16th December -North Wind

Holiday to consumer-ville

The weather has changed. Cold wind sucked in by a storm over the continent has bought snow to parts of our little isle and miserable sleet to Kent. Still if you're going to spend the day Christmas shopping in Maidstone it would be a shame to waste a good one. High-street shopping is something almost entirely alien to me.  I have made it my business to shun the consumer culture, yet every year I gladly swallow my principles and enter the lion's den. Our family and friends are unimaginably generous to us and I have come to realise over the years, that whatever my personal beliefs maybe, it is right to spend money on presents that they will really appreciate. After all there is a limit to how many wooden whistles, jars of honey or bottles of homebrew anyone wants! Perversely, I am probably a very good shopper. I have spent so many years purposely retarding my desire to possess fripperies (for the benefit of my wife a billhook is not a frippery) that I am totally unmoved by advertising and temptation (in a shopping sense at least), which allows me to set about the job with the detached efficiency of an outsider.

A busy weekend waits, with shooting tomorrow and poultry killing on Sunday. As I have said before, in a ' kill the fattened calf ' kind of way, slaughter precedes any notable celebration in this household and Christmas is no exception. Although we shan't be shooting woodcock tomorrow (like many shoots we have a voluntary ban on shooting them) I shall be interested to see if there are more present in the woods and cover. With freezing conditions and snow further north, there should be an influx to the area as the birds seek viable feeding sites. The woodcock's long beak is used to probe soft ground, largely for earthworms and if the ground becomes frozen they must move on or face starvation. I realise as I write this line that I dreamt about a fall (the correct term for a group of woodcock putting down to rest after migratory flight) of the birds last night and having accurately predicted a cold winter last year, with a dream depicting a frozen blue tit preserved in its final act of trying to extract food from a equally frozen seed head, perhaps I am developing powers of prophecy!