five acre Hampshire garden)
• A churn of Butter
• Chestnuts
• Some Fat Hen leaves
• 300 Cloves of garlic
• Salt and Pepper to taste

Method

1. The night before your feast, marinate your Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (or second smallest chef) in the nettle beer. I’ve used Stinger beer rather than waste my home-brew.

2.Stuff your Anthony Worral-Thompson with the chestnuts and hemlock, sorry, fat-hen leaves and baste in butter.

3. Remove the tongue of your Jamie Oliver and set aside

4.Lovingly insert the Anthony Worral-Thompson into your Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall using extra butter if any lubrication is needed.

5.Mop up any drool from the side of your Valentine Warner’s mouth before basting in butter and inserting the first two chefs.

6.You may feel you’re running out of room to put the three chefs inside your Jamie Oliver but having removed the tongue there will be ample space in the oral cavity.

7.Place the 300 cloves of garlic in your ‘flavour shaker’ along with the homegrown herbs and spices and coat the skin of the Jamie. Having been raised in Essex the Oliver’s skin can be a little on the tough side so this is an essential part of the preparation.

8.For the last step it is important to have a team of runners on hand as the combined weight of the chefs is quite considerable. Place your Gordon Ramsey on an extremely large baking tray with its head facing away from you. Take your four stuffed chefs and shove them all in the nearest orifice.

9.Roast in a moderate oven for a week.

10. Serve with roast potatoes and a side of seasonal vegetables.