Beautiful Rural Decay: Three Farm Photographs

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Tags: photographs, rural life, farming, England, countryside, shooting, UK, photography, decay, farms

Bullet Points: Three Days of Hunting

• Today I went to a public library and downloaded seven-hundred-odd meg of a Linux operating system to a memory stick while a lot of kids mucked about around me on the computers and when I got the memory stick home I discovered that I'd made a cock up of transferring the file and so the damn thing wouldn't burn to disc properly.
  

• I haven't eaten any rabbit today.

• I haven't gone shooting today.

• It's pouring down with rain here today.

• I did go shooting yesterday.

• I missed.

• Twice, I missed.

• I did find another puffball - but not, it seemed, before a whole lot of little burrowing insects had found it first.

• I did see an adorable baby cow in a field and I wished I had my camera with me.

• I did also clamber through a small hole in a prickly hedge in a blind panic when a herd of cows surprised me by suddenly coming into the field where I was quietly stalking.

• They scare the crap out of me, cows, they really do.

• I went out shooting three days ago and I did get a rabbit (after a particularly satisfying bit of stalking and shooting the complexity of which I'm afraid I lack the stamina to describe right now) and I cooked it with rice, veg and some Saffron I found in the cupboard and, afterwards - although I scoffed the lot of course - I did slightly wish I hadn't put the Saffron in since I'd forgotten that, as well as the nice colour that's produced by the addition of this stuff to food it also adds the taste of Saffron as well and that, I discovered, is a taste I'm not that keen on.

• Hopefully, tomorrow, it won't rain.
  

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Tags: hunting, rabbits, shooting, cooking, rural life, England, Humor

Air Rifle Fieldcraft: Breathing and Shooting

I took what felt to me to be a 'good shot' a few days ago. It was late afternoon and I'd just spent a while leaning up against a fence post and watching as the wood-pigeons came home to roost. I'd got up and walked across one field - patting a passing Labrador on the way - and then through a gate and down along the side of another. As I walked, I found that I was looking through a gap in the hedge at the bottom of the field at the land stretched out beyond and, squinting a little, I noticed that just visible in the green of the distant grass were two tiny patches of grey-brown.

I stepped sideways so that one clump of the old hedge would shield me from sight and kept on walking. There was a dip in the ground over the last dozen yards so I ducked down into this cover, dropped into a semi-crawl on my hands and knees, and managed to get to within ten yards of the hedge without the rabbits - perhaps another fifteen yards beyond in the next field - being able to see me.

Lying flat and raising the scope I saw that my approach hadn't gone completely unnoticed as the rabbits were sitting quite still and alert, holding their heads up high above the grass to look around.

I could have snatched at the shot but I decided - in the hope that an accurate shot in a few seconds time might yeild more than a quick but wobbly one right then - to take a moment or two and steady my breathing.

Looking through the scope I watched as, with each exhalation, the falling pressure of my breath lessened the push of my shoulder against the rifle stock and caused the cross-hairs to rise on the target. The sights climbed with my out-going breath and reached their peak in the momentary pause before the next inhalation which, increasing my shoulder pressure, would again force the reticule down.

In the cycle of two breaths I made tiny adjustments to my support of the rifle so that the peak of the sight's climb on the next exhalation would hopefully leave it paused - in the stillness before the next breath - on the head-shot aim-point just back from the eye and beneath the ear of the still-motionless rabbit. As my breath left me and the sight rose I tightened my squeeze on the trigger; the shot gave out much as I'd wished and the rabbit disappeared.

I scrambled through a gap in the hedge and made for the place where the rabbit had been and found it, to my surprise, head-shot and dead right there. I stood for a minute or so almost baffled at how well the shot had gone and pleased that, once again, I'd managed to get some food for the next few days.

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Tags: stalking, rabbits, scope, fieldcraft, hunting, shooting, air rifles, photography, rural, England

Hubert's Cookery Tips: Cooking Rabbit with Olive Oil?

I'm no gourmet; I don't haunt delicatessens in search of edible exotica or loiter in puddles of my own drool beside the doorways of fancy restaurants. I don't really do posh nosh.

I do, however, regularly buy olive oil and, when I can afford it, I'll spend extra to get a bottle of oil that has a bit of taste to it. The furthest down the 'extra' road I ever got was a bottle of Nunez De Prado.

I came across it because I'd spent most of a day walking around the giant halls of the Tate Modern gallery in London and I was knackered, blitzed with high culture and very hungry. Wildly against my better judgement and heedless of the real state of my bank account, I decided - the hell with frugality! - to have a snack in the Tate's own swish restaurant.

I ordered the cheapest thing I could find and a devastatingly stylish waiter appeared bearing a tiny plate which was artfully adorned with one pink, glassy rectangular block (which turned out to be pressed hock of ham), one purple blob (a beetroot puree of some kind), a hand-hewn chunk of bread, a small pile of sea-salt flakes - and a circular pool of pale green oil.

All of these peculiar components turned out to be individually delicious but the star was - to my surprise - the oil: it was just unbelievably rich, complex and delicious. I was astounded; I had no idea that a simple thing like olive oil could get so good. I consulted the menu again: "...Nunez De Prado Oil". O.K, then.

When I got home I tracked down a supplier on the net, bought a bottle straight away and, for a few months after it arrived, every salad I ate was a feast and every dull boiled bit of veg - when garnished with a few drops of this stuff - positively shone on the palate! It was wonderful stuff.

It ran out, of course, and, because it's about twelve quid a bottle (about a fifth of my weekly income right now) I didn't buy another one. I did carry on using olive oil for almost everything I cooked, though - only I'd use Tesco 'Extra Virgin' at about a tenth of the cost.

This brings me - finally - to rabbit.

For months now I've been cooking rabbit with olive oil and I realised - yesterday - that I have finally developed an opinion regarding the merits of this which I am in a position to share with the readers of this blog. It's this:

Don't cook rabbit with olive oil.

Why not?

Well, even basic olive oil, I've decided, is just way too strong for rabbit. Rabbit - I've finally understood - is a delicately flavoured meat and a feisty, noticable oil like this just gets in the way, interferes with, clashes with the flavour of the meat - and then hangs around afterwards.

It's just not good.

I'd been suspecting this for a while but, since I'm a bit slow on the uptake - in this as in most things - it's taken a while for it to percolate through my bonce that something might be amiss in the kitchen. The last rabbit I got, by way of experiment, I cooked with sunflower oil only - and it was a huge improvement: there seemed to be space, this time, for the flavour of the meat to sit with the thyme and the rosemary; it was altogether fresher and less cloying than when cooked with olive oil.

Well, yes - that's quite enough Fanny Cradock impersonations for now, I think. Back to shooting stuff.
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Tags: Cookery, Rabbit, Olive oil, food cookery, game, food

Puffballs and the Scope again...

Two days ago, after missing a couple of rabbits and feeling thoroughly fed up with my skills using open sights, I found a puffball mushroom in the fields and carried it home. It's very odd and entertaining to cut one of these things up and include it in the makings of a meal - like cooking with expanded polystyrene:


The pasta dinner that it provided me with, however, was tasty and very welcome - the cooked puffball having a pleasant texture and a creamy, buttery flavour:

Today, I bolted the scope to the Weihrauch again, zeroed it with an ease that surprised me and - wincing at the extra weight on my still-painful, bike-fall-knackered wrist - from an impossibly uncomfortable half-crouching position behind a willow tree at the edge of an old damson grove, took my first rabbit for a month with a head-shot at fifteen yards.

I'm cooking it in accordance with the 'use what's in the cupboard' recipe so, today, that means with rice, the last of the puffball, cabbage, carrots and onion - plus thyme and rosemary from the windowbox. It's bubbling away on the stove behind me as I write.

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Tags: Cooking Rabbit, Puffball, Mushrooms, Shooting, Weihrauch, Hunting

Back in the fields again.

I've not been out to the fields since I hurt myself a week ago falling off my bike. I've spent the time since then slapping antiseptic and sticky dressings on my knee, palms and elbow and trying to get a little flexibility back into my wrist. My knee is still painful but this evening I was so beside myself with restless, furious cabin-fever that I snatched up my gun and army jacket and set out anyway.

I took a few pictures of the motorway, climbed a stile into the fields, dodged a herd of over-curious cows - and then spent a beautiful couple of hours reacquainting myself with this place that, to my surprise, I find I've so keenly missed.

Paths that I walked every day and swiped clear with my knife are now darned across with thick ropes of new bramble; the summer growth has been so strong that I twice came into clearings and was each time startled, for a moment, at not recognising places that I know like my own home; fields that were waist high are now mown into lawns; fields that were flat are now knee-high tangles of dandelion and lush, green grass. Can it only have been a week?

I flopped on the ground - not caring that I'd frightened every rabbit for a hundred yards - and just lay there with my chin propped on my rifle butt, drinking in the setting sun, the view of the fields and the peace.

I came home - darkness falling - empty handed, caring not a damn.

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Tags: Hunting, rabbits

Pike Tales

A reader recently posted a comment on a post of mine about fishing which asked: How was the pike by the way?

Well, since you ask, the Pike was pretty good, thanks! As I recall, I filleted it, coated the produced steaks with a little seasoned flour, pan-fried them a nice golden brown and then ate them with a squeeze of lemon. It was very tasty. There's a nice bit in Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's River Cottage Fish Bookwhere he says something like, 'you want to know what Pike tastes like? Well, it's not like chicken and beyond that, I'm not going to tell you - you'll just have to catch one and find out for yourself'.

I agree that landing one and cooking it is the best way to find out, but I think I can say a little more than Mr. Fearnley-Whittingstall about this. It's an interesting fish to eat; the flesh is very firm and white - far more like Tuna than it is like Cod, say - and it has a pleasant flavour all its own; one that's neither very delicate nor overwhelming. It's certainly not a 'muddy' taste - though I've never eaten a lake-caught Pike and I couldn't vouch for them. I've caught all the Pike I've ever eaten from a clean, fast-flowing local river which rises from its source about ten miles away from where I live and passes through no cities or sites of industry on its way to the place where I fish. I'm sure you can catch Pike in English canals but I've never pulled a fish out of a canal and then scoffed it myself; what that would taste like I've no idea.

Filleting Pike is rather tricky. Fearnley-Whittingstall suggests that one way around this is just to cook it with the bones in - steaming or roasting - and then separate the bones out on the plate as you eat. I have tried this and it's perfectly OK; the bones are big and easy to spot - but it is still a tad fiddly.

There are many helpful videos on YouTube about filleting Pike (along with countless unhelpful ones, of course); one of the best I found that helped me navigate the removal of the fiendish Y-Bones is this one:



This gentleman is filleting a medium-sized Pike but they can, I'm here to testify, grow to truly terrifying dimensions. I was fishing in a deep-water section of another local river last year - just alongside a wide bridge - when my line was abruptly taken out from close to the bank to mid-stream in what seemed like a fraction of a second by an extraordinary force. I was very taken aback - and probably yelped a fair bit - but I did manage to hang on to the rod and the very strong plaited braid I was using didn't break either. The line soon came back to the river bank and then there glided in front of me, just beneath the water and clearly visible, a glaring, furious, monstrous animal I would swear was the size of a fairly generous, full-grown Labrador.

Happily, the fish then prompty spat out the lure and swam away to leave me shaking with shock and relief on the river bank. Pike become too tough to make good eating, so I gather, when they get over five pounds in weight and so I've no wish at all to ever catch one that's larger than that. That one - though fishermen's tales must be taken with a little salt I suppose, my own included - was certainly a shade over five pounds.
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Tags: Pike, fishing, cooking, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, River Cottage Fish Book

The Karma of Hubert? On PETA, Suicide Food, the Cathars and Road Rash

In the turbulent wake of 'Flygate', Obama's doubtless illegal act of war against the species Musca domestica, I was following links from the always mind-boggling PETA site when I came across a blog called "Suicide Food" which I read for a while with some enjoyment.

The blog's premiss is a good one and it mines its niche with a single-minded diligence that lazy bloggers such as myself can only admire. It's an attack on one single strand of anthropomorphised advertising: the representation of animals as desiring their own consumption.

I find the blog thought-provoking, amusing and just-plain-wrong in about equal measure. The post about the high-kicking barbeque pig is a good example. It is a dumb and tasteless ad - fair enough - but the discussion at once introduces what seems to be the central motif of a school of ethical thought that's all over the animal rights scene like a rash: 'how can you not feel tainted just by witnessing this?' Ethics understood as the maintenance, at all costs, of the image of oneself as an ethically pure agent - untainted by the sinfulness at large in the soiled world beyond the realm of the pure.

I do find this point of view tremendously interesting and so I at once lurched off, after reading the blog, into writing a near dissertation-length post about 'Quasi-Buddhist Pelagian Dualism and the rise of the New Perfecti'

Realising, after about two thousand words, that I didn't have a clue what I was going on about, I hit, 'Save as Draft' instead of 'Post'. (A score of academics will, I'm sure, construct distinguished careers around the imagined contents of the 'Lost Post of Hubert on the Digital Cathars'. Oh well, what can you do? Those guys have got to make a living too, I suppose...).

Anthropomorphising animals is a thoroughly bad thing? Yeah, well, probably it is.

I was riding home last night after a warm summer rain and, coming to the the bottom of a fast downhill bend, I saw approaching, fallen from a much-perched upon tree above, a wide carpet of slimy bird poo across the smooth tarmac path. That looks a bit slippy, I though, as I sped towards it, a less-skilled cyclist might well take a tumble on such a treacherous surface - and then, of course, promptly went arse over tit and converted much of myself into pizza.

I suppose I could write a post now called, The Karma of Hubert: Small Animals Fight Back! - and that might be funny.

Would it be tasteless anthropomorphism, though? Well, yes, maybe it would be. Can I get worked up about it? No, I don't really think I can right now.

Right now, anyway, I have to go and change these damn band-aids...
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Tags: ethics, PETA, karma, suicide food, theology, philosophy

Habits of Hubert: W.E Garrett Snuff

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This week, thanks to the kindness of a gentleman from Pittsburgh who frequents the Snuffhouse site, I was the happy recipient of some fine American snuff. And yes, it's bloody evil, much stronger than anything I've come across in the UK. Very like - in the case of the Scotch, the white can on the left - sticking nicotine-laden, hot-chilli barbecue seasoning up your hooter. To my surprise, I'm getting a taste for it.

Reading the can, I noticed that it says 'causes gum disease and tooth loss'. Baffled by this, I resorted to a well-known search engine and discovered that people in the States are in the habit of sticking this stuff in their gob. Extraordinary. Thinking about it,though, I guess it's no weirder that putting it up your nose. They call it 'dipping', apparently. Here's the proof:

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Tags: habits, snuff, addiction, dipping, garrett

How Do We Enjoy a Fish?

I caught this Pike last year. It wasn't the first Pike I ever caught, but it was the first Pike I ever landed, took home, cooked and ate.

The first Pike I ever caught I was just too astounded by the sheer enormity of having caught an animal so fierce and so beautiful that I just stood there on the riverbank, transfixed, gaping at it like a fool as it tugged on the line in the water at my feet. A few seconds passed like this as I wrestled with the shock of its beauty and the seeming sacrilege of my plans for it - and then it spat out the spinner and surged away to disappear into the waving green weeds downstream.

The first Pike that I landed - the fish in the photograph above - was, if anything, even more striking than the first. I'd gone out late in the day at the end of Autumn - dusk was becoming darkness and dense mists were rising from the floodplain fields behind me. The first cast of a red 'Flying C' lure produced an explosion at the bend of the river before me and this tremendous fish leapt out of the water and started to thrash at the line. Despite my shock, I landed it quickly and, as I say, killed it, took it home, cooked it and ate it.

Now I'm aware that I'm nervous writing this because in England at the moment, we don't really have a fishing culture that supports pulling fish out of rivers and then eating them. In England, by far the dominant notion of what you should do if you catch a Pike, say, is to lay it carefully on a mat, unhook the lure or deadbait that you used to catch it with, weight it, pose with it while an accomplice takes a photograph of you holding it - and then return it safely to the water.

This is the procedure for fishing understood as a 'sport' and there is, at the moment - and Izaak Walton would doubtless be amazed, but it's true nonetheless - almost no popular way in England of understanding what the word 'fishing' might refer to if it doesn't mean this. Catch and release: that's fishing . Coarse fish - Perch, Carp, Pike, Chub and the like - are almost universally caught, admired, weighed, photographed - and then put back in the water. That's what 'fishing' means here.

So there's been a very heated argument over the last few years - in on-line fishing forums and the sport-fishing press - that's been sparked almost entirely due to the influx into the country, temporarily or otherwise, of fishing folk from the rest of Europe. In most parts of mainland Europe, English 'sport' fishers have discovered to their dismay, the popular culture certainly does support the idea that 'trying to get some food' is one of the obvious, commonplace reasons why a person might take to the riverbank with a fishing pole.

Importing this approach into England, however, where the popular culture is very different as regards conventions on the riverbank, has proved far from simple and has sparked a furious series of arguments.

Certainly, a part of the heat has been generated by a number of Central European people who've been caught fishing in England without a Rod Licence. Scores of English nationals go fishing without a rod license (they're 25 quid a year and that's certainly been enough to prevent me getting one in the recent weeks since the season opened) and this is a matter for official censure and public disapproval - but a special fury seems to have been reserved for immigrants who have the temerity to behave as many UK citizens ordinarily do. People have been very cross about this - but it still hasn't been the big issue.

The big issue has been, I'd say, the question of the clash of cultures as regards the proper aim of a fishing expedition: do you go fishing in order to get photographs - or do you go to get food?

It's been very interesting to read the forums on this matter. Those whose fishing pleasure is organised around the 'sport' fishing model seem to be genuinely astonished and outraged with those whose enjoyment is organised a different way - and, interestingly, vice-versa. I read a fine post by a Scot who was treating the dominant English mode of fishing-enjoyment, sport fishing, with absolute contempt, "pulling them out of the water just to have a wee look at them!" - he was disgusted with the idea.

It seems to be that if you're a member of a group who are organised under one mode of enjoyment - 'fish are for food' or 'fish are for photos' - then it's baffling and infuriating to meet members of a group whose enjoyment is organised differently. If your group, say, enjoys a caught fish only with the eye, then meeting members of a group who enjoy them with the mouth as well seems to inspire a furiously disgusted revulsion.

So, I'm nervous admitting that I'm personally a member of the 'mouth clan': I enjoy eating fish that I've caught in the river.

It seems to be very difficult for different modes of enjoyment to exist together happily. It looks as though 'enjoyment' is a way that we define ourselves on a shared level that's set very deep. It's tricky enough getting along with people who think differently about things, who have opinions that we don't share - but living alongside people who enjoy things differently is a far greater challenge.
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Tags: enjoyment, ethics, fishing, politics, culture clash, food, psychology