Wood for the seas

Aside from the DS lite saga this morning it was a fairly lazy day. Ady plucked the pheasants and partridges for dinner and the children spent some time with him while he did that. I am by far the most squeamish of the four of us and I’m fairly strong stomached so there is very little in the way of ‘eww it’s a dead animal!’ and ever so much of ‘where is it’s heart then?’ and ‘can we tell what it was eating before it died?’. We had four cock birds so the pheasants particularly were beautifully plummaged and their feathers are so very soft. The children both had a go at plucking (Scarlett was quite good actually) while Ady told them about how he used to pluck turkeys for £3 a bird at the weekends when he ‘were a lad’ at the nearby turkey farm in the run up to Christmas.

We talked a bit about how the birds were killed (shot from the sky and recovered by gun dogs) and Ady showed us the gunshot wounds, and the pheasants must have been shot from a great height as they were fairly shattered from impact so he filleted the breasts rather than plucking them to cook whole. We discussed a bit about hunting for fun, sport, pleasure and food and how the lines slightly blur as obviously these birds found their way to us by someone else shooting them surplus to their own food requirements and not even specifically to eat. It’s been a real journey for me personally the last couple of years from eating supermarket meat only that bore no resemblance to it’s original animal form to watching a bird I’d hatched and reared myself killed and cooked and eaten and all shades inbetween. I know it is all very ‘now’ with the Jamie Oliver and Hugh F-W stuff in the news aswell as shows such as kill it, cook it, eat it but given we do eat meat and have no intention of stopping doing so I am very proud that we are completely educating our children about where it comes from, exactly how it gets to our plate and dealing with their questions about it as we go along. Their matter of fact attitude to the whole thing makes me crave all the more for our different lifestyle really.

I read Life Story and Earth Story to Scarlett, with Davies listening in and then they did some painting. I’d picked up some very cheap watercolour pencils the other day (from the pound shop – told you they were cheap! ;)) so we did some painting with both those and the block and tube watercolours and noted the differences. Davies was very weepy today and when they went off to play and the volume and boisterousness increased to levels I couldn’t ignore anymore I told them to put their shoes on and we’d go to the park to run off some physical energy to catch up with his low mental energy levels a bit.

The first park was full of teenagers so we drove through the airport to another nearby one speculating on litter as we went (Davies had looked out of the car window when we stopped at traffic lights and noticed heaps of litter on the grass verge). It was freezing at the park (it’s on the riverbanks which lead out to the sea) but there were several people there with small children. We lasted well over half an hour but I got fed up with Davies being pathetic about what he could and couldn’t do (things like firemans poles) for Ady’s benefit and was shorttempered. As we’d left the house we’d heard the news story about wood from the sunk Ice Prince washing up on the beach along the coast and Worthing beach being shut so on the way home we parked at Lancing to go and see. The coastguard was there preventing people from taking any wood away. We were stunned at how much there was there, including a whole complete still bundled up load which must have washed up with all sorts of crashes and drama. We stayed til it got dark but it was low tide going out so there was nothing more being washed it while we were there. I might check tide times for tomorrow and go down again with the children – it was quite a spectacle. Having got home and checked other people’s flickr pictures and the local news I realised how much more dramatic it was just a mile or so down the beach at Worthing – our pics won’t be worthy of anyone nicking off flickr on this occassion ;).

Home for dinner and then a fairly early night for the children while Ady and I had a long chat about The Future including some internet searching for properties. We’re going to get an estate agent round to value the house and try and get up to Wales for a long weekend sometime in February to set some wheels in motion and Ady is going to speak to his boss tomorrow about any possibility of remaining employed by them without needing to live in Sussex. Who knows if it will actually all lead anywhere, particularly having decided to wait another six months before doing anything but we’re both feeling frustrated by the biding time aspect that we’ve had to our lives the last 3 years and I think we need to feel we are taking positive action to change things rather than sitting around waiting for stuff to just fall in our laps.