Paul Malpas

Although I was to continue with my holiday trend yesterday, I awoke or more like got kicked out of bed at 5.30 with a violent attack of sneezes, coughs and a nose running like the Boyle River was two months ago.  I had been suffering from a cold or some such affliction for three or four days, which as you will have noticed severely affected both my output and its quality.  I had tried to work my way through this dreadful debilitation but yesterday it was at its apogee and as my attacks are far more severe than those of most other people, you can imagine my plight yesterday drowning in phlegm from my chest and mucus from my nasal passages allied to violent sneezing bouts, running eyes and severe breathing problems.  I was really in a state and not fit to think and anyway the game of the season was on that afternoon and I had to be ready for that.  England v Ireland at Twickers, with England on the up and Ireland struggling after that dozy performance last time out against France.  But I had a feeling that my massive support could just swing the day for Ireland and so it happened that for all England’s huffs and puffs they could not blow Ireland’s house of bricks down.  Ireland’s incisive backs and their rock solid scrum withheld England’s majority possession and made it all look easy in the end, but I am certain my roars and cheers and the half dozen pints of porter I consumed in the panic of it all must have saved Ireland’s  bacon.

This morning I am feeling much better and more able to continue with life on the farm ably assisted by my box of Kleenex tissues and my hazy memory.

Where were we, oh yes, I was sneaking round the farm buildings whilst the household slept.  The house was seperated from the farm buildings by an entrance road of York stone setts and the buildings were built in the  classical style of the late 17th century, in a square, with the creamery and dairy, single storey structures, taking up the short western side, leading to the piggery and various sheds for storing equipment and where the various dogs and cats lived, most of the cats feral but doing a great job keeping the rat and mice populations at manageable levels. Next were the incubation sheds where chicks were hatched under warm lights and kept until old enough to blend into the farms flock, which consisted of many hundreds of birds who roamed all over the place but safely delivered themselves back to the hen-houses every evening for a secure nights roosting.  Between the incubation house and the shippon was the draught store, which was a concrete and brick tank which held the spent grain from Robinson’s Brewery’s various brewing processes which was delivered to the farm in 10 ton loads, shovelled off the wagon into the tank and allowed to drain of its brewing liquids.  It had a lovely beery smell to it and the cows went mad for it at milking time and it probably weaned me on to the deadly nectar but I never cared too much for Robbies.

All the way down the eastern side was the shippon or milking parlour, divided into six sections with eight stalls in each.  At the front of each section was a narrow corridor where in the winter the hay from the barns above could be thrown down and distributed to the cows during the winter months, then there was an iron railing to which the cow was chained during milking incorporating a drinking bowl fed from mains water. At the end of each stall was a channel 150mm deep and 900mm wide into which the cow disgorged its urine and faeces during this very sensual milking process and which liberally splashed and slapped us as we went ahead with our duties.  After each milking this depression was cleaned out with shovel and wheelbarrow and tipped on the middern at the back of the shippon, from where every springtime it was dug up and put into a horse drawn muck spreader and put out on the fields.

The southern side consisted of more barns, stables for the horses and a workshop and forge for the travelling farrier.  At the back of this southern side was a large roofed shed for storing various pieces of horse drawn equipment like the muck spreader, the mowing machine, binders, rakes and various carts.  At the south side of the house was the hen accomodation with its houses and compounds all very securely fenced off from Mr Fox.  Therefore a quick trip round the whole of this kept me occupied until the snoring stopped as if on a time switch and the house returned to each and everyones duties.

I am now afraid I will have to again break off from my scribbling, it is 2.30pm and Manchester United are kicking off in the League Cup Final against Aston Villa at 3.00pm and I still have to put the crust on my steak and kidney pie which we are having for dinner later on.  Such are the duties of an apprentice writer but my wife does really appreciate me for my thoughtfulness.

These cold, wet February weeks makes you yearn for the sun and long bright days.  When I was young, myself and my brother Kevin were always packed off to the farm, my paternal grandfather’s place in Denton, just to the west of Manchester.  These summer holidays were in many respects, the highlight of my year.

We used to visit the farm often during the year.  Nearly every Sunday we would catch the 53 bus to the Belle Vue Lake Hotel on the corner of Hyde Road and Kirkmanshulme Lane and take the 210 trolley bus to Crown Point or the 125 express to the Angel pub and walk the mile to the farm.  Every Sunday we sat down to a massive roast of meat.  My grandfather at the head of the table, sat in his large carver chair, moustache bristling as he sharpened the large carving knife on his steel.  The table would sit about 24 around it on Christmas Day and the knife appeared as long as the table to the seven or eight year old me.

The farmhouse was unbelievably large, or so it seemed to us, weaned as we were, in our little terrace house in Longsight. It was built in about 1800 along with the main farm buildings.  The rooms were massive with a large stone floored kitchen and a utility room, where cleaning equipment was kept and chickens and turkeys were left to bleed after being killed, a larder where all sorts of other foods were kept, a sunken creamery where dairy products and fresh food was stored on stone slabs in its very cool atmosphere and at the back of the kitchen was the servants staircase leading to the upstairs rooms.  A door led off into the living room of the house with its massive table and sideboards, two settle beds, a large fireplace and fitted wooden cupboards on two sides.  Through that room and into the main hall with its grandfather clock, a staircase down to some cellars and the main wide staircase up to the bedrooms.  Off this hall there was a large library and games room and the front sitting room of the house where we watched the coronation in 1953 of the new Queen on a 12″ Bush television which took about ten minutes  to warm up.  Upstairs there were at least six large bedrooms and a large bathroom with a huge cast iron bath, but no toilet.  Until I was about 15 the whole sanitary arrangement of the house was managed by an outside lavatory which was controlled by liberal doses of Jeyes Fluid and every so often cleaned out by some unfortunate.  The nightly evacuations being managed by vitreous enamelled clay chamber pots which were emptied daily by one of the women who worked in the house.  They must have lived in houses with flushing toilets and must have found this archaic arrangement strange for an employers abode.

The house was run by my grandmother who had three women helping her.  Bread was baked everyday and each day there was a large roast of either pork, beef lamb or chicken, all cooked on a large coal fired Aga cooker, the fire of which never went out.  If chicken was on the menu my grandfather or my aunty Betty would walk out into the yard and pick one of the hundreds that were walking about the place.  Betty’s method of execution was to swing the bird by its neck until it broke, hanging it up and slitting its throat. My grandfather caught the bird in the same way and stuck a penknife down its throat.  All the birds were hung in the cool utility room and the blood collected as they continued their deathly flutters and given to the pigs.  In fact all food waste went to the pigs and Betty used to collect more on her daily milk round.  There was never any shopping to do, most of what we ate came from the farm, the rest was delivered as if by magic.  My grandmother rarely left the farmhouse, filling her day with baking, cooking, dressmaking and carpet manufacture.

The day started early, about 7.00am, in the summer, as we walked down the lane with Lassie, a Border collie, collecting the cows from the field.  Mainly Fresians, but always five or six Jersey cows for there special milk and cream.  This task was easy as the cows were more than willing to return to the shippon or milking parlour where they knew exactly which stall to enter.  The farm by this time consisted  of about 70 acres of good flat pasture and supported 40 cows.  The milking when I was very young was done by hand but in the early 1950s they had an Alfa Laval milking system installed which worked off compressed air powered by a generator.  This system filled airtight stainless steel buckets, which on completion of each beast were taken across to the main creamery and measured so that a record of each cow’s production could be kept.  The milk was then put into a refridgerated holding tank to be processed later.  By this time we were filling the float for it’s first round with crates of milk, cream, butter, eggs and orange juice.  My grandfather meanwhile prepared Merrylegs, a Shire horse , kitting it out with all the trappings of a workhorse, the head harness with bridle, noseband and bit, the horse collar and hames, backband, saddle girths and reins, breeches and breaststrap.

Merrylegs, a mare, was the favoured horse for this job as she was intelligent, docile and knew every house on the round.  My grandfather then backed Merrylegs into the shafts of the float, the chains were fastened to the collar and saddle, every fastening checked, the girths tightened, the reins threaded through  the front of the float, and we were off.  As we delivered milk to one house Merrylegs moved on to the next.  The round was in two halves, returning home at about 10.00am for some breakfast and reloading the float and setting of again until about 1.00pm with never any urgency but chatting and talking to people who were walking by.

Felix, a stallion, was also used if  Merrylegs was off colour or getting shoed but Betty found him skittish and difficult to handle.  Felix was my grandfather’s horse of choice, he never owned a car and if he needed to go into Denton on business Felix was harnessed up to a large hand-painted and sign-written dray with one axle and two  rubber wheels.  You climbed up three steps to stand in the well of the dray and there were seats down each side.  It was a fine sight sitting there as on an open-topped bus with Felix knocking sparks out of the road, as we galloped along, continually being reined in by the big strong arms of my grandfather.  Merrylegs was a big bay horse with white socks but Felix, a grey,  was massive.  Sitting on his back was like doing the splits.  He stood nearly 19 hands high (nearly 2 metres high at his withers) and had been bred from a line that had been in the family for over a 100 years.  Before the family went into general farming they just bred shire horses in the main for Robinson’s Brewery in Stockport.

Then to lunch where I could see no difference between the Sunday lunches and those we had during the week.  My grandfather sharpened his knife and cut off slabs of meat of whatever joint was served while the women served out the vegetables.  Everybody ate at the one table, the family and any visitors at one end and the five or six employees at the other and the conversation flowed.  This was always the main meal of the day.  There then followed two hours of siesta, where every one slept in their chairs round the table, except grandfather who slept on one of the settles.  Not a thing moved on the farm until 3.30pm, even the animals understood and I  slunk in and out of the buildings in a total state of ennui, driven out by the snoring and the absence of tiredness.

This is a nice place to finish for the day whilst those people sleep and we will continue the tale to-morrow when everybody is refreshed.

I refer to my previous blogs of On The Shit Heap posted 27 January 2010, Deriliction Of Duty on17 January 2010 and Small Town Ireland on 7 January 2010 and I have to say nothing has happened.  The status is still quo.

I wrote to the Planning Enforcement Officer at Roscommon County Council on 17 January 2010 telling them of the recent construction faults which are now appearing in our small estates infrastructure.  Explaining how the developer after 9 years still seems to be in breach of six planning conditions even though Ros Co Co in 2004 tried to solve the matter and I asked what were the Council’s plans for the future.

That was 39 days ago and no answer, not even an aknowledgement to say that my query was being dealt with.  So on 11 February 2010 I wrote to the County Manager asking him to intervene and put some spark into his Planning Department.  That was two weeks ago.  No aknowledgement-nothing!  Surely County Councils should be no different than any other business which turn round aknowledgements within two days.  What do I have to do for them to answer my problems, or perhaps this is not their reason for being; but their website says different.

“Roscommon County Council provides a variety of services, which impact the daily lives of those living in and visiting the county.  These vary from  essential services such as the provision of water and sewerage facilities, to those of a recreational nature such as libraries and the arts.”  Well that is what I am questioning or is it a boundary problem.  I have thought for a long time that Ros Co Co do not consider North Roscommon to be part of their gubernance but consider that possibly Sligo or any one in fact should take up the responsibility.  So here I am asking questions of obviously no one in particular and wondering if any one wherever he be can stand up and do something.  A little vague perhaps.

The Ros Co Co website lets me know that there are 702 of these fine procrastinators (one member of staff to every 77 of population.)  Surely any one of these 702, in 39 days, should have been able to put pen to paper and ally these two with a little mental effort.  Are all the County Councils in Ireland the same or do some of them perform or are they all tarred with the same brush as the rest of the public sector workers sitting in anonymous offices country wide, having thrown their dummies out of the pram at the last budget and now refusing to answer telephones or in fact do anything other than lift their arses off the chair at 5.00 or 5.30 and think about going home.

I awoke this morning to a pleasant surprise a chap called Jesse who often posts insightful comments on to my blog, came up with a good point. See my blog comments on yesterday’s Admitting Defeat. I immediately dashed off a letter to Pierse & Fitzgibbon, which I give below:-

Dear Sirs,

I acknowledge your rather shrewish letter of 17 February 2010 and note by your tone that you realised mankind had left this planet several years ago and that you now only write and speak to the inanimate.

Perhaps a little advice would do no harm here and it might help in your dealings with the lumps of stone that are scattered around.  Erratics we call them in Archaeology.

A friend of mine with experience in this field that we are mired in, wonders why this car reg. could not have been matched up sooner with my payment.

He goes on to say “Furthermore, to the best of my knowledge, we do not have more than five numerics in our reg. nos. They imply you imputted six.  Who did the systems analysis work here?  My point is, the fact that your payment was accepted on the net would seem to indicate that your reg. no. was validated.  It would be intetresting to see, if, in fact, you did key in the right data.”

Perhaps you might put it to eFlow that their system is flawed and needs replacing and also this piece of advice must be worth money, so how about paying my costs.

Yours Faithfully,

Paul Malpas.

We will see if anything will happen but I am definately going to send the file to the Ombudsman.  When I hear something, so will you.

To change tack, I have, for the last few days, been researching the life of a British soldier who served in the Army in the middle of the 19th century in India.  He was born in Ballygar in Galway in 1828 and made it through the Famine.  In 1847 aged 19 he enlisted in Warrington and joined the 29th Foot (Worcester regiment) and spent 12 years with them serving through the 2nd Sikh War in the Punjab and the Indian Mutiny in 1857-8.  Volunteered to join the 80th Foot when his first regiment went home and served eight years with them, serving all over central India and in the North East in Assam and Bhutan in the Himalayas and when they went home joined the 88th Foot (Connaught Rangers). where he spent his last two years in service, taking part in the Grand Durbar of 1866 at Agra before walking 500 miles to Rawalpindi to build a road. It was at Rawalpindi, which is at the other end of the Khyber Pass from Kabul that he developed presbyopia, which stops the eyes from focussing at near sight and he was discharged unfit for duty.  He was probably the fittest 40 year old around after all his endeavours.  He came home, married a girl from Williamstown, had five children and died at 51 years old and he his buried in Glenamaddy graveyard.  He packed a lot in and saw a lot more of the world than most in those pre-Ryanair days.  In all his 21 years in the Army he never rose beyond a private and never received a pension but he would have been a great man to sit and have a pint of Guiness with.

Another thought that struck me was that the British Army have not moved far in 143 years.  They are only 200 miles away now in Helmand Province in Afghanistan.

So here’s to you Bernard Lohan, may you forever rest in peace and may your god go with you