Those Silurian brackeny hills above Kington were white; the road to church crunched under foot and the bells rang out beneath an ice blue sky. Together we gathered to give thanks for the most extraordinary event this universe has every seen since its marvellous and unfathomable creation. Humanly speaking I am pessimistic about the future of our species and this delicate slither of life which is our planet home. But experience teaches me hope founded on something wider and deeper and timeless. The fifth candle was lit in our church on Christmas morning, lights symbolizing the long heralded coming of God to earth fettered in flesh. The Patriarchs saw it dimly, the Prophets foretold it scarcely daring to comprehend it, The Apostles were burdened with this heavy news, Mary the servant was pierced by it; finally the light of the world was come, and as St John puts it “the light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not comprehended it”.
We went forward to receive the gifts of bread broken and wine poured out, quietly, personally. My eyes wandered up the stained glass window to the image of the cross. There the mystery is focused. Out of light, through darkness, came life for those who come near. Light-darkness, birth-death, new life and hope for the pilgrim, walking lightly, going together on unknown paths towards a certain home.
TS Eliot said it in his Journey of the Magi:.“.were we led all that way for Birth or Death? There as a Birth, certainly, We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death, But had thought they were different; this Birth was Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death. We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, With an alien people clutching their gods. I should be glad of another death.” Hope possesses shape and life when you are “no longer at ease here”, when you throw out your foreign gods. Jeanette Winterson in her fable The Lion, the Unicorn and Me, gathers in the eternal with the imprisoned past, the breathtaking reality of divine intervention. “The kings came inside even though there was no inside left now that we were blown inside out, time past and future roaring round us like a wind, and eternity sitting above us, like angels, like a star. The kings kneeled and one of them, the youngest, began to cry.” ....began to weep in unreasoning unfathomable joy at a promise we dare to believe.
Walking home in the sunlit snow through the parkland we kicked the ice in a shower, crunched the frozen turf, disturbed the sheep, unwitting spectators of angelic heralds bringing “good news of great joy that will be for all people.” Strange and wonderful that at this winter solstice the creation itself speaks hope in shards of light in the winter darkness. A Great spotted woodpecker drummed its territorial tattoo on an old oak in the wood; a dunnock began feebly to sing, stirred by the boldness of the sun. The dipper flew piping down river; in the dead of winter he sings secretly by the sweet murmuring Arrow. The unsettling flight of hope, restlessly joyful.
19 December 2009 – Magda's Zimnica
With Copenhagen leaving most of us feeling frustrated and disappointed, I am back to the less spectacular micro economy of village life. I have to admit that there is a slightly selfish, perhaps even ridiculous, “Noah's ark” motive at play. I think I can see where we are going. A terrifying prospect of the future through which those with hope see a path powering down to a safer lower energy economy. I've just been observing it amongst our immediate neighbours on both sides of us in Stara Moravica. Magda and Ferenz work all the hours they have to till their strip of land and ours producing vegetables and fruit and winter preserves called zimnica.
I went round to see what they were up to. Magda had a couple of large vats in which her cabbages were fermenting with salt. Kisili kupus, as it is called in Serbian, is the secret ingredient waiting to be discovered by a celebrity chef. The large firm cabbages are lifted in December just before hard weather comes. (A week later a friend tells me that it is -10 with 40cms of snow!). But Magda's cabbages are safely lifted, salted, placed in a vat and pressed to expel the liquid as a natural fermentation sets in. In this state they can be preserved for the whole winter. You won't be convinced by this, but kisili kupus is actually delicious, nothing like vinegary sour kraut, and an exquisite addition to meat dishes, especially the Serbian feast day speciality of sarma which is spicy mince wrapped in cabbage leaves. The village market is now full of all sorts of zimnica including Magda's ajvar, which is a preserve of red peppers roasted, skinned and mashed up with garlic, tomato and hot paprika. And I shouldn't forget to mention the hundred litres or so of Šljivavica (othewise called palinka in Hungarian or plum brandy) all distilled from our orchard crop of plums.
My other neighbour, Irena, bakes the most delicious bread, kneading it all by hand. The brick oven is fired by maize stalks from their strip of land, and the flour comes from the village mill. Nothing could be more local; and certainly no bread is more delicious than her traditional sipo loaf, which is the one folded over. Why it is made that way I haven't discovered, nor why it is called sipo. But the smoke goes up from the oven at 12.00 and three hours later the gate to their yard opens and you can buy hot sweet-smelling bread for lunch which starts any time from 15.00 when people come in from their work.
Owls must wait until last light for their lunch. In a couple of sheltered spruce trees the winter roost of Long-eared owls sleeps out the day, peering back slightly irritably if you go trying to count them. At dusk they fly off in streams on silent wings to their village duties hunting the rodent cohorts scampering through our yards and orchards. We could learn something from the owls; work locally, live as community.
9 December 2009 – Lost in Central Europe
This week I am at our village house in Stara Moravica, a Hungarian village in Serbia. Well, it is actually in Vojvodina, which many feel may not really be in Serbia at all but lost somewhere in Central Europe. It was once Hungary and a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until 918. Our village found itself suddenly cast off and stranded in the Balkans. After the fall of Communism, the dismemberment of Yugoslavia and the enlargement of the European Union, Stara Moravica still exists much as it always has, proudly but not entirely happily. It is still stranded. Culturally it is Central Europe but there is a dreary border with Hungary and an unpopular tax regime in Belgrade and prices keep going up. But, there is good news. In 2 weeks time Serbian passport holders can at last travel into “Europe” without the indignity of queueing up and paying a ransom for a visa. For 90 days there is freedom to roam around in “the West” shopping, sight seeing, visiting relatives. For the Roma, who are by nature itinerant and always about to go somewhere else, a whole new universe is opening up. They are lining up already to cross; or at least those who have managed to obtain the necessary new passports are waiting for the off. They will travel and trade and look for jobs. Some will join the prominent begging communities in tourist centres like Paris and Rome, others perhaps will disappear into the grey economy.
A year ago I was unable to get any of my neighbours or Serbian friends to show much interest in the economic crisis. The Credit Crunch had not registered and no one could imagine how it could affect a society that had hardly begun to enjoy the fruits of easily available credit. But things are a bit different now. Inevitably the effects find their way down to the bottom in the shape of lost jobs, rising prices and diminished purses. A small state owned factory in the village laid off its 30 workers; it didn't pay them much, but that was all there was to buy bread and fuel and trainers. The wood working factory that makes furniture for export hasn't paid its workers for a couple of months we were told; but they are advertising for more workers. The Serbian privatisation programme, part of that transition to a market economy, has been badly hit by the loss of credit. Once workers in state owned companies went to work to wait for rescue, now many just wait for the layoff.
It is not the best month of the year to be cheerful about the economy, and cold rain and mud only add to the sombre hunched appearance. It is easy to hear a catalogue of woes. There is a continually replicating Serbian joke that goes “How do you know you are a Serb?”, “Because you are 40 and still living at home!” and many similar reasons! But some souls never give up. Our friend Eta has a part time job, runs a large vegetable garden, sells produce, makes pasta and testa and comes and nurtures our flowers when we are not there. She never stops, but her sons have no work and see little reason for hope. Without the dignity of work life is very cruel. I topped up my mobile this morning and watched the girl record it in a notebook; all the top-ups bar one were for 100 Dinara (less than a pound). I also went to the woodyard to give them my water meter reading. “Which do you need? My name or my address?” I asked; “I know who you are!” she said with my overdue account already up on the screen. But outside my friends with the waiting carts seemed as resilient to the turbulence of global economic fortunes as they were to the cold rain. One was waiting for the blacksmith to come back and finish off shoeing his grey stallion. Without ceremony he lifted up the big grey's leg while the other pared down the hoof and nailed on the new shoe.
Not good weather for birding. But when there was a glimmer of sun I heard the wild call of cranes overhead. A flock flew north, who knows where? My argumentative neighbours, the dapper Tree sparrows are busy gathering spilled meal and goose down, flying from yard to eave or collecting in dense hawk-proof thickets to gossip. The “Village woodpecker”, otherwise known as the Syrian woodpecker, is in and out of the garden and enjoying making yet another hole in our apple tree. A goshawk soared up and circled in the sun while the collared doves hid in the trees and clung to roofs. The Little owl called at dusk still preferring an empty factory roof to my bespoke owl box in the walnut. The unrecognized centre of our universe is a village with its well dug soil, wood smoke and its modest well-loved homes.
21 November 2009 – Will and Ed Found in a Wood
In a chance encounter I met Will and Ed in Romsey in the Spring (See blog 20 April). I was bicycling across the country and they were walking around it <www.awalkaroundbritain.com>. My journey took a week and theirs was taking months and months walking generally west, then north, living in the woods, walking the lanes and paths, singing old country songs for their supper. A sort of social experiment to live on the land, to shake off the claws of high energy consumerism, to find new healthier rhythms. I applaud it heartily, and like many others wish them well. Then suddenly I discover that we are almost neighbours. We settled in Kington in the Welsh Marches; Will and Ed and Ayla and Rose took up residence in a Welsh wood over the hill.
We went to look for them without very many clues other than “somewhere in Radnorshire”. The woods around Pen y Bont seem to be full of people living in mobile homes and trailers eking out an existence in defiance of the Welsh climate if not Powys Planning Department. Good on them. If Powys knew what was good for them they would be paying grants for people to buy up fields and woods to settle the land with low impact lifestyles so that we have a repository of wisdom for following them when we run out of choices. At the third trailer parked up semi-permanently in a dripping wood we received red hot intelligence that Will n' Ed had recently been seen. A long wet walk around a large oak wood began cold without a hint of woodlander life but then we found some footprints; soon we saw evidence of firewood scavenging and hazel stick cutting. We knew we had found them! Finally there were Will, Ed, Ayla and Rose toiling away building a not inconsiderable lodge of hazel sticks that would have have impressed aboriginal villagers in Borneo.
They were doing well. There was a little stove, a good fire and cooking pot, the nearby recycling centre (dump) had yielded up endless treasures for re-use in a woodlander's winter residence, and a series of benders made life tolerably sheltered if damp. The mice were delighted and kept them awake with their much repacking and sorting of provisions in the night. We brought a kotlich, tripod and grill to contribute to a well provisioned winter quarters. They sang us a song for our trouble; “her rosy red cheeks and curly black hair....” destined to cause trouble. Shout for joy for the woodlanders!
15 October 2009 – Back in the Woods
It was almost 7 years ago that we loaded up our small car and trailer and headed off in the winter mists to Novi Sad on the Danube. Living in Serbia has been an unintentionally long adventure but this Summer we finally came home to where we belong. But where do any of us belong? Western cities are a babble of tongues. Some of them are tourists but most are economic migrants of one sort or another. We have the privilege of being able to return, but part of us has been left behind. We have a house in a Hungarian village in Vojvodina where we shall return as often as we can, and our friends there feel like an extended family whom we miss. This blog began a few years ago in Serbia and Vojvodina, it will continue from its new home in Britain, but whenever possible it will return to our village on the stubble plains of Vojvodina with occasional excursions to the Dinaric mountains of Serbia and the Balkans.
Alas, the downside is that I can no longer live the life of energetic early retirement doing whatever my hand finds to do, dreaming up “escapades” to Serbia's wilder corners, plumbing the subterranean chambers of cross-cultural living, coping with alienation, rejoicing as guests in a country we have grown to love. In short, the bad news is that I have a job and must turn up to work every morning and be shackled to a laptop for at least 8 hours, or sent up a mountain to worry about trees. Can that really be work? Well, yes! If you are easy to please then being a Chartered Forester might be a sufficiently interesting job to keep one from complaining. So the upside is that I am getting to know a new corner of Britain and enjoying getting mud on my boots as I climb up through dark murmuring spruce plantations on Welsh mountains or stalk through the oaks in a Herefordshire wood. But the reality of “applied ecology”, which in theory is very close to my heart, is that one is sunk in a morass of paper, lost in a virtual jungle. You really have to fight to see the wood for the paper.
We have only been occasional visitors to Wales in the past, but now we live in the Marches in the tiny town of Kington where the Old Red Sandstone of fertile oak filled Herefordshire meets the golden bracken flanked hills of the harsh Silurian rock of Radnorshire. It really is the border between 2 different countries, although the Welsh flow naturally over into the milder green wooded hills of the Marches and English “settlers” seeking cheap land and more sustainable life styles have planted themselves in the valleys of central Wales.
We shall put down our roots at last, God willing, in the wooded and orcharded red green landscape of Herefordshire, but I work more over the border in the steeper uplands of Wales. There nature wages an endless war on farmer and forester. Just look at the landscape. Down in the valleys there is “in-bye” land enclosed by fences and hedges with grazed oak woodland all dedicated to the raising of sheep and beef cattle. On the steeper or wetter slopes where improved pasture gives way to moorland grass, heather, bogs and thin woodland of birch and Rowan the sheep graze in the Summer. Even higher up, at last, the land was once cheap enough for the farmer to relinquish his subsidized grip and for foresters to establish plantations of Sitka spruce. If your roof is made of timber, don't complain! Timber, and that means spruce, is the only sustainable home grown material for building a roof over your head. The land speaks to us; the woods and hills sing a primordial song. The forester and farmer no less than the environmental campaigner must listen to it.
Those Silurian brackeny hills above Kington were white; the road to church crunched under foot and the bells rang out beneath an ice blue sky. Together we gathered to give thanks for the most extraordinary event this universe has every seen since its marvellous and unfathomable creation. Humanly speaking I am pessimistic about the future of our species and this delicate slither of life which is our planet home. But experience teaches me hope founded on something wider and deeper and timeless. The fifth candle was lit in our church on Christmas morning, lights symbolizing the long heralded coming of God to earth fettered in flesh. The Patriarchs saw it dimly, the Prophets foretold it scarcely daring to comprehend it, The 
Apostles were burdened with this heavy news, Mary the servant was pierced by it; finally the light of the world was come, and as St John puts it “the light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not comprehended it”.
TS Eliot said it in his Journey of the Magi:.“.were we led all that way for Birth or Death? There as a Birth, certainly, We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death, But had thought they were different; this Birth was Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death. We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, With an alien people clutching their gods. I should be glad of another death.” Hope possesses shape and life when you are “no longer at ease here”, when you throw out your foreign gods. Jeanette Winterson in her fable The Lion, the Unicorn and Me, gathers in the eternal with the imprisoned past, the breathtaking reality of divine intervention. “The kings came inside even though there was no inside left now that we were blown inside out, time past and future roaring round us like a wind, and eternity sitting above us, like angels, like a star. The kings kneeled and one of them, the youngest, began to cry.” ....began to weep in unreasoning unfathomable joy at a promise we dare to believe. 
With Copenhagen leaving most of us feeling frustrated and disappointed, I am back to the less spectacular micro economy of village life. I have to admit that there is a slightly selfish, perhaps even ridiculous, “Noah's ark” motive at play. I think I can see where we are going. A terrifying prospect of the future through which those with hope see a path powering down to a safer lower energy economy. I've just been observing it amongst our immediate neighbours on both sides of us in Stara Moravica. Magda and Ferenz work all the hours they have to till their strip of land and ours producing vegetables and fruit and winter preserves called zimnica
I went round to see what they were up to. Magda had a couple of large vats in which her cabbages were fermenting with salt. Kisili kupus
My other neighbour, Irena, bakes the most delicious bread, kneading it all by hand. The brick oven is fired by maize stalks from their strip of land, and the flour comes from the village mill. Nothing could be more local; and certainly no bread is more delicious than her traditional sipo
This week I am at our village house in Stara Moravica, a Hungarian village in Serbia. Well, it is actually in Vojvodina, which many feel may not really be in Serbia at all but lost somewhere in Central Europe. It was once Hungary and a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until 918. Our village found itself suddenly cast off and stranded in the Balkans. After the fall of Communism, the dismemberment of Yugoslavia and the enlargement of the European Union, Stara Moravica still exists much as it always has, proudly but not entirely happily. It is still stranded. Culturally it is Central Europe but there is a dreary border with Hungary and an unpopular tax regime in Belgrade and prices keep going up. But, there is good news. In 2 weeks time Serbian passport holders can at last travel into “Europe” without the indignity of queueing up and paying a ransom for a visa. For 90 days there is freedom to roam around in “the West” shopping, sight seeing, visiting relatives. For the Roma, who are by nature itinerant and always about to go somewhere else, a whole new universe is opening up. They are lining up already to cross; or at least those who have managed to obtain the necessary new passports are waiting for the off. They will travel and trade and look for jobs. Some will join the prominent begging communities in tourist centres like Paris and Rome, others perhaps will disappear into the grey economy.
A year ago I was unable to get any of my neighbours or Serbian friends to show much interest in the economic crisis. The Credit Crunch had not registered and no one could imagine how it could affect a society that had hardly begun to enjoy the fruits of easily available credit. But things are a bit different now. Inevitably the effects find their way down to the bottom in the shape of lost jobs, rising prices and diminished purses. A small state owned factory in the village laid off its 30 workers; it didn't pay them much, but that was all there was to buy bread and fuel and trainers. The wood working factory that makes furniture for export hasn't paid its workers for a couple of months we were told; but they are advertising for more workers. The Serbian privatisation programme, part of that transition to a market economy, has been badly hit by the loss of credit. Once workers in state owned companies went to work to wait for rescue, now many just wait for the layoff.
It is not the best month of the year to be cheerful about the economy, and cold rain and mud only add to the sombre hunched appearance. It is easy to hear a catalogue of woes. There is a continually replicating Serbian joke that goes “How do you know you are a Serb?”, “Because you are 40 and still living at home!” and many similar reasons! But some souls never give up. Our friend Eta has a part time job, runs a large vegetable garden, sells produce, makes pasta and testa and comes and nurtures our flowers when we are not there. She never stops, but her sons have no work and see little reason for hope. Without the dignity of work life is very cruel. I topped up my mobile this morning and watched the girl record it in a notebook; all the top-ups bar one were for 100 Dinara (less than a pound). I also went to the woodyard to give them my water meter reading. “Which do you need? My name or my address?” I asked; “I know who you are!” she said with my overdue account already up on the screen. But outside my friends with the waiting carts seemed as resilient to the turbulence of global economic fortunes as they were to the cold rain. One was waiting for the blacksmith to come back and finish off shoeing his grey stallion. Without ceremony he lifted up the big grey's leg while the other pared down the hoof and 
nailed on the new shoe. 
In a chance encounter I met Will and Ed in Romsey in the Spring (See blog 20 April). I was bicycling across the country and they were walking around it <
We went to look for them without very many clues other than “somewhere in Radnorshire”. The woods around Pen y Bont seem to be full of people living in mobile homes and trailers eking out an existence in defiance of the Welsh climate if not Powys Planning Department. Good on them. If Powys knew what was good for them they would be paying grants for people to buy up fields and woods to settle the land with low impact 
lifestyles so that we have a repository of wisdom for following them when we run out of choices. At the third trailer parked up semi-permanently in a dripping wood we received red hot intelligence that Will n' Ed had recently been seen. A long wet walk around a large oak wood began cold without a hint of woodlander life but then we found some footprints; soon we saw evidence of firewood scavenging and hazel stick cutting. We knew we had found them! Finally there were Will, Ed, Ayla and Rose toiling away building a not inconsiderable lodge of hazel sticks that would have have impressed aboriginal villagers in Borneo. 
They were doing well. There was a little stove, a good fire and cooking pot, the nearby recycling centre (dump) had yielded up endless treasures for re-use in a woodlander's winter residence, and a series of benders made life tolerably sheltered if damp. The mice were delighted and kept them awake with their much repacking and sorting of provisions in the night. We brought a kotlich, tripod and grill to contribute to a well provisioned winter quarters. They sang us a song for our trouble; “her rosy red cheeks and curly black hair....” destined to cause trouble. Shout for joy for the woodlanders!
It was almost 7 years ago that we loaded up our small car and trailer and headed off in the winter mists to Novi Sad on the Danube. Living in Serbia has been an unintentionally long adventure but this Summer we finally came home to where we belong. But where do any of us belong? Western cities are a babble of tongues. Some of them are tourists but most are economic migrants of one sort or another. We have the privilege of being able to return, but part of us has been left behind. We have a house in a Hungarian village in Vojvodina where we shall return as often as we can, and our friends there feel like an extended family whom we miss. This blog began a few years ago in Serbia and Vojvodina, it will continue from its new home in Britain, but whenever possible it will return to our village on the stubble plains of Vojvodina with occasional excursions to the Dinaric mountains of Serbia and the Balkans. 
Alas, the downside is that I can no longer live the life of energetic early retirement doing whatever my hand finds to do, dreaming up “escapades” to Serbia's wilder corners, plumbing the subterranean chambers of cross-cultural living, coping with alienation, rejoicing as guests in a country we have grown to love. In short, the bad news is that I have a job and must turn up to work every morning and be shackled to a laptop for at least 8 hours, or sent up a mountain to worry about trees. Can that really be work? Well, yes! If you are easy to please then being a Chartered Forester might be a sufficiently interesting job to keep one from complaining. So the upside is that I am getting to know a new corner of Britain and enjoying getting mud on my boots as I climb up through dark murmuring spruce plantations on Welsh mountains or stalk through the oaks in a Herefordshire wood. But the reality of “applied ecology”, which in theory is very close to my heart, is that one is sunk in a morass of paper, lost in a virtual jungle. You really have to fight to see the wood for the paper. 
We have only been occasional visitors to Wales in the past, but now we live in the Marches in the tiny town of Kington where the Old Red Sandstone of fertile oak filled Herefordshire meets the golden bracken flanked hills of the harsh Silurian rock of Radnorshire. It really is the border between 2 different countries, although the Welsh flow naturally over into the milder green wooded hills of the Marches and English “settlers” seeking cheap land and more sustainable life styles have planted themselves in the valleys of central Wales. 
We shall put down our roots at last, God willing, in the wooded and orcharded red green landscape of Herefordshire, but I work more over the border in the steeper uplands of Wales. There nature wages an endless war on farmer and forester. Just look at the landscape. Down in the valleys there is “in-bye” land enclosed by fences and hedges with grazed oak woodland all dedicated to the raising of sheep and beef cattle. On the steeper or wetter slopes where improved pasture gives way to moorland grass, heather, bogs and thin woodland of birch and Rowan the sheep graze in the Summer. Even higher up, at last, the land was once cheap enough for the farmer to relinquish his subsidized grip and for foresters to establish plantations of Sitka spruce. If your roof is made of timber, don't complain! Timber, and that means spruce, is the only sustainable home grown material for building a roof over your head. The land speaks to us; the woods and hills sing a primordial song. The forester and farmer no less than the environmental campaigner must listen to it.