We catch the on-time (how nice) 4pm Saturday afternoon flight from Glasgow to Heathrow. We’re seated in an emergency row to accommodate my long legs, not because I want to be first out of the plane if it crashes. My (life-time) gold card allows me to choose my seats at the time of booking without an outrageous extra fee and I always try to get an emergency row seat if possible.
Neal, one of the cabin crew and at about 50 seems more experienced than most, welcomes me by name – that hardly ever happens. That’s what the gold card can get you sometimes. Impressive. He asks if there is anything we need, and I bite my tongue and don’t ask for a couple of glasses of champagne. He also has a line when he comes through the cabin collecting rubbish – “Let me have anything you don’t want – husbands, wives, small children”. The flight leaves and arrives 5 minutes early. We stay overnight at Heathrow. All good.
Our experience on the next flight is not so good. We’d checked in for the 9.50am Nairobi flight the day before. We were flying Premium Economy (I know, slumming it) and months ago I’d selected seats together (another benefit of having a gold card), 23J and 23K, for a good reason that we’ll come to. We get out boarding passes on our phones.
The day of the flight, we check in our two bags at the first class area (another benefit of having a gold card). The check-in lady seems to spend a lot of time on the keyboard. We get two paper boarding passes with the bag tags on Sabine’s. Fine. However, as we’re walking down the jetway to the plane, I notice that while my paper boarding card is 23K, Sabine’s is 24E.
And we’d used the paper ones to go through the boarding gates. What the ****!!?? Does that mean that someone else has been given her seat? How on earth could that happen after she’d checked in on-line and had the 23J boarding pass on her phone?
And why didn’t the check-in lady at the first-class desk say something to us? Didn’t she see we’d checked in sitting together and then weren’t? While she was doing all that hammering away on the keyboard to allocate Sabine a completely inappropriate seat, one of the middle seats in a row of four. She could see we were travelling together. How could the BA check-in system let this happen? It’s an 8 hour flight and we didn’t fancy being in the company of strangers.
When we get to the aircraft door, we take the cabin manager aside and tell him there’s a problem. He checks his iPad, and allocates us 26J and K at the back of the Premium Economy cabin, all well, so he thinks.
Someone comes on board and sits in Sabine’s seat. Lucky guy – he had no-one next to him the whole flight in what was otherwise a pretty full plane.
But contrary to the satisfaction in the mind of the cabin manager, all was not well as far as I was concerned. Another benefit of a gold card is that it means you’ve flown a lot with BA and can anticipate problems that you’ve seen before, and I’d chosen 23J and K in the middle of the cabin for a particular reason. I’d sat at the back of the cabin before. And sure enough, it happened again.
We’re almost the last to be served lunch because they’d started at the other end of the cabin and we were offered two out of the three choices for main course. Sabine was fine with the pasta option, but they’d run out of the third option, chicken tikka masala that, of course, I wanted.
Believe it or not, I don’t consider myself capable of meeting the high standards of arrogance demonstrated by a select group of entitled Jersey BA gold card holders who have been known to harangue the check-in staff, demanding that their plane has to leave because they have an important meeting in London (or holiday in the Caribbean …. make up your own reason), even though the island is completely fogged in and no incoming flights can land.
So, rarely do I pull this. But I’d known it was almost certainly going to happen, because I’d had it happen to me before, hence the carefully thought through seat selection. I said to Rash, the young cabin attendant, that I’d wanted the chicken and that sometimes on long haul flights, as a gold card holder, I’m asked for my choice of meal before the service starts. That hadn’t happened on this flight.
He was very embarrassed, saying that he would normally do that (really?, but he was mortified so I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt) but his tablet wasn’t working so he didn’t know if there was a gold card holder in his cabin. He apologised profusely. He gave me the lamb option and said he would check in Club to see if they had a chicken meal.
Which they did (herb chicken), would I like that (thank you very much) and back he came with it. It was delicious. And I could have had the lamb as well (which I declined) but I kept the bottle of red wine that went with it. All good. Honour was served but it shouldn’t have happened. All because the BA check-in system malfunctioned.
Our other flight experiences were fine. The seats were comfortable, the plane left and arrived on time, the entertainment system worked (I can remember when there’d be a 50/50 chance of it not working and on one flight even got a free bottle of champagne on the strength of it), and we enjoyed what we watched – Sabine watched the remake of Dune and I particularly liked the first three episodes of a series from Paramount+ called Lioness (nothing to do with safaris or a member of the England women’s soccer team).
I’ve been asked to keep these stories shorter. Hard for me because there’s so much to tell you, but I appreciate they have been a bit long.
Sunday
Months ago, we invited three of Sabine’s colleagues to come for lunch. That starts the week off on the wrong foot because one of the guests called on Saturday just as we were outside Lidl to buy the food to say he had CoViD, so he and his wife couldn’t make it. At least we hadn’t bought food for 5 people – phew.
We had decided to reschedule. We had to reach the other guest but Sabine knows she didn’t look at her emails all the time. Who would have thought in this day and age it would be so difficult to find someone’s phone number, and if she wasn’t old school and still had a landline, we might not have managed. She calls on Sunday morning, having heard the message Sabine had left – phew.
We have the meal we were planning, coq au Riesling and blackberry and apply crumble, for lunch anyway. Both dishes are delicious and it is a glorious day as well, so it would have been lovely to have people around. Hey Ho.
In the evening we christen our CostCo copper firepit – possible the last chance for months to do so. My cold seems to be over the worst (I’d tested for CoViD the previous Friday just in case but was negative). Sabine is cold unless she stands down-wind of the fire but then she gets the smoke as well.
Monday
The stonemason replacing our garden steps starts. He removes the old steps and prepares the ground for the foundations. No rain.
I spend much of the morning on the phone to about six different people at Lloyds Bank being persuaded that just because the direct debit on my Lloyds credit card didn’t go through my HSBC account the previous Friday and my balance on Monday had reverted to the pre-direct debit amount, it wasn’t necessarily a sign that there was a problem. It turns out that if you haven’t used the card in the last thirteen months, which I hadn’t, the direct debit falls away (news to me) but it was the weekend and the system was showing a pending payment, Sir, so it should be fine!
The problem doing it by phone is that I don’t have the card and don’t know the three digit security code so I have to go through the telephone banking process and they then pass me on to the credit card people who then say that as I have come through Telephone Banking, they need to ask me more questions, most of which are the same.
The last person I speak to says if there was a problem with the payment, they’d make sure I didn’t get charged for anything. Yeah, right ☹.
I take Sabine to the station for her commute into Glasgow. I do some work in the garden, digging out the outline for the pond that Sabine’s mother and aunt who have ponds have said I should forget.
I feel a bit tired, have a snooze (as you do), have something to eat as I hadn’t been hungry, still feel tired, sleep for another 2 hours and think – hang on, this is what happened when I got CoViD last year. Sure enough …. two lines on the test. Damn and blast.
I’d been given the CoViD booster in Jersey about a week before. Was this a false positive caused by the vaccination. Not according to Google. Double damn and blast.
And then how do I break it to Sabine? She wasn’t going to be happy as a) I’d given it to her last time and b) she has a very busy week at the university. She definitely wouldn’t want to get it and certainly not from me.
I phone her before I meet her at Helensburgh Central. She takes it relatively calmly (phew) but thinks I should wear a mask in the house, keep away from her, watch TV on my own in my study and sleep in the spare room, all reasonable requests. So far so good.
Tuesday
I’d slept well and wake up feeling fine – phew. Sabine tests negative – phew. I don’t need the car obviously, so Sabine happily drives herself to the station.
We’d reflected on the incidence of CoViD and I note that if our guest from Sunday hadn’t already got CoViD, there’d be a good chance he’d have it now. We could have held a super-spreader event which wouldn’t have made us very popular – phew.
Our stonemason brings a young apprentice and they unload the materials for building the steps. He tells me the forecast for Wednesday looks awful, so work will be held up. It’s been like that the whole summer.
I feel the need to call Lloyds again as clearly there is a problem. My statement now shows that the direct debit had failed. The same rigmarole getting through. I pay what I owe over the phone, email my Lloyds account manager only to get an out-of-office message, so I email her colleagues as the out-of-office message suggested, and call Lloyds again (same rigmarole) to remind them not to charge me. Astonishing, I get put through to the same person as the day before, who remembers the conversation and confirms what he said – what are the odds?
Not raining. I continue doing some work in the garden and on the pond outline. Make hay and all that. No sign of CoViD (phew), but pace myself, so no need for a nap. I even have the energy to book BA flights to Innsbruck the week before Easter for what I hope will be my third and Sabine’s second skiing holiday of the season. I read the Jersey Evening Post on-line – the weather there is unseasonably dry, sunny and hot.
Sabine comes home after yoga in Helensburgh, we both eat in the kitchen, she at the table and me at the island. My mask is in my pocket just in case but eating is ok because you can’t if you’re wearing one. She isn’t showing any CoViD symptoms – phew. I enjoy another guilt-free evening watching programmes in my study that Sabine wouldn’t like. The spare room bed is very comfortable. This CoViD isn’t all bad.
Wednesday
Sabine goes off to university in the pouring rain. No sign of the stonemason, and being a fair weather gardener, I’m not about to potter about outside either. What to do? Build the BBQ that I bought last week? Seems the right thing to do, it isn’t going to build itself, so I do, in the garage.
If anything is going to bring on CoViD symptoms, following picture-only instructions for something relying on open flames attached to a very large gas tank that would be standing on our brand new and very expensive balcony up against our even more expensive house would surely be it. Especially when there is one picture I just couldn’t figure out till I accidently put the part into the right position. Eureka. BBQ 1, CoViD 0.
It helps that I had bought the exact same model in Jersey. It was the floor model so it came built, but wouldn’t go up the staircase and seeing this, the delivery guys backed away and ran (almost literally), so I had to dismantle a lot of it, carry the component parts upstairs and then rebuild it on the balcony. Talk about déjà vu.
Someone from the Lloyds account manager team calls me in the afternoon. Nice but too late to help.
I test myself again just before Sabine gets home – negative (phew). I break the good news to her when she arrives home. I wasn’t expecting her reaction. Clearly she doesn’t believe me. She doesn’t come near me, she looks nervous, stammers, questions if this is a false negative given that it should take 5 days to get clear. Clearly she’s not wanting our in-house separation to end just yet.
However, notwithstanding the scepticism on the part of one person in the house, that same person reminds me that the real highlight of the evening is a Scottish Wildlife Trust webinar on the Life and Ecology of the Corncrake, 7.30pm to 9pm. Corncrakes are now rare and we’d seen them for the first time last year in the Outer Hebrides on an Aigas wildlife programme. However it took 15 minutes to introduce the speaker and while the talk itself was interesting up to a point, that point was reached about 7.55pm.
Out of pity, I’m allowed to watch TV in the living room for the rest of the evening but I spend another night in the spare room.
Thursday
It’s still raining, so no sign of the stonemason again. The slight inconvenience for us is that these steps are where we turn the car around, and his materials are stacked in front, so we have to back the car out onto the road. The driveway entrance has a large car-unfriendly pillar either side on a slight bend, so reversing can be a challenge for some, especially when the car proximity alarms are going crazy.
The rain is a bit more intermittent, so I can get out and finish the pond outline wall. I need to explain. Where we want to put the pond is on a slope – the whole garden is on a slope so it wouldn’t actually matter where we wanted to put it, we’d have this problem. However, as those of you who’ve read the previous story will realise, I am very keen on physics and it is my understanding that a slope and water don’t go well together – the water keeps trying to escape. You need a flat surface for a pond. So do you build up the down-slope end or dig down at the back to get the pond level (or both)?
I’d come to the conclusion that both would be easiest. I’d build a wall in the front, and pile the spoil from digging out the back against the wall so that we get the base level faster with less digging. Then dig out the pond. Using some surplus garden stone blocks, a piece of wood and a spirit level, I was able to envisage how that would work. And I confirmed it with a friend who came to stay around the time I was planning it out. But I don’t blame him.
So that day, I finish the wall – a trench dug half-way round, each lower block carefully located so it is perfectly level with the one before, tested across the length with the spirit level and a long peince of wood, another block on top so the wall is about 30cm deep, forming half an oval shape. It cuts into the slope increasingly deeply at the sides, the curve carefully managed by angling the blocks. A work of art, true craftsmanship and I’m sure on the Tuesday I’d seen the stonemason looking admiringly at what I was doing.
So when Sabine asks why I was doing it that way, it was going to look like a swimming pool, I am somewhat taken aback. And sadly, I don’t have a good answer.
I’m back in the conjugal bed, though.
Friday
Not raining …. yet. The stonemason resumes work. I’m still thinking about the wall.
My Lloyds account manager calls and we talk through the experience. She didn’t know about the 13 month rule either. She says she’ll sort out any issue if there is one, bless her.
I’ve come to realise that my pond plan was going to make things much harder, not easier, than if I simply dug out the back to the same level as the front and put a nice drystone wall to contain the “cliff” at the rear. That solved another problem – not having enough of those garden wall blocks. I could just dig the outline trench all the way round and use the blocks I had in a single layer to get the level surface across the area of the would-be pond. I’m happier and glad I worked it out now and not later on. Thank you, Sabine.
She is out that evening at a mega 2 hour yoga thing. It starts to rain.
I go to do some washing up, so she wouldn’t think I’d watched TV all evening. No hot water. Actually, no heat either, which I hadn’t noticed in the living room with the wood stove on. My heart sinks. Why? What do I know about gas boilers? Only enough to realise that when something was working and now isn’t, there’s a problem and likely a serious problem.
The pressure is way down and the temperature gauge reads 113 and falling. 113? 113C? First I check the gas stove – it works so it’s not a gas supply problem (like across the whole of Jersey that night and well into the next week, as it transpires). I play around with the boiler controls, turn it on and off at the mains, change the Hive controls and replace the batteries which were showing very low, and pray a lot. Nothing happens. Sabine gets home and her ex offers to come round to look. He knows a lot more than I do, and restores the pressure. Still nothing. Manuals come out and get poured over. Nothing. Nothing but a cold house and cold water in it.
It is so all-consuming and upsetting that I even forget to tell Sabine that I’ve left her half a tin of baked beans that she could reheat and put on toast as I’d suspected she hasn’t eaten because of her epic yoga session.
It’s still raining.
Saturday
It’s still raining, torrentially at times. It’s been raining all through the night.
I hadn’t slept well. I have this feeling of desperation about the boiler. The man who serviced our boiler had said last year that he was stopping doing it as his certification was expiring. We call another local who didn’t seem at all keen, on his suggestion try British Gas who had sold and installed the boiler 11 years ago but I can’t be bothered to spend an hour pressing 1, 2 or 3 to try to get to the right part of the organisation which might or might not be able to help us, and finally call an outfit I Googled.
They’re very professional (smooth would now be my preferred adjective) and we like them. But they can’t come till Monday afternoon. With hindsight, we should have paused and thought is that’s what we wanted, but we didn’t. We are left feeling that we are so lucky that they will put us to the top of their schedule. Ok we think we can cope over the weekend, we’re out tomorrow for lunch anyway, it’s relatively mild, we have the wood stove and we’ll hopefully be up and running a day later. How naive were we?
Sabine leaves for her yoga session in Helensburgh around 9.45 and is back before I could clear the leaves out of an overflowing gutter. The roads into town are closed because of flooding and they’re closed out of town the other way too. Trains all cancelled. The Rest and Be Thankful Pass has several mudslides so the route to Mull of Kintyre is closed …. Again. The amber weather warning has proved totally justified. It’s still raining.
We manage without heat and hot water for the day. I write this on Tuesday evening. Nothing has changed. More on this perhaps as the next story?
The rain eases off some time on Saturday night/Sunday morning.
As we know all too well, life can change in an instant. One such instant for me happened in May while looking at the birds on the bird feeder. I sensed a rustle low down in the foliage to one side of it and out popped a rat. It arrived furtively, looked around and then quickly made itself at home, hunkering down and calmly hoovering up the bird seed on the ground dropped by the birds from the feeder above.
It put a shiver down my spine – like someone walking over my grave, isn’t that the saying? A feeling of utter revulsion (and fear?) that on rats can impart. I suspect everyone has the same reaction to these pernicious creatures. Certainly Sabine did and so did the two tough Glaswegians working on our balcony renovation.
You’ve been told that they’re everywhere, town and country, but if you don’t see them, you can pretend that fact doesn’t actually apply to you, that they’re everywhere but not in your neighbourhood. The cats down the road are hunters (we’ve seen them at it), so they must have scared them off. Apparently not, in our case. Actually seeing them brings with it a realisation that you’d much rather not have, that you’ve been blissfully fooling yourself.
And indeed I had stupidly thought we’d got away with it, but there was always a nagging doubt that it wouldn’t last …. and sure enough. But I should be forgiven for being that naive because the problem took long enough to materialise. We’d started feeding the birds months before, when we first moved into the house the previous September in fact, and all through winter the feeders were inundated with hungry avians eager to enjoy the gastronomic delicacies, mostly sunflower seed hearts, our bird restaurant had on offer.
Sunflower seeds are very popular with the birds. The oil provides them with a lot of energy per seed and they are smart enough to know this. Smarter than a lot of people who buy any old seed mix, only to see most of it scornfully discarded by the birds who wouldn’t waste the energy they need for digestion on the nutrient-free crap served up in those restaurants. So the first rule of bird feeding is to provide something the customer wants – so obvious because it applies to the hospitality business everywhere.
But don’t be fooled into buying the black sunflower seeds unless you like clearing up the husks. They are a lot cheaper because the husks make up a lot of the volume, but the birds have to do a lot more work to get at the nutritious part. Our birds don’t have to do that – they’re spoilt rotten because we offer only sunflower seed hearts, already shelled.
I always think that a good restaurant has a simple menu with only a few courses made from good ingredients to choose from as starters, mains and desserts. We’ve followed that line of reasoning, offering only three main-course options – sunflower seed hearts, fat balls and peanuts. Each course requires its own feeder, so I had to do a lot of research (a PhD is next on the list) looking at various websites to decide which type of feeder to buy and not surprisingly there was a lot of choice. And I didn’t get it right first time either, so maybe the research wasn’t good enough for a PhD.
The sunflower seed hearts are the clear favourite, by a mile. Next are the fat balls, but the peanuts are largely untouched. I had hoped that we could attract a Great Spotted Woodpecker to them but no such luck – I’ve only heard one once or twice in the woods nearby, so perhaps we don’t have a resident. I suspect they would be eaten if they were the only thing on offer, but as they can go mouldy in our rainy climate if left uneaten in their feeder, there’s a footnote on the menu now – peanuts only by special request.
Our birds come to the feeder with two very different types of eating styles The Tits (Blue, Great and Coal) are tidy and elegant, they wait their turn if the feeder is busy, their visits to the feeder usually being fleeting, a quick but orderly in and out, picking one seed at a time which they carry off and eat elsewhere, freeing the perch for the next bird. More akin to a take-away service. They’re clinical, purposeful. They can choose to discard a seed but there’s not a lot of wastage. I get the impression that they really appreciate what’s on offer and are keen not to cause a mess in return. Like people at a motorway service station who carry their trays to the trolley when they leave.
Long-tailed Tits are a particular favourite of ours. That’s when you know you’re running a family restaurant because the whole family arrives en-masse. Thoughtfully, they’ve waited till they have the place to themselves, so no queuing with other birds and there is an orderly procession of these cute little birds with long tails to both the sunflower and the fat ball feeders.
However, there are other, slightly larger birds, mainly Goldfinches, Greenfinches, Chaffinches and Siskins, that descend on the feeder in gangs (“flocks” is too a nice word that doesn’t do justice their bully boy tactics). They fly in, they haven’t made reservations, they get upset possibly to the point of being abusive if the restaurant perches are already full, hang about the bushes until one comes free, and push and shove other birds out of the way that are trying to do the same thing. Pigs at the trough (like some humans at a buffet?). They even dive bomb birds on the perches in the hope that they will vacate their seat at the table. And size matters.
To cap it all, once at the feeder, they throw their food around like little children, discarding any seed that doesn’t meet their nutritional standards. On closer observation, I’ve also noticed that they don’t eat with their mouths closed (beaks in their case), and while crushing the chosen seed in half to make it easier to swallow and digest, the half that isn’t in their beak falls to the ground too. Absolutely no manners whatsoever. But the last photo above, a goldfinch waiting in the spirea for a perch to come available, makes you forgive everything.
And there was a silver lining: the area underneath became a secondary feeding station. We had the pleasure of watching other birds seemingly not so comfortable with feeders, principally Dunnocks and Robins and the occasional Blackbird, happily availing themselves of the discarded seeds on the ground. Pleasure is the wrong word for watching the fat Wood Pigeons pecking away – they were too big for the feeders or simply too lazy given that easier access to food was available on the ground.
One evening Sabine saw two hedgehogs (mother and bairn) feeding on the discarded seeds. They were very cute, happily snuffling about minding their own business but they froze when Ernie, the chihuahua, found them. He barked at them but wisely kept his distance until he was scolded and recalled. They’d gone when Sabine looked for them again.
I’m very happy to report that, touch wood, fingers and toes crossed and rabbit’s foot stroked, the rat-under-the-feeder problem seems to have gone away, but not without a great deal of ingenuity, determination and perseverance on my part. I thought it would be simply a matter of doing some Google research, choose the solution that people had assigned 5 stars to, place the Amazon or RSPB order and install the new feeder system when it arrived a couple of days later. Dream on.
At the outset, the most urgent question was to carry on feeding or not. The month of May is very important in the bird breeding calendar, and denying food to our faithful repeat restaurant customers that they possibly had grown dependent on was a very upsetting option. Selfishly, we would be denying ourselves of seeing them looking resplendent in their breeding plumage. Did we want to see both the rats and birds or nothing at all?
We chose the latter, very quickly, in fact the same day. We’d seen enough of the rat population to know we didn’t need to see them anymore. We had workmen close by and the rats seemed quite indifferent to them, but that sense wasn’t returned by the workmen. They weren’t impressed at all. Which meant we had to move fast.
And unless we could come up with a solution, this could be a permanent arrangement. The birds were frantic at first, flying up to the feeder station that no longer had food, finding nothing, flying around it, and finally calling us names. It was all very upsetting for both the birds and us.
I must admit to having been a wee bit angry too – we can’t be the first feeder of birds to have this problem, so why wasn’t there an easy answer? All the stuff I was reading on the internet was about how to stop squirrels climbing up the pole to the feeder and how very expensive feeders or covers with dangling chains could prevent them and the larger birds such as Magpies and Crows accessing the feed while allowing access to the smaller birds. Nothing about rats apart from “you need to stop feeding the birds”.
What to do? Some time in my working life, along with my colleagues at Midland Bank in Jersey, I had to do a behavioural attributes self-assessment test for something called Belbin, which was all about making teams of people work more effectively. Fascinating stuff, easy to understand, not so easy to implement – but great for consultants as it created a self-perpetuating and continuous need for them.
There are 9 roles within any properly balanced team, so the theory goes. I scored well on two roles, co-ordinator and plant. The former seemed to me to be reasonable understandable as that actually was my job, but I and most of my colleagues were surprised by the plant label. So surprised that I got the nickname “petal” for a while. But the plant label, according to this theory, meant I was quite creative and boy, did I need that attribute in order to come up with a solution for the rat problem.
While on folksy work things, I’m reminded of something quoted by my friend Jim (a unique person in that not only is he a great friend but I respect him as a consultant). In some of his presentations, Jim mentions a leader of US industry who said that he found there is always a simple answer to a complex problem ….. that’s wrong. So I started looking at this problem with some trepidation, because to work in the first place, never mind for any period of time, any solution had to be simple.
With hindsight the solution is obvious, so obvious that I really doubted myself. None of the bird feeder venders offered this as an accessory. However I did find one outfit that had a squirrel guard that I could see actually served the purpose but they sell it upside down as a squirrel guard – missing a trick! But that was later, after I worked out what was needed and how to make it work.
It’s very possible that a number of you have already worked it out for yourselves but for those less experienced in engineering and the laws of physics, please read on. The answer is of course to obstruct one of Newtons laws, that of gravity. Britannica obligingly gives this definition:
Newton’s law of gravitation states that any particle of matter in the universe attracts any other with a force varying directly as the product of the masses and inversely as the square of the distance between them.
Fortunately, rather like Newton sitting under the apple tree and an apple falling on his head, the birds gave me first-hand experience of the way gravity worked. In plain English the issue, as I saw it, was how to stop the bird seed falling to the ground.
In assessing the problem, I realised I needed to satisfy a number of conditions simultaneously that would remain constant throughout:
We wanted to feed the birds
The birds wanted us to feed them
We did not want to feed the rats and we didn’t care what they wanted
The table manners of certain species of birds would not change
Any seed would come to rest when it hit an obstacle stronger than itself, currently the ground
Any solution would be based on one fundamental assumption – if the rats could not find any food, they’d stop appearing. That would take us back to an acceptable position. Not quite as good as before they started appearing because we now knew we had to be careful, but good enough.
However, the trouble with assumptions is that they can make as ASS out of yoU and ME (ASSUME). We needed Plan B just in case we were wrong. So another assumption was made, harsh but on firmer ground so to speak. If the rats were dead, they’d stop coming too.
So a two pronged attack was called for, a primary and a secondary. Primary first. The solution was of course to suspend a bowl below the feeder to catch the discarded seed before it had a chance to fall all the way to the ground. At this stage I have to admit to having been slightly disingenuous with the facts – there is a commercially available mesh basket (I already had one) but it was too small to catch all the seeds. The key was to design and make one that was going to be fit for purpose.
The process was as follows:
Check Amazon and kitchen hardware websites like Lakeland, and finally find exactly what I want at the local Home Hardware store – a 30cm (1ft) plastic bowl.
Buy mental chain and fixings to attach the chain to the bowl, and try not to show the pain on your face as you find the 8ft of chain (too long but rather too much than be too little) alone cost £20.
Cut the chain to the right length so the feeder sat just above the bottom of the bowl when the bowl was hung on the same hook as the feeder – nerve-wracking exact measurements needed at that price.
Drill four holes just below the rim of the bowl at the four quarters.
Attach the chain to the bowl using the fixings and hang both bowl and feeder on feeder station arm.
Take both down and drill another hole in base of the bowl to let rain water drain, making sure the hole is not so big as to let seeds be washed out by the rain water.
Rehang.
Wait for the birds to come to the feeder and chastise you for not feeding them for two days.
Wait with bated breath a bit longer to see if the rats reappear.
And it worked like a charm and still does (fingers crossed etc.). What’s been very surprising is how much seed is wasted by those ungrateful finches, now that we are capturing it in the bowl. And by wasted, I mean unusable because before you can put the detritus back into the feeder, it has rained and the seeds lying in the bottom are soaked. The drain hole helps but doesn’t get rid of the water fast enough. More holes? I’m working on that one.
The feeder at the back had the same unwanted wildlife problem but its mechanics were different. Instead of hanging from a hook at the end of an arm of the upright feeder station pole, the feeder was screwed onto the top of the pole. No arms and hooks, so nothing to hang the bowl from. That’s where the commercial squirrel guard I mentioned earlier came to the rescue. I bought two, one to be used as a squirrel guard (like an inverted bowl) and one above it the other way up to catch the seeds. That worked like a charm too.
Except we haven’t found a solution for feeding the gluttonous pigeons. They worked out that they can stand on the edge of the top bowl, strain their neck a bit and reach the bottom seed hole in the feeder. And you can imagine how quickly the feeder gets emptied. Also, this bowl is big enough and unencumbered by chains that they can stand in it and eat the residue (that’s not so bad, given the wastage anyway). Lowering the bowls on the pole helps but raises the risk of the discarded seeds missing. More work in progress.
I’m pleased to report that Plan B was never seriously implemented because Plan A worked so well. Plan B did have two options. We looked into getting an air rifle, but Scotland, unlike England, has treated air pistols and air rifles as lethal weapons after the Dunblane school incident, so it was going to be a lot of hassle just owning one, never mind actually hitting the intended target.
The second option was the easier to implement. I bought a couple of poison dispensers that I put in the garden where the rats had been seen running, and soon after I saw a rat showing signs of having eaten some. Nothing since. My friend Gordon told me rats were neophobic – they’re creatures of habit and eschew new things (which could include poison dispensers appearing on their runs), so I wasn’t too hopeful. I didn’t check the dispensers until August, but they were empty, so something didn’t feel very well. They’re in the garage now.
For the rest of the summer, we got immense pleasure from watching the birds at the feeders. Hopefully the birds, and later their young, appreciated the efforts we went to in order to keep the restaurant open. And another autumn is upon us and they’re going to want three square a day again.
I continue to make modifications to the feeder stations given the new balcony which now obstructs the view of the front garden feeder and the fact one of the expensive squirrel guard bowls cracked and broke – probably the weight of a fat pigeon was too much for it. You’ll be pleased to know that another hardware bowl at a fraction of the price has been modified to do the same job. It’s the old story of Once You Start …….
Having a dog is a great way to get some exercise, but it really helps if somebody else picks up. I have that happy arrangement – Ernie is Sabine’s Chihuahua, she has total responsibility for that side of things and I don’t interfere. Sharing is what it’s all about. She shares him with her ex, Ian, and when Ernie comes to stay, I share Sabine with him.
Sabine fetched him on Friday morning with the intention that he would return to his main home on Saturday, but Ian came down with a late summer cold, so we got to keep Ernie for another day. Saturday was amazingly hot and dry in Rhu (an almost unheard of 26C), so we took him for an earlyish (for us) morning walk around Ardmore Point, a favourite of ours. It’s about 4 miles east of us, through Helensburgh towards Cardross, jutting out into the River Clyde.
The walk is around the outside edge of the point. We’d tried to cut across it once for a bit of variety and regretted it. The path that we took went through some woods and, just as we got to what we judged was the point of no return, disappeared. We then had to bushwack our way around thickets of rhododendrons and the tangled brambles, over fallen trees and through very muddy bog-like patches until we reached the track to the big house on the Point, whereupon we had to climb over a barbed wire fence to access the track. We haven’t tried that route again.
So this Saturday I only took my binoculars, reckoning on a more sedentary walk, which we had. I had the telescope in the car too, but the bay by the carpark was devoid of bird life, and in any case I wasn’t going to take it all the way round for two good reasons – it’s quite heavy despite having a special backpack for it and it would take too long to keep setting it up with Ernie in tow.
As we left the carpark some campers had started up their gas stove and were cooking breakfast. We got a whiff from it that drifted across to us – what is it about other people’s outdoor cooking that smells so good and makes you feel so hungry?
The first part of the walk if you go anti-clockwise, which we usually do for some reason, takes you down to another bay and then the path goes left around the Point. We noticed a few things as we went on this stretch. The first was that you really needed to watch where you trod. Clearly other people don’t have the same happy arrangement that Sabine and I have in sharing dog responsibilities when it comes to their dogs.
The path had dog pooh in too many places probably at the start of the doggy walk, if Ernie is anything to go by, and their foul owners weren’t doing their end of the business. One was deposited exactly mid-point across the path and I could imagine the animal getting a treat for being some precise.
Anyway, let’s not ruin a perfectly lovely morning with that memory. It did get better – as I said, they probably got it out of the way early on, but I was a bit more careful towards the end of the walk too just in case the same applied to the clockwise dog walks.
Where the path turned left, we met a man coming from a less used path to the right who was carrying a telescope attached to a tripod. There were a lot of shorebirds out on the mudflats of the bay where the tide was neither high nor low. The sea can go out quite a distance at low tide, which would be too far to see much clearly, even with a telescope, but this midpoint seemed ok.
I hate being asked if I’ve seen anything interesting because inevitably I haven’t and the person asking clearly thinks that the only birds that matter are ones of some particular rarity. So while I was dying to know what he’d seen, I wasn’t going to ask him, and I got a bit concerned as I heard Sabine say Hello in the friendly way that indicates a question would follow.
But bless her, she asked if he’d seen a LOT of birds, which gave him the chance to tell us that there were quite a few of waders out there but too far away for him to identify too many of them (despite the telescope?) and that there was a peregrine around. Later in the walk, as I scanned the sky hopefully but fruitlessly, I reflected on the peregrine information, and realised that he probably hadn’t seen the bird, just read about it on a local on-line “who’s seen what” birding sites.
Immediately after the birder, at the same place, coming from the opposite (left) direction, we met another man and his dog picking blackberries (not the dog obviously). He was very enthusiastic and said there were loads to be had, particularly further round. He even offered us some from his stash. Sabine asked him what he would do with them and he said he was looking forward to making blackberry and apple crumble, one of my signature dishes. It was only later that I realised I’d missed the opportunity to swap crumble recipes with him – I always use Delia’s with nuts.
We walked all the way round, noting a lot of places for blackberry picking. The early fog had cleared enough at the start of the walk, but it carried on getting brighter. There was no wind, so the Clyde was like glass, making it easier to see the seabirds out there – eiders, with the males either in or turning into their beautiful breeding plumage, with the females being followed by what I think were 3 or 4 ducklings, about 50 red-breasted mergansers swimming in a straight line from left to right, 2 great crested grebes swimming in the opposite directions, lots of cormorants and gulls and, too far out to be certain, black guillemots. Towards the end of the walk, we had the pleasure of a grey seal’s company.
The seal appeared just after we’d said Hello to a middle-aged couple who were looking at his phone at the side of the path in an enquiring sort of way which implied they weren’t sure where they were. Sure enough they were trying to judge how long the walk was from Google Maps. Sabine told them it was about half an hour which I thought was on the thin side. It is in fact just under 2 miles. The time it took us was nothing to go by because we kept stopping for me to look at birds and for Ernie to sniff God knows what.
The lady’s English accent made Sabine ask if they were German, which they were, so they continued the conversation in that language. They were camping, and were planning to visit Geilston and Hill House gardens, both nearby, that day. She thought that they might be doing enough walking without anything extra like Ardmore Point. We left them pondering but then saw them several times more.
We walked on, stopped again to look at birds and the Germans passed us, having apparently decided the walk looked more than they wanted to do and turned back. A little further on, we passed them again. Poor people had made the mistake of getting into a conversation with a man with two dogs, one a spaniel and one an Italian greyhound, a fact that was gleaned by Sabine asking if it was a Whippet. When she said it was big for an Italian greyhound, he bristled and said it was fully grown and wouldn’t be getting any bigger. I can’t imagine what he had to say to the German couple that took so long but he sure was doing all the talking. He left us both with the impression of being your worst nightmare at a dinner party.
I hadn’t actually spoken to the Germans but as we went between them and the talkative man, I wished them “Schöne Wochenende” which, by the way she said “Danke”, had pleasantly surprised her. I wasn’t sure I’d got the adjective ending right though, so I checked with Sabine who told me it should have been “Schönes” because it was “das Wochenende”. Of course …. what a dummkopf.
At the car, having extracted themselves from said man, they passed us for the last time on the way to their large campervan (camping, eh?) and she wished us “Schönes Wochenende”. I’m sure there was a little stress on the “es” for my benefit. I think she must be a teacher.
We had had such a lovely walk that we decided to go back the next day. I’d do some birdwatching in the first bay with the telescope and Sabine would take a container and pick blackberries with Ernie. The tide would be about 40 minutes different, but that would be fine as we could still watch Laura Kuenssberg. Fortunately her over-aggressive and unproductive interviewing style and the fact that an unshaven Stephen Fry who Sabine can’t stand was on the panel meant that we only watched about half the show.
I say fortunately because I wanted the tide to be roughly where it was the day before so the birds wouldn’t be too far out or not able to feed because the tide was too far in, and it was. It wasn’t as nice a day but promised to get better and the sea state was the same, flat calm, as the day before.
We started down the same anticlockwise track. Ernie obliged almost immediately and Sabine went back to drop the bag by the car, thoughtfully preferring not to be incumbered by it while picking blackberries. Sure enough, we quickly came across fresh signs of other dogs being taken for walks by owners without the same level of social integration.
After one particularly large example, a couple appeared going the other way with two collies and I noticed they didn’t have a pooh bag between them (unless the woman had put them in her bum bag – pardon the pun), so I was left wondering why that would be and hoping I hadn’t inadvertently trodden in one possibility.
We’d started picking blackberries on the way to the bay where the path goes left for around the Point or right for birds. There, we separated after finding that the guy the day before had generously left quite a lot of blackberries for us. Rich pickings. I walked along the uneven path by a fence line on my right with long grass and the bay to my right, and a lot of shorebirds in the distance ahead of me.
There were texel sheep in the field to my right (undoubtedly the ugliest breed of any domesticated animal) and one of them had put its head through the wire chain link fencing to get at the long grass. I groaned in anticipation of having to help it extract itself, sheep being driven, according to Sabine’s brother, by a self-destruct gene, but it managed to free itself on its own with a twist of the head that indicated a certain practised familiarity with the situation.
Apologies if you don’t like birds, birdwatching and/or birders – the rest of the story revolves around all three. But if you’ve got this far, you’ve already put up with dog pooh and what follows is a lot better than that.
On I went. As I walked along the narrow grassy path, I thought a good vantage point would be over to my left where a small piece of land jutted out into the bay. It would be far enough away not to scare the birds to flight. The land in between was covered with long grass and, about 10 feet off the path, my right leg went all the way down into a hole that I couldn’t see. There were probably a lot more holes hidden by the grass. Not a good idea, Peter. I managed to extract my leg, unbroken and still attached, and gingerly wended my way back to the safety of the path. Won’t be doing that again!
Back to Plan A – walk along the path as far as I could, step onto the beach and position myself on another low promontory, hopefully still far enough away not to spook the birds. I needn’t have worried. It was a perfect spot and I was able to set up the tripod and telescope behind the low rise of the land to act as a little cover from the large flock of waders, ducks, and gulls ahead of me.
No sooner had I had a first peek through the telescope than I was joined by another birder, also with a tripod and telescope. She looked late 30s but had grey hair. She asked if I minded her using the same spot and of course I replied positively, saying four eyes were better than two. I soon found out that her eyes were an awful lot better than mine in finding and identifying the variety of birds that were in front of us. From my point of view, this could not have turned out to be a better morning.
Just a word on my use of capitals when naming bird species. I haven’t used them if the term is generic, as above (waders, ducks and gulls), but when it’s a specific species (e.g. Herring Gull), I’ve used them to help those readers less familiar with the terms to make the distinction.
Feeling that if we were to establish any kind of rapport, I needed to get awkward things out in the open as soon as possible. I told her I was pretty rubbish at identifying waders. Don’t worry, she said, she’s pretty good at it as she loves the challenge they present. Wow! My day was going from great to fantastic!
The first thing she did was identify a Greenshank that I would have completely missed – I struggled to find it to begin with in my telescope even when she told me where it was. It was among some Common Gulls and some Curlew. She had it in her scope and we swapped scopes so I could see it. Shannon (we’d introduced ourselves by then) gave an exclamation of appreciation as she saw how clear the birds were in my Swarovski telescope, which was lovely because I didn’t feel I was going to contribute very much else to our joint birding experience. Swarovski is the market leader, expensive but extraordinary – it took me decades (till lockdown actually) to persuade myself I really should get one, a decision made easier by my old telescope giving up the ghost.
But I sell myself a little short in the morning’s activity . Mainly thanks to the telescope, I was able to find birds that Shannon hadn’t seen (yet) – but she still very kindly would identify them if I wasn’t sure what they were. Not just that, but she gave tips as to why the bird was what it was – e.g. less spangled on the back than a similar species, slight upward bill, colour of the legs, size.
With Shannon’s help, I saw four birds I hadn’t seen this year (and in fact which I rarely see most years) – yes, sorry, I’m one of those sad people who need to have a spreadsheet list each year that shows me what I’ve seen and of course the total for each year. I can tell Sabine worries about my sanity while at the same giving herself great pleasure relaying this need to anyone who shows even just a vague interest in my hobby.
However, that’s nothing on Shannon. She not only records what she’s seen but counts how many of each species, and then fills out an on-line record for the British Trust for Ornithology using their app Birdtrack. As I looked through the telescope at the untold numbers of Curlew and thinking about the murmurations of starlings that are a feature of the autumn evening sky, for example, I know how committed Shannon must be. One serious birder!
One of those four birds for me was the Greenshank, a pair in fact, which had its bill tucked in under its wing in the classic resting position of so many waders when Shannon spotted it. It makes them a lot harder to identify as the shape and length of the bill is often a strong identifier, you couldn’t see its green legs either and it was quite a long way off, so her correct diagnosis was quite amazing. I returned to it later and it obliged me by moving so I got to properly see its bill, its long green legs and the pattern of its plumage – tick!
Another one was the Black-tailed Godwit, easily confused with the Bar-tailed Godwit, both of which were present in the Bay that morning. Sabine and I had seen the Bar-tailed the day before, and as the Black-tailed is less common, it was another special find by my new best birding buddy. She followed it up by finding a pair of Knot (bird #3), small waders often seen in large flocks of hundreds. Once you have them pointed out, they’re obvious, but how Shannon saw them in the first place was amazing, as they were standing a way off among a group of much larger Curlews. My scope came in handy again.
Other waders were the enduring and omnipresent Oystercatcher, lots of Redshank, a few Dunlin, a flock of Lapwing and three Snipe. Shannon mentioned seeing a Little Ringer Plover but I never espied it. The important things are patience and going back and forth over the same ground because these birds can easily disappear from view and reappear somewhere else depending on the terrain.
Gulls come in different shapes and sizes and that morning we had all the main ones – Great and Lesser Black-backed, Herring, Common and Black-headed (which lose their black heads in winter). There were two Little Egret there too. And although not actually gulls, I’d seen a pair of Gannets at the Point the day before.
I actually found the Pintail on my own (#4, a duck), but couldn’t tell what it was as it was in its eclipse plumage which I’d never seen before. Male ducks in non-breeding plumage often look a little drab and nothing like as striking as they do in their breeding plumage, which changes about now ready for the winter pairing and spring mating. So oddly, it’s in the winter that male ducks are prettier and easier to identify.
However about now they are in transition, some still in eclipse, some in their breeding plumage, and some in between, which makes identification more than a challenge. Waders are in a similar state of plumage, except they are going in the opposite direction, changing from breeding to the duller winter plumage. While asking Shannon about the Pintail, she was able to show me the Wigeon in its deep chestnut eclipse coat in the same scope view. The Canada Geese, Shelduck, Teal, the Eider and the same fifty Red-breasted Mergansers out in the bay, and the inevitable Mallard were very straightforward for me, though.
Sometime while all this was going on, I asked Shannon what she did when she wasn’t bird recording. She worked at Glasgow University, doing administration. It turned out that she worked in the same College of Art as Sabine whose name rang a bell – she’d not met her but had worked on a grant application for her.
Towards the end of this enjoyable morning distraction, Sabine and Ernie appeared, blackberries having been picked and Ernie having been walked, so the two were able to say Hello. Yes, their paths had crossed albeit remotely. Small world, even here, eh? Shannon is taking a new role in a different part of the university, though, so they may not be able to work together again.
Shannon wasn’t finished helping Sabine though. Sabine was sufficiently interested in what we had seen to push me out of the way to look at the birds through the telescope. Sabine asked a question which Shannon answered, whereupon I stood well back while Shannon took on the role of guide and teacher. She walked Sabine through some of the ducks she could see and explained the differences between three species of wader standing together – Curlew (big), Bar-tailed Godwit (medium) and Knot (small). Examples of these birds were together in the same scope view so it was easy for Sabine to get an appreciation of their relative sizes, bills and colouring.
We reluctantly said goodbye to Shannon and the birds. Treading carefully on the path, we reached the car with incident. Sabine said Ernie’s pooh bag had gone – how nice of someone to have picked it up and put in the bin. I suggested it could have been the pair we’d seen at the start of our walk – they might have thought they could avoid criticism if they were seen to put one in the bin.
I had been reflecting on the things that had not worked out as planned on our holiday. I couldn’t blame the French for the storm that meant Condor had to cancel the ferry to St Malo on the 2nd August and bring our sailing forward a day to my birthday, nor for the sunroof not wanting to close as we waited to board. And some other things could have happened no matter where you were.
But …. there was a village outside Saumur that seemed to go out of its way to make our lives as difficult as possible. We’d seen an advertisement for weathervanes in the Saumur visitors’ guide when we first arrived at our chambre d’hôtes. We were intrigued and just wanted to see what the blacksmith had.
On Google Maps, the workshop was fairly close to Chateau Brézé that we wanted to visit the next morning. It looked easy to get there, an unusual tourist place to visit and possibly relevant for the house in Scotland, and we liked the idea of supporting a local artisan, even if we only turn up, show an interest but don’t buy anything. Mmmm.
It would be a mistake to think that two dates above, 10th and 11th August, were required because we had visited a retail establishment one day, made a purchase that needed some finishing touches and had returned the next day to collect our purchase. That would completely miss the point that we were in France in August.
While on the subject of difficulties, I need to get this out of the way early on and I won’t mention it again. The word “weathervane” is not that easy to say if you happen to be German. It has two parts, the first starting with a “w” and the second with a “v”. In English the letters have different sounds but the word is fairly simple to say. However, in German the two letters have the same sound (“v”) as there is no “w” sound. And then the “th” in the middle of the first part can be awkward too as it sounds like a “t” in German but can come out as “zz”.
So when you’re with a German who is fluent in English and who therefore understands to the need to not sound like a German when articulating the first part but in mid-word change to sounding like a German for the second part, you can get a variety of words articulated, sometimes in quick succession if the first attempt(s) didn’t quite get it right. Usually followed by a laugh.
For any reader who is sufficiently interested in other people’s languages, the French for weathervane is “la girouette” and in German it’s an almost direct correlation – “die Wetterfahne”, pronounced Vetterfarne. Neither word is important to this story.
There might be something else that needs explaining. I use the term “blacksmith” when possibly the correct term is “metal worker”, especially as no horses needing shoeing were in evidence. However, it seems such a boring term for a skilled craftsman, an artisan, someone with so much creative flair, that I have reverted to using the old term to make it sound a little more inspiring. I hope you don’t mind. And, No, I’m not going to give you the translation for those words in French and German as well.
I can thoroughly recommend Chateau Brézé, an extraordinary mix of above and below ground construction dating back at least 1000 years. Troglodyte stuff. I still can’t understand why the lords needed 4,000 doves and pigeons – think of the mess, never mind the fact that they ate most of the corn in the fields planted by the peasants. Vive La Révolution.
Our first mistake was not to have lunch there – in our defence, it wasn’t much of a café, more geared to wine tasting which we did do, and the village where we were headed to visit the blacksmith looked like it would provide us with some culinary relief. Even we realised that going to the blacksmith over lunchtime was a no-hoper, but Google Maps showed there was a bar and a shop in the village of Le Coudray-Macouard where the blacksmith was located, so lunch was sorted. Or so we thought.
We arrived in the village at about 1.30 pm, a little late for lunch perhaps but still within the traditional 12 to 2pm window. We parked the car in a little car park under a tree to get a little shade. A family were sitting on a wall by their car having un petit picnic and in hindsight, that should have been a warning. We wandered up the narrow main street that ran through the village looking for the bar. As per usual, no-one was around, but they’d all be in the bar, having lunch, wouldn’t they?
We found the bar fairly quickly. There was a folding sign on the side of the road advertising its presence opposite to traffic in both directions but the locals certainly weren’t having lunch there. The main problem with the bar was that it was closed. Not just closed, but closed and for sale with the blinds down and looking very unloved.
Never mind, I said. There’s a shop a little further up the road that will open again at 2pm. We walked further up the street to the shop which also had a sign outside on the pavement advertising sandwiches and drinks, with an ice-cream parlour attached at the side, all closed of course because it wasn’t yet 2pm. Except that the sign on the door told us that the shop didn’t open till 3.30pm. They took a three hour lunch.
Nothing else for it – we’d have to do without lunch in the village, see the blacksmith and get something later on the way back to Saumur, or wait and eat in the town itself. Not a problem. We’d had a good breakfast, we told ourselves. But was there a maxim of never buy a weathervane on an empty stomach? We carried on walking and quickly found the little side road that the blacksmith was on.
But right on the corner was a tearoom. Hallelujah. I must have missed it on Google Maps. It was called Rosamée and looked absolutely charming, with a garden with a pergola and paths under and on which little tables and chairs were placed. It looked like we had the place to ourselves, though, which was strange given the time of day and the fact that the bar wasn’t open. Until we read the sign saying Open Friday, Saturday and Sunday 11.00 to 19.00. Today was Thursday. Merdre.
So three out of the four businesses in the village we’d wanted to patronise were closed. It was now after 2pm so we headed down the short sideroad to the blacksmith. We could see the gate to his place and some large sheds – looked quite an operation. The gate was positioned across the entrance in a blocking unwelcoming sort of way and when we got to it there were no cars in the forecourt beyond.
By then, we knew to look out for a sign and there it was – opening hours 08.00 to 13.30 Monday to Friday. Double merdre. We’d missed them by about 30 minutes. But then, we thought: What – they only work five and a half hours a day? Even in France. No, that can’t be right. They must be about to re-open, say at 2.30 or 3pm. But re-reading the sign twice and looking helplessly over the gate at the empty facility didn’t change anything. It was well and truly fermé. It gave out that desolate feeling that told you it would stay like that for almost another 18 hours. Four out of four. 100%.
And you feel so stupid, standing there in the heat of the day, mouth opening and closing but no sound coming out that could possibly express your frustration, looking at the buildings and forecourt devoid of life, the closed gate saying to you that its sole purpose in life is to stop you from doing something you shouldn’t, like walking into an area that is closed until 8am the next morning.
We walked back to the car with our tail between our legs. The side trip to look at the church didn’t help much, especially as it was up a steep road and we were tired and hot. We were also expecting that it too would be closed, five out of five, but Him Up There understood our plight – the church was open, cool and tranquil, but it wasn’t enough to make us feel uplifted.
Our initial reaction to this experience is unprintable. Our incredulity at a business that advertises in a significant local tourist publication but omits a really important piece of information (come early to avoid disappointment), a bar where the owners couldn’t be bothered to take the sign off the road before closing the establishment for good, a shop advertising sandwiches that’s closed for 3 hours at lunchtime, and a tearoom only open 3 days a week in the middle of the summer.
And we’d checked their very good website and I didn’t remember seeing those limited hours. I checked it again when I started writing this article and sure enough the hours are what you’d expect, open in the morning, an hour or so for lunch and open in the afternoon. I must have stopped looking when I saw that. But only if you scroll down, out of sight of the normal hours, do you see they tell you that “exceptionellement”, it was only open those more limited hours that particular week – and closed completely for the two weeks after. In retrospect, how lucky were we to catch them on their last day!
We saw the exceptionally word a lot on this holiday to preface the announcement of something bad, usually something closed that coincided with not only our visit, but peak summertime. A perfect example of this was the Saumur Theatre which had notices and leaflets all over the town advertising its exhibition of tapestries from Aubusson, famous for tapestries since the 16th century. When we went to see the exhibition, we couldn’t find a main door of the Theatre building that was open, and eventually came to one that told us that “exceptionellement” the Theatre would be closed 7th to 11th August, the week we were there.
Back to the blacksmith’s closed workshop. How disconsolate were we? A lot was the answer and some ripe language was heard on the way back to Saumur. But not disconsolate enough, obviously, because we did decide to go back the next day. Our interest in weathervanes had been sufficiently piqued to return the next morning, Friday, when perhaps, without pushing our luck too much, both the blacksmith and the tearoom might welcome us.
And we were right on one count, the blacksmith. He was open – hooray! We parked in the carpark off the street outside and walked across the road, through the forecourt and into a large shed that was connected to another one behind. Off the forecourt there were other large sheds that was occupied by at least one other business that also managed to work an onerous 5 hours a day. Metal worked shapes of various dimensions greeted us – round window frames that would sit out on the sloping roof of old buildings, the large pointed pinnacle of an old tower, huge decorative fleurs des Lis. Clearly, if you had a run-down chateau and plenty of money, this was the place to come to get help with the restoration.
In the centre of the forecourt was a metal pole with lots of metal arms and on the arms were a variety of weathervanes. And the variety was enormous. We stopped to admire them and think through the huge number of options. First, did we want one to mount on the chimney or a post in the garden? Then, which of the themes would we be interested in – animals, water, scenes of life, nature, occupations, one for mechanics (with cars), or fantasy? Did we want to design one ourselves and let them make it (obviously a non-starter for us)? How did you want the points of the compass below the image to be displayed? Mon Dieu.
And the choice within both the themes and the compass points was huge, even with the ready-made weathervanes on display. I suppose the first question really was did we want one at all? Of course we did. We’d have been kidding ourselves if we’d gone this far and not bought one. And for Rhu, it would be perfect fixed to the top of a fence post in sight of the kitchen doors.
The blacksmith was in his workshop and asked in French if he could help us. Sabine to the rescue. Yes, it was fine if we wanted to just look around. In the end the choice was easy. We settled on the Gallic Rooster that we had taken a shine to right at the start, with a star, the moon and the sun and just one compass point (S), with all the figurines made in copper. It came in two pieces, the rooster and arrow fitting over the pole that the compass points were attached to with the secret ingredient being a small marble-like ball that sat on top of the pole to allow the rooster to turn in the wind. Ingenious.
All this was explained in French by the blacksmith, the Atelier de la Girouetterie as the business was called (https://www.girouette.com/). Thank you, my lovely German girlfriend, for being able to handle that side of things. The atelier called his young assistant, possibly his daughter, who had been working in the rear shed, to come and deal with the finance side of things. He set about wrapping the two parts, an awkward job given the spikey components that mercifully appeared he’d done before. It was now about 12.50pm.
The cost was a not inconsiderable €490, a lot more than I’d thought it would be (if I’d thought about it much at all) but heigh-ho, it was a piece of true craftsmanship, came with our story in getting it, we really loved it and we’d already erected it in our minds in the garden in Rhu. I produced my Lloyds euro account debit card and we thought we were back in Austria – je suis desolé, pas de cartes. Only cheques or cash. Quoi? You’ve got to be joking!
I knew we had less than €150 in cash between us. Once they had determined that payment by cheque was not going to happen, the assistant told us there was un bankomat at the Carrefour in Distré, four kilometres away back towards Saumur, where we could get cash out. I remembered seeing the sign for Distré when we had left empty-handed the day before and had driven back to Saumur that way. Great. Stressful? You bet!
Thank heavens for Google Maps which located the supermarket and guided us there. At least it was off the main road and not in the middle of the town. It involved going to the second roundabout, coming back in the direction we’d come, and immediately taking a slip road into the shopping mall carpark. You didn’t want to miss that slip road because it was off a dual carriageway and we’d have to drive back to the end of it, turn around at the first roundabout and come all the way back.
So far so good. But where to park, where was the cash machine? By that time, we’d agreed that if they wanted the sale, they’d stay around if this took us longer than 30 minutes. But that attitude didn’t help an awful lot. We still felt very stressed. I left Sabine in the car and ran to the shopping mall main entrance.
I found the cash machine easily enough, correctly reckoning that it would be just inside the main entrance which was also the entrance to the Carrefour. Phew. I chose €400 and the machine refused the transaction. I was sure I had enough cash in the account. I tried €300 and it worked. Phew. Out came 30 €10 notes. I wasn’t going to count them and we were still about €50 short. I put the card in again, this time opting for the lowest amount on the list, an interestingly high €120. Out came 12 €10 notes. Phew.
I couldn’t stuff them all in my wallet. I felt like someone who’d won the jackpot in Vegas on a slot machine with a ton of quarters to have to scoop up. So I went back to the car trying not to look like someone with 42 €10 notes in my pockets. I gave them to Sabine along with my other cash and she counted out the required amount, including the €50 note that she’d had trouble using the day before.
We still had time. We could feel the stress completely dissipating as we drove back. The blacksmith and his assistant welcomed us with open arms and the exchange took place. Smiles all round. They waved us goodbye – as we now know, they were about to start their two week holiday, so no wonder they were happy, especially with an extra and unexpected nearly €500 in cash in their pockets.
Time for lunch. 1.30pm again like the day before, but the tearoom was open all afternoon. We put the weathervane in the car and walked up the sideroad to the corner where the entrance to the tearoom was. It meant we walked past the garden area and could see a lot of people having lunch, but there were still a couple of empty tables. All good. And all that stress had made us quite hungry. We were looking forward to a lovely lunch in their lovely garden. Sabine said she might even have some wine.
What happened next is still a bit of a blur. That’s because it shouldn’t have happened at all and in trying to make sense of it, it just becomes even more opaque. I remember we approached an empty table, and were about to sit down when Sabine quite properly said we should wait for the woman serving another table not far away and ask if we could sit there. Which we did and which Sabine did in French.
This woman looked like she’d been struck by lightning. She just stood there, stared at us blankly and shook her head in an uncomprehending manner and asked Sabine to repeat the question. Which Sabine did, still the same reaction. The French couple sitting at the nearest table couldn’t help but overhear, understood Sabine perfectly well and relayed our request to the woman in their French. At this point she came to life, and looked around her at each table in the garden, appearing to count the number of people waiting for their lunch. At which point she turned on her heel and walked away from us saying something like “I need to ask” but in a very dismissive way. And didn’t come back.
Once again in this small village, we had our mouths open. Her rudeness was breathtaking. We weren’t in any hurry, lunch was being served and the place was open till 7pm, for heaven’s sake. All she had to do was say it might take a while, or even tell us we could only eat cake as one her fellow countrywomen is quoted as saying, but “Bienvenue” nevertheless. But No, quite the opposite.
We stood there for a couple of minutes feeling like we were sticking out like a sore thumb and then a wave of anger got the better of us both. We slowly walked back up the path and left. No-one called to us to come back. On our way to the car, we saw that the woman had reappeared and was serving one of the tables, not looking for us or beckoning to us. Had she simply waited for us to leave before resuming her table service?
This establishment gets an astonishing 4.9* rating on Google Maps. That’s before Sabine has given them our experience. And I’d put one of those €10 notes on getting a gallic shrug in response. France can still be France pour les anglais.
The door looked completely unprepossessing. Dark blue paint on vertical boards, no window, no signage on the door, a dark forbidding-looking handle. You could have missed it completely if you didn’t see the sign outside above and to one side on the wall. And what a curious name for the restaurant – I’m still not sure how to pronounce it. The door did, however, have a notice hanging from a nail saying in white painted handwriting “Complet”. Fingers crossed that didn’t include our 1pm reservation.
The door opened with more a push than the turn of the handle into a room full of people sitting a tables. It felt a bit like one of those western movie when the gunslinger enters the saloon, the music stops and everyone turns and stares. A short man came up to us, smiling and said something I didn’t catch. I guessed he wanted to know if we had a reservation, and given how full the place was, he may have been a little sceptical about how much longer he’d be enjoying our company. I could see a shake of the head coming and “Je suis desolé” forming on his lips.
Taking back the initiative, however, I said my name and the time of the reservation. He checked a list, smiled again (phew) and showed us to a table by the door that was already occupied at one end by four older people (husbands and wives by the look of them) but which had two places set at the door end. We all said “Bonjour”.
Sabine generously let me sit facing inwards with a view of the restaurant and the other patrons, which she knows I prefer, but which required me to sit on the bench seat against the wall that was about eight inches wide. The two ladies at the other end were sat on it too. Sabine had a chair. We were given cushions to sit on that made it much more comfortable.
The Sunday menu was put in front of us as well as a laminated menu with some explanation of the menu food combinations and prices, and the wine which pleasantly had half bottles of Menetou-Salon white, red and rose.
An older women (60?), the owner as we learnt later, asked if we wanted an aperitif and we chose a half bottle of the white. She explained a few things about the menu, including the word Brochet (pike) served in a cream sauce, a house speciality. She did this gracefully in a mixture of English and French with no sign that speaking English was objectionable or difficult. Neither of us fancied the pike which from my limited experience and Sabine’s memory of having it in Germany was quite a strong flavour and very bony (but not here, as it turned out).
The first food to arrive was a tray of bread and a jar of gherkins, home-pickled, with a pair of wooden tongs to serve them up. Then came the wine – the man delivered it with a little flourish, saying it was go gay or something like that. I got him to repeat it again, said it back to him to his satisfaction (Oui), after which he left without pouring it. I then noticed the wine bottle had no label. But before we went to the restaurant, we did a little walkabout in the town (didn’t take long as surprisingly given it was the centre of the Appelation, but typically in only a French way, there was nothing there) and Sabine had suggested I take a photo of the list of vignerons at the bottom of the area map we saw down the street from the restaurant. I had a sudden brainwave, not a frequent occurrence these days, and checked the list. Lo and behold, Gogué was on the list. That answered that question. The wine was perfectly quaffable.
Our entrées (starters if you’re American) came fairly quickly after the wine, but not in a way that seemed hurried. It was the same with all the service from the four people doing the serving. There was the older woman, the man, a younger woman who looked like the older woman’s daughter and a teenage girl.
Sabine had duck terrine with bread and I had herrings in oil, onions and carrots with sliced potatoes in balsamic vinegar and oil – the herrings were delicious, far too much food but mercifully I wasn’t mad about the potatoes and only ate about half the dish. Sabine loved her duck terrine.
At the end of the first course, I ordered a half-bottle of red. It arrived as the white had, in a bottle with no label. This time, though, it was brought by the teenage waitress; she didn’t tell me the vigneron and had gone off before I could ask. Again, wine pouring was not part of the service proposition. It was passable and went well with the lamb and cheese, but was nothing like as good as the red wine we’d enjoyed the night before at Restaurant La Tour (and nothing like the price either). Sabine only had a little as she had offered to drive back, bless her.
The plats (main courses) were delicious. My lamb was pink, soft and succulent. Sabine’s rabbit effortlessly fell off the bone. We both had green beans and roasted carrots, plus a large spoonful of dauphinoise potatoes. I’d noticed the man going round serving this to other people as they were given their main courses. For example, the four next to us had the pike and before they served themselves the fish and cream sauce they had on the table, he scooped large portions out for each of them from a Pyrex dish that he carried to their end of the table but then took away it with him. We got the same treatment.
When we had finished, the lady next to me asked (in French of course) if we wanted to try their pike. I said No (I might even have been so confused that I said Nein), but Sabine felt obliged to give it a go, saying in French that she used to eat this as a child in Germany. We were given a very generous portion of their leftovers. It was reasonably tasteless but had a nice constituency and the cream sauce made it really quite pleasant, not at all fishy and we were spared any bones. I still think we made the right call in not ordering it, though.
While we were in that holding position of having had more than enough to eat but knowing that we would need to confront the cheese and dessert courses, the woman serving us who we had correctly designated the daughter of the older woman, early 30s and very slim, came and talked to us in English, starting by asking us where we were from. I was a bit nervous that others diners might hear when Sabine said Scotland, given the rugby result of the day before, the hitherto unheard-of victory of Scotland over France at Murrayfield 25-21, but fortunately there were no embittered rugby fans within earshot
She was lovely, elegant and at ease in that very French way. She’d spent time in Dublin but had come home to help with the restaurant, a fourth-generation family business. She amazed us by saying she had 3 children. It was so nice that she came up and talked to us.
While we were chatting to her, the cheese trays had arrived at the other end of the table. When I say trays, that hardly does justice to the size of the two round trays, easily 50 cms across. One was laden with mainly goats cheese, the other with only two cow cheese, a huge brie and one with orange rind like Port Salut. They were carried, one in each hand, but I don’t mean carried, I mean balanced rather than held, with the fingers of each hand supporting a tray. The fingers belonged to the young waitress who looked about 16, who had been carrying these trays in this way around the restaurant from table to table, apparently effortlessly, as the patrons reached that course.
The daughter of the owner left us and the lady next to me started chatting to me in French again (I think she fancied me). She seemed to have no idea that I couldn’t understand what she was saying, but I did catch “quatre-vingt something” so I rightly guessed she was saying her age and commented appropriately. She was very petite, but dressed and turned out beautifully and had a lovely twinkle in her eye. Sabine asked what her secret was and she said living every day as happily as you can. She’d had hardship as a child (WW2 presumably) but now things were better. Her husband, sitting diagonally opposite and also very well turned out, was eighty-five.
Then it was our turn for the cheese. In fact, we were asked if we wanted cheese and dessert. Sabine made a face where you blow out your cheeks to indicate how stuffed you are and declined both courses. I said Oui to both. I didn’t want any goat’s cheese as it looked mainly from Chavignol – I’d had some the previous evening at La Tour and had preferred the flavour of all the other five cheeses we’d had between us that evening. I had some fromage frais that had no taste, but the brie and the one that looked like Port Salut were great, consumed of course with some bread and what was left of the red wine.
Then came dessert – Charlotte chocolate gateau with a choice of accessories – crème anglaise, peche, banana, prunes in red wine, apricot and others. I chose crème anglaise and peche, forcing it down as Sabine looked on – she was so full, but she had a taste and in an instant realised her mistake in not ordering it, but still went without. We had coffee (black) to finish.
When we came to pay, it was an unbelievable €110, €120 with tip.
The day was perfect. Well, almost. It would have been more perfect had we had just one winner instead of three seconds. The really annoying one was the fourth race where Whatzupwithme came from behind and pipped my horse at the post by a neck …. Grrrr. In fairness, Sabine did pick a winner but …..!
I’m getting way ahead of myself. It all started when I saw the banner advertising the race day when Emily and I drove to the Zoo. It reminded me that I’d not taken Sabine to The Races yet, even though when I’d mentioned them before on several occasions, she seemed keen.
The weather had been an issue on previous occasions though. The first forecast I saw for Monday was earlier the week before and it showed a sunny morning followed by rain (or was it drizzle?) all afternoon – typical. As we know, forecasts can change and this one certainly did and for the better, to the point that it looked like we were going to be in for a treat.
So I suggested a picnic, getting there well ahead of the first race at 2.30, to enjoy the location a little before the serious betting began. We might even get a walk in. Sabine looked worried. I had to assure her that it was very unlikely that a horse would have to be put down as a result of a fall in the hurdles race and that although the jockeys did use the whip at the finish, it would be mild. She was clearly a little sceptical but seemed prepared to give me the benefit of her doubt and risk me being right about that. Nevertheless, she told me on no account was she going to see horses hurt.
We had taken the picnic hamper to France and not put it to much use, so here was the perfect opportunity. But what to have for the picnic? We settled on prawn, mayo and cucumber and ham, mustard and cheese sandwiches that Sabine made. We took the leftover potato and tomato salads from our entertaining the day before too. Jersey strawberries and cream for dessert. To drink, cans of Sipsmith G&T we found in Waitrose. I did flasks of tea for later, and took the cinnamon bun I hadn’t eaten from the day before just in case. All set. They say you should take sandwiches if you go as far as St Ouens, anyway, don’t they?
We were going to leave about 1 pm but we were ready about 12.30 so left then. At the Beaumont Hill roundabout, Sabine saw the notice for the Jersey Model Railway Club annual show at St Peter’s Community Hall and reminded me that when we’d seen it before, she’d thought I had been keen to go. Was it on the way, did we have time and would you like to drop in now? I said No then on reflection Why Not, if she would like to as well as me. So we did.
Certainly one of the highlights of the week. Two lovely ladies at the door took our entrance fee of £5 each and put wrist bands on us to show we’d paid. Looking around this large hall with virtually no-one in it, it seemed a bit like overkill, but we might have hit a quiet time and there may be huge Hornby train bargains only available to the wrist-banded.
Sabine was fascinated by the N Gauge layouts that crammed an awful lot of model railway into a small space. A very nice man talked us through each of his layout, those of some friend who wasn’t there at the time but seemed to be a leading light in the Club, particularly as one of his layouts was Z Gauge layout even smaller than N, and the two Club layouts. All fascinating stuff.
We moved on to the next layout that I could more easily relate to as it was OO, which my trains are. I noticed a propensity of ScotRail rolling stock which is curious given the (unjustly in my opinion) bad reputation that outfit has north of the border. It turned out the modeller was of course Scottish. Did we know how difficult it is to find this livery – they rarely come up for sale and are really expensive when they do – the two carriage diesel multiple unit cost him £350? Gosh – No, we didn’t realise that.
Over on the far side, there was someone I recognised – the man who has the model train shop in town. About two years ago he’d serviced my two steam locos and on another occasion got for me the Merchant Navy class locomotive East Asiatic Company 35024 in blue livery that is coupled to my two Pullman carriages in the study.
I thought he’d recognise me, seeing as how I’d been such a good customer, but although he was displaying his wares on a long table, he ignored us. We didn’t get past his upright stance, him looking straight ahead at nothing in particular as far as I could gather, and his unkempt long wispy grey hair falling down over his collar from the back of his quite balding pate. He made a point of not showing any interest at all in us browsing while a lady (his wife?) fussed about tidying and rearranging the boxes of trains etc. Sabine looked back across the hall as we left – he hadn’t moved.
The guy with the biggest layout – an HO Guage oval about 20 feet long by six feet wide with the centre hollow for the modellers to control and oversee the action – sat with his back to us the whole time we were admiring his work. And his trains weren’t running either. Possibly an introvert for whom railway modelling is a perfect pastime? Or had it been a hectic 3 day show weekend, it was lunchtime, he needed some downtime and didn’t want to be disturbed while eating his sandwiches? You choose which you think is the more likely.
That was money well spent we thought and how good it felt to support such an enthusiastic local hobby group. Only when we got back to the car did we realised that the green wrist bands didn’t come off without a pair of scissors, so everyone at The Races would know we’d been to the Model Railway Show and laugh at us.
Heigh-ho, nothing we could do. We’d used up the extra time we got by leaving home early, so off we went to the far north-west of the island, past St Ouen’s Manor, through St Ouen’s Village, past Vinchellez Manor (which is having a lot of work done by the new owners, by the way) and on to Les Landes. The clouds were disappearing, the sun was shining, the wind looked to be dying down and it was all set to be a lovely afternoon.
The entrance fee was £15 each, nothing for the car. We were given two race cards and told we could park anywhere. We found a parking spot in the very far right corner by the racetrack – perfect. I backed the car in, we got out the green foldup chairs that had been unused in the shed for years, and I realised I’d forgotten the picnic table that would have been useful. The fabric of one of the chairs was badly ripped, but the chair was serviceable – Sabine offered to sit in it, suggesting that the rip probably had been caused by someone (me) sitting down in it too heavily (cos that’s what you tend to do).
Then she saw the nearest hurdle and we had to deal with the possibility of animal cruelty or worse all over again. I had parked in the worst place to dismiss her concerns – next to the track, right by a hurdle and on the slightly uphill straight, 50 metres from the finishing post, where the jockeys have been known to urge their mounts on with their whip in a close finish.
The sandwiches were delicious and very filling – we left one of the ham ones. We used the picnic hamper plates and cutlery with the salads and the G&T was a great match for the occasion. We had a superb view of the other Channel Islands (the Guerns had a large cruise ship in) and Sabine had a nice view of the elderly terrier sitting with the family and many of their friends parked next to us. I got to look the other way at the nice elderly (probably my age) couple in their VW Beetle convertible who had parked ahead of us in the absolute corner of the field.
A car drew up and parked behind them, disgorging another couple of families. I got fold-up seat envy because they had two chairs that reclined with really thick cushions. Sabine remarked that they were the same as the ones our Italian neighbours behind us have. These people arrived in a hire car, and neither of the two dads seemed to be local as they asked the elderly couple next to us to settle a dispute among them as to whether the land over there (Guernsey) was France. The smug looking dad clearly was right. I remain perplexed as to why they had the chairs with them at all.
It was now time to induct Sabine into the routine of a race afternoon. It was about 2.10. We went across the track to where all the action was – the ice cream van, the burger bus, the members’ lunch tent, a display of about ten old cars (mainly Jags) by the toilets, the crown and anchor concessions, the parade ring, the tote, and of course the bookies, of which there are still about five. And the lines for placing a bet with them were long, all through the afternoon.
So our routine was this:
Look at the runners and riders for each race on the race card,
Carefully consider all the information provided on each horse – previous performance, jockey, trainer, handicap, opening better odds projections, and the very helpful race card write up for each horse,
Pick one between us or possibly one each, based on our own individualised selection system usually biased towards name association (e.g. Bring The Money as mentioned earlier),
See what the odds were being offered by the bookies,
Pick the line with the best odds,
Wait in line while feeling the anticipation build,
Hope the odds didn’t worsen before we got to the front of the queue,
Try to explain how the tote worked to Sabine who just shook her head each time in utter bewilderment,
Place the bet and get the ticket from the bookie,
Go to the parade ring to watch the horses and owners strut their stuff,
Wonder if one of the other horses we hadn’t bet on didn’t look much more athletic,
See the jockeys mount up,
See how long the queue for an ice cream was and decide not to join it,
Go off to the mound or the car to watch the race,
Cheer on your horse as it comes up the final straight to the finishing post and
Tear up the ticket when it was over.
That routine worked perfectly for four of the five races. The 3rd race not so much but I saved £10 as a result. Sabine had looked at the race card when we arrived and categorically stated that we wouldn’t be staying till ten to five when the last race was run, would we? Remember it was turning into a beautiful afternoon, so I was non-committal. It was when she brought her knitting out, sitting by the car, between the second and third races, saying that No she didn’t want to go over to place a bet and see the horses that I wondered if she might be right.
The first race was hurdles. I’d said to Sabine you don’t have to bet and you certainly mustn’t expect to win if you do, but it’s more fun to have some skin in the game, so to speak. Three runners, one a big previous winner, one a debutant to hurdling as it had lost the urge to perform in flat races, and one also-ran who was seemed to be there to make up the numbers.
Needless to say, the bookies thought the big winner, going by the oddly human name of George Bancroft, was going to win again, with odds of 7/2 on. The debutant, Arthur’s Angel, had 7/2 but not “on” and it was a grey (like most of our own horses had been), so that one got my first £5. The fancy electronic bookie’s ticket encouragingly showed I’d get £22.50 if the horse won.
A word about the Jags. They looked magnificent. A mixture of mainly XKs and E-types, convertibles and hard tops, as well as one more recent and an older model that I didn’t recognise. Oddly, there was also a more modern Porsche among them. They were next to the members’ marquee where lunch was being served to people who, if my past experience is anything to go by, had a lot more interest in savouring the food and drink being served than the races. Because I mentioned this aspect of a day at the races more than once, Sabine assumed I was hankering to join them. My denials of course only made her more certain. But looking into the marquee, people did seem to be enjoying themselves.
We watched the first race from the mound, twice and a quarter round the one mile course. Bal Amie, the also-ran, led from the start, all horses safely jumped the hurdles, and Arthur’s Angel came from behind to be placed respectably not far behind the winner, George Bancroft, who’d been saving himself for the last 2 furlongs. Never mind, better (good pun?) luck next time.
And Sabine did indeed pick the winner in the next race, a sprint over 6 furlongs. If only she’d bet on it. Early on in our race card deliberations, Sabine picked out number 7, Evening Song, because it was the only mare in the race. The write up mentioned she was fairly inconsistent but then contradicted itself by noting she hadn’t won in 15 appearances, which seemed pretty consistent in my view. Nevertheless, once in your mind as your favourite, it’s hard to let it go. In fact, none of the horses looked a sure thing but perhaps two or three looked promising. I particularly liked Profit and Loss, number 4, not just on form (3 wins this season) but for reasons that only other accountants would understand. I placed my bet (another £5) but Sabine didn’t want to bet on Evening Song at 10 to 1.
We had a look at the horses in the parade ring and on the way to the mound, I said we should place a bet, even the minimum £2, on Evening Song, still at 10 to 1. She still didn’t want to. We went to the mound, watched them start over the other side of the track and heard form the commentator that Evening Song had started strongly and soon was in the lead. As they came into the finishing straight, she was still in the lead, a position she maintained right to the finish.
Sabine was completely bummed. So was I, both for her and for myself as Profit and Loss must have decided that the number on its saddle cloth, 4, was meant to reflect its place in the field as well. I was even more upset with myself for not insisting on a bet when I realised that Evening Song had name association for me, being very similar to Evening Star, the name of the last steam locomotive built by British Rail, number 92220, a question in a Times quiz recently and a model of which we had seen for sale at the Model Railway show.
However, making the best of it, this did give me the opportunity to demonstrate to Sabine what I had already explained about how horse racing in Jersey worked. We’d had two races, one where the favourite had won and one where the rank outsider had won. Never bet a lot of money, even on the favourite, because it’s still the throw of the dice as to who wins. And this proved to be the pattern through the afternoon.
Perhaps on the back of that, her knitting became more attractive when we got back to the car. We had another sandwich but Sabine refused another G&T, so I drowned our disappointment on my own. She also didn’t want to follow our routine for the third race, preferring to stay by the car and knit. I said I’d stay with her a while longer (the start of the 3rd race was still 20 minutes away), so we checked out the next batch of runners and riders.
The race was the big one of the day, The Clarenden Cup, with a field of 8 minus I’m Digby which had been withdrawn.. The favourite was Sumatran Tiger at 2 to 1 that had already won the Jersey Derby earlier in the summer. I settled on Allegro Jete, owned by Sheik A’Leg Racing syndicate. Sabine had already dismissed this horse because it was owned by a very wealthy arab but she quite fancied Nature and like the name of the rank outsider Brown Mouse. In England I suspect Brown Mouse would have been 100 to 1, here it was 12 to 1. I did explain the play on words to her of my horse’s owners, but she still preferred her own choices.
Off I went to place two bets, one for me and one on Nature, still not being able to accept that Brown Mouse had a chance, despite Sabine’s incredible selection talent from the previous race. Only to find I was too late – the barrier across the track was closed (it was still 10 minutes before race time). So back I went to the car, from where we watched the biggest race of the day with no skin in the game. I wasn’t happy but now of course found myself in the rather curious position of hoping above all hopes that neither of those two horses I was going to bet on to win were going to win. Which they didn’t. And neither did the favourite which came third behind Clear Man at 5 to 2 (we didn’t ever consider him) and, yes you guessed it, closely followed by Brown Mouse in second place.
We got our act together again for the 4th race. I’d chosen Bring The Money (name association in overdrive), and Sabine had picked Dancing Master. £5 on each. With 5 horses in the race, we had a 40% chance between us of having picked the winner. I thought the maths was quite simple but Sabine and I had a short, non-confrontational conversation about whether it was 40% or 20%. We were back at the car, not the mound, to watch the race, before this issue was resolved and we had a cup of tea to calm the nerves. I had the bun too. I had offered to share it but Sabine was being good.
The race was a mile and a quarter, so we were able to see the start and see the horses go past us twice, the second time as they were sprinting to the finishing post. Sabine was very concerned that one of the horses, Brown Velvet I think, wasn’t at the starting tape when the starter set them off, which she felt put it at a real disadvantage. I could only sympathise while shrugging my shoulders.
First time round they were all in a line and stayed that way for much of the race. Bring the Money was leading round the bend before the finishing straight but not by much. And as it turned out, not by enough. Whatzupwithme came from behind and edged past my horse as it went past us. Sabine’s horse was third. Our 40% chance had turned into 0%.
Sabine hadn’t expected to stay past this race but it was a lovely afternoon and her spirits had risen again despite the Evening Song disappointment. So we went over to the other side of the track to give the last race our full attention. There were 5 runners.
By then I’d noticed that a trainer I’d never heard of, Karl Kukk, had had three winners in four races. Looked like a good idea to bet on his entrant in the race. The trouble was that his horse, Akkeringa, was one of the two favourites, so the odds were awful at 6 to 4. Another horse, N over J seemed to have some chance, and was trained by Christa Cuthbert who had trained the winner in the 3rd race. So my final £5 went on that horse. Which came second to Karl Kukk’s Akkeringa.
Then a major decision point was upon us. To go or not to go. There were a lot of cars over the poor people’s side of the track and I have experienced a Le Mans start as the last race ended. However, everyone seemed pretty relaxed and were staying on to enjoy the late afternoon sun. The nice chairs went and the old folks in the VW Beetle followed but no-one else near us. We happily sat in the sun for about 15 minutes but then images of tired children around us and a traffic jam of gigantic proportions made us think it was time to leave.. Which we did, with only a small queue to cope with, a small inconvenience for a lovely afternoon.
Pete's Perusings 