Christmas morning on the Croft

Up sharpish to feed the donkeys. It's a magical time, a totally silent Christmas Day, with the gentle rhythm of  three donkeys chewing their hay:

Hay, Santa

Oli booster

Ovelia Modale, better known as "Oli" needs a wee booster. His mum, Ballachulish has mastitis and so is only giving milk on one side. It's a messy business, feeding the wee one:

Mine's a pint

Enough!

Ovelia modiale, nou nascut

Ballachulish has given birth to a new Ripollesa lamb, born yesterday :

I've named her Ovelia Modiale in honour of my brother-out-of-law, Jonathan Jarrett whose paper* on the use of cows, sheep and possibly pigs as monetary units in 10th century Catalonia is a must read. Our tiny new lamb (3.8kg at birth, so small) probably is not yet worth a modius of grain, but I'll love her all the same.

Unfortunately when I explained to the residents at the Croft that we were calling her "Ovelia Modiale" they all, er, laughed. So she's to be called "Oli" for short. 

Difficult to imagine this animal currency really working. Here's an early manuscript from Catalonia, cerca 975 AD: 

Shopkeeper: Thank you ma'am. That will be three Bovo soldare and half an Ovelia modiale.
Customer: Half an Ovelia modiale? Not sure I've got the change. Just a moment while I fetch an axe...

Bloody business, shopping.


*Bovo Soldare: A Sacred Cow of Spanish Economic History Re-evaluated, in Naismith, Rory, Martin Allen, and Elina Screen, eds. Early Medieval Monetary History: Studies in Memory of Mark Blackburn. Studies in Early Medieval Britain and Ireland. Farnham, Surrey, UK ; Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2014.

The Woods go Dung

Turning over a new leaf

 The forest here grows very thick, so we've put the donkeys to work reducing the woods to, er, manure.

The woods go dung

Donkeys are efficient, but ruthless. They will strip the bark off anything small enough, and chew their way through almost everything else.

Barking mad

Arran loves it.

Jogging asses

I put Arran, Laialuing and Marguerita in a new field today. They loved it:

Salamander stroll

The Salamanders are back.

Baby, I'm on fire

The Fire Salamanders with the perfect double-barrelled name Salamandra salamandra, are migrating to their winter hibernation spots. That means they cross the track near the Croft, and yesterday I drove past (and hopefully not over) four salamanders on the way home. I had to move the Salamander in the photo because she was strolling across the track and would have been squished under my wheels.

I love the colours but also the signals that they give - of impending cold and of a healthy ecosystem; they won't live in areas that are polluted or unclean.

Roots to success

Quercus ilex, the Holm Oak, grows everywhere around the Croft.

A new leaf

It is an evergreen, and efficient at using the tough, dry moraine soil to extract nutrients. I know this because we just renewed an old cutting here at the Croft, and uncovered part of the root system of one tree. Here it is, three metres deep:

Roots to success

Even at this depth the roots are substantial:

Deep roots

These trees will be here long after we have gone

Furry annoying invader

We have an invader. And we think she's American. Yesterday she killed another chicken - Cheepy, one of our favourites. We had already lost two other chickens and a duck over the last couple of months.


Luckily, she left evidence:

Dark and deadly

This looks like American Mink (Neovison vison), according to Animal Tracks and Signs, the wonderful book by Preben Bang and Preben Dahlstrom.

So on Friday the lovely Agents Rurals Quico and Oriol came up and helped us lay a live trap.

This way, please

We've baited it with chicken and sardines - a feast for a mink - and we await results.

A Letter to my Niece, about Scotland

Dear R

The Referendum on 18th September will be your first ever vote. So it's a good opportunity to find out about how politics works. I mean how it really works, not the theory.

You can see a good example of how it works in the "Plan B" issue that has been top of the news this week and last. As you know, this is about Scotland and the pound.

Alastair Darling asked Alex Salmond 20 times, during the infamous TV debate "What is your Plan B?" 

In interviews and statements, Mr Darling and his BT colleagues have focused on the "lack of a Plan B." And now there is a poster campaign about the lack of a "Plan B."

What is going on?

Mr Darling is a clever politician. He knows that it is relatively easy to make people worried. You just have to find out what scares people - so he and his team will have been surveying and questioning people to find that out. And they will have discovered that (as Bill Clinton said) "it's the economy, stupid" that most people are concerned about. So they have picked something big and obvious like "the pound in your pocket" (these are favourite politicians' phrases - hence the inverted commas), and a catchy phrase about "Plan B." This is propaganda.

Propaganda just means information that is used to persuade people of a point of view, or to act in a particular way. It has been used for good and for bad through history, and comes in every flavour, shape and size. The "Plan B" campaign is a good example:

How Do I Know It's Not Butter?

You can check whether or not something you hear, read or see is propaganda. Here are some easy tests:

Is this stuff everywhere?

Effective propaganda is widespread - so you can expect to see it everywhere. You'll see it in Facebook and on Twitter, in the newspapers, on the TV and in adverts in the street. "Commentators" will talk about it, long and often. "Analysts" will appear to, er, analyse it. Propaganda works when it is everywhere.

Are you feeling emotional?

Propaganda is often designed to make you feel emotional. So emotional that you stop being rational. I hope that you never live through an era when there is the worst type of propaganda - that which engenders hatred - but you may feel twinges of fear or anger. The "Plan B" story makes people worried, and that may be enough to trigger them to vote "safely" for the status quo.

Is someone trying to make me do something?

All through history propaganda has been used to make people do stuff. Before you were born, Mrs Thatcher created a war with Argentina over a tiny archipelago of islands called the Malvinas. I remember standing in Charing Cross Station in London seeing the Sun newspaper headlines about the "Argies" and realising that I was in the middle of a propaganda campaign. The Government wanted me to feel that Argentina was our enemy. But I knew that Argentina had for years been a friend of the UK. There was and is a huge population of Britons there - I think it has the largest population of Welsh-origin people in the world (I mean, more than are in Wales!) But the newspapers, the TV, the radio, were full of bad stuff about the "Argies." This was propaganda.

Look the other way, at the stuff they are not saying

If you think you are being fed propaganda, look the other way. Think about the stuff that is NOT being talked about. Politicians often try to hypnotise us - like rabbits in the headlights - and the "Plan B" campaign is just such a trick. BT are shouting about the lack of a "Plan B" but they are NOT talking about, well, everything else! They are NOT talking about the health service, or poverty in Scotland, or the £4bn-per-year Trident missile, or making a fairer society, or free university education, or… 

Get the idea? Propaganda tries to grab your attention. Turn away, and think.

Think it through, for yourself

What happens when you think it through for yourself? Can you see the flaws? Walk through, in your mind, what would happen if Scotland voted Yes on 18th September. There would be a massive negotiation afterwards. England would want some oil, Scotland would want rid of the Trident nuclear bombs, England would want access to Scottish fishing grounds, Scotland would want a currency union on the pound… It would all be negotiated.

What the politicians are doing now is they are preparing themselves for that negotiation. They are trying to get into the best position to negotiate with the winning side. Scotland can use the pound if it wishes - it's an international tradeable currency and can be used anywhere in the world. But the Scottish Government wants more; it wants a currency union. Darling knows this, so he is making it hard to get. Salmond is also focusing on the pound because he wants the voters to support Scotland's demand for currency union. No-one is admitting to any Plan B, Plan C or Plan D because to do so would look like weakness in the negotiations that will follow the vote.

When I think it through for myself, and look away from the propaganda I see Scotland's poor. I know we could have a better Scotland in which the poor are not abandoned. That's why I want a Yes vote.

And This, Too?

And you'll have worked out the logical conclusion. It's all propaganda. This letter included. 

So what do you do? Think for yourself! How do you want your country to be governed, in your lifetime? (You know my answer!)

Love

C

Custard and Prunes go for a swim

Custard and Prunes go for a swim, while Jenny looks on.

Muscovy ducks - silent swimmers.

Doncklicker

My sister taught me to clicker train our donkeys. It's the most wonderful, painless, productive form of animal training that I know.

Today I achieved a milestone, getting Laialuing our 7-month donkey to accept a halter:

Halter? There's no stopping us now.

Back to Bugs

Back down here on earth after all the politicking, here are a couple of splendid bugs, seen today:

Turquoise Flying Thing

 This first one might be related to Cetonia aurata, but frankly I have very little idea. Any suggestions, welcome.

Ding dung

The second is Plebejus argus, I think, sucking up some amino acids from a nice mature pile of donkey dung. Delicious.

But together, they show that we are not having a Silent Spring; no-one is spraying chemicals anywhere near here, and the bugs thrive.

On Paisley, hens, and Scotland's Empire

This is "Paisley" pattern;

 

Paisley pattern ties - Wikimedia Commons

It's a picture of twisted teardrops, woven into brilliantly coloured fabrics. The pattern is not originally from Paisley - it was brought there by Scottish soldiers and merchants who had seen the originals in India and Persia. Paisley weavers reproduced the cloth mechanically, on looms, and the Scottish merchants went back to successfully sell the patterned cloth to the then Indian colonies. In modern terms, they took the Intellectual Property (IP), and turned it into a profit.

A lot of profit. The evidence is all over Scotland, where our public buildings (Gallery of Modern Art, Hutchesons' School, and Hospital in Glasgow, amongst many others) were donated by people made wealthy by the imperial trade.   We benefit today from public goods, ranging from art galleries to schools, built from imperial profits.

Glasgow Necropolis - Wikimedia Commons

 

Glasgow's landmark Necropolis, a hilltop covered in the ornate gravestones and memorials of our rich 18th and 19th century merchants - the time when Glasgow was the Empire's second richest city - reminds us that Glaswegians lived, profited and died all over the Empire.  Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881) said: "It has been my lot to have found myself in many distant lands. I have never been in one without finding a Scotchman, and I never found a Scotchman who was not at the head of the poll."

The Imperial trade was not simple burglary, or just swapping trinkets for gold. There was exchange, even if it was not between equals. And it is too simplistic to say it was just evil white men; I've been to the West African seaboard, and I know that slaves from what is now Mali were traded by people who would now be Ghanaian.

There were exchanges that benefited both sides. Here is one with a Catalan connection:  In farms in Minorca you'll see fat black chickens scampering about the farmyards. Good layers, and good to eat, these are Menorquin hens.  The chickens are here thanks to the wife of the British Governor of colonial Minorca. This was probably Ann, wife of James Murray, the Scottish-born Governor or Minorca from 1774-1782. She took some scrawny black hens home to Britain, spent years improving them (presumably with a bit of good breeding) and returned them to the island's farmers. Generations of Menorcans have benefited from her imperial philanthropy.

The Scottish Referendum reminds us of Empire, because at various points in the debate it has felt like Scotland is the colony. When George Osborne said that we could not have the pound it sounded like the Empire speaking. How dare he! That pound is built on Scottish wealth as well as English; he cannot simply take it away. And when we are told that Scotland should continue to hand over its oil to support the UK treasury we are being treated as a colony, only relevant so long as the Imperial power can extract valuable raw materials.

Now we know, just a little, how it feels to be colonised.

So now is the time to face up to our imperial past. That means justice,  education and reparation. Education in its very widest sense, so that we the public learn that our good stuff, much of it, was built on bad stuff - on injustice, pain, death and cruelty. Education designed to remind us, before we purchase that new mobile, that new dress or those shoes, that these objects are made in the Empire of today, the multinational trading Empire, and that they are made in the pain of the Coltan mine or the dangers of the sweatshop.

And reparation meaning that we go back to the communities we abused and repair some of the harm we caused. We will arrive far too late, and in far too tiny a way; we will not find the skilled Persian embroiderer who made the first twisted teardrop. But we must seize this moment when we are, for a while, a colony of England, to start to repair the ruin of Empire.

Sources:

Article on Paisley pattern http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paisley_%28design%29

Disraeli quote from The Scottish Enlightenment, Arthur Herman, Fourth Estate, London, 2002, page 294

Poultry for Anyone, Victoria Roberts, Whittet Books, Suffolk, 1998

The Minorca Club - poultry http://www.poultryclub.org/minorcaclub/

James Murray - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Murray_%28British_Army_officer%29

Nation-ality

The people who live here.

It's the phrase used to define who will vote in September's referendum in Scotland. And it signals how different the independence debate is in Scotland than in, say, Kurdistan.

In most "nationalist" debates the heart of the debate is ethnic, defining your nation by virtue of your parentage. JK Rowling got this wrong, in her £1m No statement in which she says that people might judge her 'insufficiently Scottish'  http://www.jkrowling.com/en_GB/#/news-events/latest (to which the National Collective's Mairi McFadyen wrote such a brilliant reply http://nationalcollective.com/2014/06/11/an-open-letter-to-j-k-rowling/ ).

In Scotland it's not about being Scottish, or not being Scottish enough. It's about a group of people, living in a nation, choosing how they should be governed.

I am Scottish. But like millions of Scots I don't live there, an emigrant looking for opportunities and a lifestyle that Scotland did not appear, in 1975, to provide. I'm ethnically and culturally Scottish, but it's right that I should not have the vote in a country that I chose to leave 39 years ago.

The evolution in the nationalist debate has not apparently registered with the No campaign. The No discourse is still shouting about nationalists closing the borders and hating the English. This is childish. The people who live in Scotland could define themselves as Scottish, English,  Catalan, Pakistani, Brazilian, Kurdish or any one of the hundreds of homes, or ethnicities, that make up Scotland's diverse populace. All of these people can vote.

The policies promoted by the Yes campaign underline this. Yes to immigration (what a difference from Westminster's xenophobia,) Yes to continuing in the EU (UKIP England says No), and Yes to a Nordic alliance, linking Scotland to its historic kin in Scandinavia. The movement to independence is the opposite of isolationist; anyone who thinks for a moment about how a new small country will organize itself will realise that it must make international alliances. The independence White Paper http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2013/11/9348) emphasises this, saying that Scotland wants to join and work with international institutions;  "Scotland will be an active member of global institutions and will be party to fair and reciprocal agreements which respect human rights..."

The debate in Scotland is not ethnic, and it is not  isolationist. It's geographic, placing a brilliant new country into a world map. A new country, where the people who live here - wherever they may call home - are sovereign.

The Catalan Question

We are "a party divided" no longer "united in our diversity."

The words of Pere Navarro, leader of the PSC (Partit dels Socialistes del Catalunya, http://www.socialistes.cat/) in his resignation speech earlier this month.

The cause of his sudden departure? The Catalan Question, mainly. The nationalist movement here is led by the left. As a result the PSC, the mainstream socialist party, has haemorrhaged votes to the nationalist left. Like Gordon Brown in Scotland, the PSC has tried to outline a federal future, but like Mr Brown's version it sounds neither clear nor likely. Voters are not buying it.

The Catalan Question is dominating Madrid politics. Our new king, Phillip VI, made an oblique reference to it in his coronation speech on Thursday. The Catalan Question seems more important in Madrid, than the Scottish Question is in Westminster.

In part this is because of different ideas of nation and thus nationalism, defined here by language, by street protest, by youth participation in Assembleas and Casals. Catalonia has suffered from a history, still in living memory, of bloody oppression.

The images of the nation are different, too; there is no equivalent here of the postcard-packaged image of Scotland (castles, lochs and kilts). Catalonia is harder to package.

Language is central to the debate. In the village in which I live almost everyone speaks Catalan. Our kids go to school in Catalan: a teacher in Mallorca has just finished a hunger strike as part of a mass protest against the imposition of Castellano in state schools there. Catalan is the starting point in any debate. Open your mouth and we know which side you are likely to be on. Harder to do that in Scotland.

We have a generation of protesters to rely on. At the village festas, and most other mass events you'll see a busy wee stand, the Catalan Senyera fluttering, surrounded by a group of older people talking animatedly. This is the Assemblea Nacional Catalana (ANC, https://assemblea.cat/), the campaign of signatures for a referendum. The ANC volunteers are, many of them, people who were case-hardened under the 'porres' (batons) of the oppressive Guardia Civil under General Franco. There have been hilarious scenes at demonstrations of the modern police trying to move them on, caught between respect for the elderly, and their orders.

Protest seems much more natural here. People fly the Estellada (Catalan independence flag) at every Barcelona FC match. We couldn't understand why Alex Salmond was criticised for doing the equivalent when Andy Murray won Wimbledon.  Extraordinary numbers of people here join the mass protests. For the Via Catalana http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan_Way) 1.6 million people held hands along 480km of our coastline on 11 September 2013.

The great gasping maw of a difference is that in Scotland you can vote. Here, we can't. The Madrid Government refuses to give the Catalans a vote, and both the main parties agree. Artur Mas, Catalan President, has laid plans including ordering 6,000 ballot boxes for the referendum he plans to hold on 9 November.

But Madrid will not allow Catalans to vote and refuses all talk of a referendum. We can expect a summer of discontent followed by an autumn of protest, with the 11^th September, Catalan national day, a special focus.

The Catalans will celebrate their day just one week before the people of Scotland vote for their independence.  We’ll be watching, with envy.

Chickulation Explosion

Cheepie, our errant bantam, has hatched ten, yes, ten chicks.

She's a proud mum. But the evidence from the chicks varied colours is that she has been getting about a bit with the blokes...

Who is/are your parents?

Eight hatched!

Here they are, the Croft's Great Eight.

All eight of our bird box eggs have hatched, and both parents are now in full feeding mode.

UPDATE: 23 May 2014: All eight have flown the nest - a really successful clutch!

Here's one on his way to the bird box with a load of lunch.

Lunch, delivered

[Photo of Parus major, Great Tit, courtesy of the lovely Henri Zomer, a student at the University of Groningen who stayed with us recently]

Dropping in on Eve

Here she is, our new housemate:

Parus major, a Great Tit, making her new home on eight eggs.

We're eavesdropping - step back Edward Snowden - as she incubates her eggs. If they hatch and we can film it, I'll post that too.

Baking day

I got up early to start the bread oven...

I'm a heavy smoker

...and made all of this...

The busy baker

 


 ...as well as a pizza and a coca de vidre (flat very thin bread with sugar and aniseed, cooked very fast in the hottest oven possible).

The piped biscuits (they look like they've been plopped rather than piped - I'm not a qualified piper) are gluten free. The recipe, adapted from my Good Housekeeping Cookery Book, 1985 edition, is:

125g butter
50g icing sugar
65g rice flour
65g oatmeal flour
A quarter level teaspoon of baking powder
Nutmeg, grated
1 tablespoon of milk, to soften the dough.

Heat the bread oven. In my case this means starting 3-4 hours earlier, burning oak logs in the oven to get it up to temperature. Aim for 190ºC. Line a large baking tray with baking parchment (greaseproof paper.)

Beat butter until smooth and creamy, sift in sugar and beat lots until pale and airy.

Sift in flour and baking powder, add nutmeg and beat. Add a little milk to soften the mixture. Put into piping bag and, er, make a splodge onto the baking parchment. And then lots more splodges until you've used it up. Bake for 20 mins approx.

Furry new

She's just a few months old, she still does not have a name, and she's just come to live with us.

Here she is, with her mum Margarita, tucking into a load of fresh hay after walking down here from Can Peu Alt. Jordi and his sons brought the two donkeys over here this morning.

Hay, I've arrived

For Arran, our resident teenager, it was a bit of a shock. He said hello...

I nose it's a new donkey...but two?

 

Curious

All together now...sweeeeeeet!

Here is Curious, born 24 hours before to Fidget, one of our Ripollesa sheep.

Camera? What camera?

Dance like a hoverfly...

...look like a bee. Or a wasp.

This, I think, is Volucella zonaria, a wasp-mimicking hoverfly. H/she was drying her wings in a sunny spot above a miniature wetland we've created using an old water tank. He's big!

Big, bug and beautiful

And this is the (not so) Scarce Swallowtail, Iphiclides podalirius, laying eggs on 5th May 2014 in the mud outside the donkey stable. Not a great photo, but I wanted to record the date.

Half a dozen here, half a dozen there