J B Priestly was born and brought up in the West Riding of Yorkshire, as I was. He would answer a friendly enquiry with the reply “Mustn’t grumble”, which makes perfect sense to a Yorkshireman. When I was a teenager his novel The Good Companions was my favourite book, although when I picked it up a a year or two ago I was disappointed to find it unreadable. On the other hand his play, “An Inspector Calls” has remained one of my favourites and I go to see it whenever there’s a new production. 

His horns were fiercesome; he weighed just short of a ton. He spent his entire life outdoors on the uncompromising Lakeland Fells. He was part Cumberland White, part Aberdeen Angus, what we called Cumberland Angus, more properly called Blue-Grey Angus, although his coat was black.

On average rare breed sows such as ours produce fewer piglets than the ‘factory-bred’ commercial varieties such as the Large White. The average is about 10, which is fine, not least because a pig has only 12 teats and might struggle with a larger brood.

But on December 22nd, this beauty of ours produced 16, and they all survived. 

So I’ll cherish the simple things
The easy took for granted things….
It’s the simple things that mean the most to me.
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From “Simple Things” by Paolo Nutini.

Paolo Nutini wins the Slow Life award for Album of the Year 2009.  

Jean has three young children, including one born this year, so you would have thought she would have enough to do, preparing for Santa on Christmas Eve. Yet she spent the early hours of Christmas morning acting as midwife to one of our Saddleback sows. The farrowing bays are in the old stable, so she had the perfect venue for a Christmas birth. Eight piglets were born, all in perfect health, the last at 3am, just in time for Santa if not for the Three Wise Men.

It was minus 11C at 10am on Christmas morning but the sun was shining.  After several days of snow the hills were glistening white and the scene was so beautiful that I could hardly keep my eyes on the road as I drove to the hotels.  At Damson Dene some guests had built a Snowman, which they inexplicably named Al Gore.

We are so far north here that we get only 8 hours of daylight in December and so far west that it doesn’t get light until 8am. So it’s something of a relief when the shortest day comes around and we know that the worst is over  and that from here on in the days will start getting lighter.  This year the shortest day fell on December 22nd, which was something of a shock to the 300 Pagans who turned up at Stonehenge to celebrate the Winter Solstice a day early in the mistaken belief that because the longest day always falls on June 21st the shortest day must fall exactly six months later.

This is Part 2 of the three videos taken during Ivan Day’s Christmas Dinner. Including: The potato pie; the leg of Herdwick Mutton, stuck with anchovies; how the English diet is really Nordic; the forgotten Christmas food; the early 19th Century 12 cake, a ‘hoop cake’ the forerunner of the Christmas cake, popular until about 1850 when the Christmas cake took over; the decoration with two crowns; the Arack punch, made with Arack, lime juice, hot water and sugar; Arack is fermented palm from Sri Lanka called Toddy, hence Toddy Walla- “the most authentic punch you will ever drink”, from the end of the 17th century.

It was minus 5 centigrade outside when I arrived at Ivan Day’s cottage in Shap for the Slow Food Christmas dinner. Inside it was deliciously warm; I was welcomed by an open log fire in an old cooking range, in front of which a whole leg of lamb was roasting on a rotating spit. Ivan Day is the country’s foremost authority on the history of cooking and he and his friend Gill had generously agreed to cook a Christmas meal as it might have been enjoyed in Cumbria 150 years ago. Here is the menu:

Philippa and I will freely admit that after a four month battle we were mentally prepared for defeat. The panel whose job it is to choose which designers will be allowed to show their gardens at Chelsea showed us no mercy at all as they insisted on three re-drafts and two name changes before, finally, today, giving us the utterly delicious news that we are IN. The original idea, of a garden built around a Victorian aviary, has remained the same throughout and we have sometimes struggled to understand the panel’s thinking as their requests for changes made us alter the title from “A Bird Lover’s Garden” to “An Aviary Garden” and finally to “A Victorian Aviary Garden”, but however great the torture, the end result is worth it. ​

Terra Madre – http://www.terramadre.info/pagine/welcome.lasso?n=en&-session=terramadre:D92BD4DB1da411E3D3xGj229FDFD

Slow Food – http://www.slowfood.org.uk
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Westmorland Damson Association – http://www.lythdamsons.org.uk/

Today is Terra Madre Day and Slow Food is celebrating its 20th anniversary with over 1,000 events in 120 countries. Here in Cumbria we are celebrating with a lunch at the Mason’s Arms, Strawberry Bank, and a walk exploring the Damson orchards of the Lyth Valley. 70 years ago most of the farms in the Lyth valley specialised in damson production and 250 tons were produced. Now the crop is down to barely 20 tons and Slow Food are supporting the Westmorland Damson Association in encouraging farms to re-plant their orchards. Our local fruit is unique, smaller and tastier than other damsons and the conditions here are perfect for its cultivation. There is an orchard at the Damson Dene Hotel and on 29th August this year four of us picked 46 kilos of fruit in an hour. Pictured are Steve and Vicky Dickinson, Peter Jackson (our Chairman) and Mark Richards on the Damson trail, and a basket with some of our August haul, now made into jam. For those Slow Life adherents who don’t have their own damson tree- the hedgerows in the Lyth valley are full of wild damson trees, whose fruit is not only free, but is often left unpicked.

November is a good month for the Slow Life, when everything starts to wind down.

November
​
There is wind where the rose was
Cold rain where sweet grass was
And clouds like sheep
Stream o’er the steep
Grey skies where the lark was
Nought warm where your hand was
Nought gold where your hair was
But phantom, forlorn,
Beneath the thorn,
Your ghost where your face was.
Cold wind where your voice was
Tears, tears where my heart was.
And ever with me
Child ever with me,
Silence where hope was.

- Walter de la Mare

The Daily Telegraph’s food writer Jasper Gerrard has asked whether our local eatery, L’Enclume is the best restaurant in England.  Its only rival he says is Heston Blumenthal’s The Fat Duck, but he prefers Simon Rogan’s L’enclume.   I don’t think I’ve ever read an article about L’Enclume that hasn’t included the observation from Simon Rogan that the locals don’t go there.  I wonder if Simon doesn’t realise that locals might read what he says.

As there’s an election in the offing we are being courted by the politicians. I spent today with Tobias Ellwood, the Shadow Minister for Culture Media and Sport, whose brief includes tourism. His pitch is that if the Conservatives get in there will, for the first time, be a dedicated Minister of Tourism. Tobias and I were interviewed by ITV news at the Windermere TIC, which the local Lib-Dem council are planning to close.