Burra Maluca

Puffball season has begun!

I picked the first one this morning from just below the house, then we went up to the top terrace to clear two fallen trees that were blocking the path.



When it was clear, he went to see what was happening further along and found another one. When we got back home I picked some galega cabbage leaves to go with them.



And we had an exceedingly frugal meal of rice, lentils, meaty bits, puffball and galega. All supervised and approved of by the new forest-spirit dragon who showed up a couple of nights ago.

I'm not quite sure how I stumbled on it. Maybe I was watching too many videos of traditional Welsh songs, but this showed up as I was browsing youtube and, well, I couldn't resist seeing what it was all about...

Long before Shakespeare, there was Sumer Is Icumen In — the oldest surviving song in the English language with music and lyrics both intact. But beneath its melody lies something more surprising: a hidden medieval joke that later generations tried to censor.

This video unpacks the song’s origins, lyrics, and the strange sense of humour that connects us to people from the England of 800 years ago.  

Biscuits and gravy today, with galega cabbage, using rendered-out meaty bits instead of sausage.

It was the first chance I've had to test the teeny, tiny little wok I was given which is just the right size to make gravy for one. And the biscuits were cooked in the old stove-top oven that my son rescued out of a rubble pile for me.

Tereza Okava wrote:you could conceivably take a deep dive into the names of the letters (mostly tree names),

I think the link with tree names is mostly down to Robert Graves' imagination and forcing the narrative to fit his ideas by chopping things up, juggling them around and mis-translating them actually. But even so it's interesting!

I found this - DIY Kids Bow and Arrow Homemade from Nature

Or how about gathering local dye-plants and dying wool different colours to weave into your very own tartan?

Haggis making might be a step too far for kids. Or their parents...

The clean-up operation hadn't quite gone according to plan. I'd successfully hosed Mochyn down, then soaped him up and scrubbed the worst of the mud off him. I'd even rinsed him off. He'd been squealing in indignation all the while though, and I'd counteracted his objection by singing Calon Lân very badly at him, with slightly modified lyrics...

"Mochyn lân, yn llawn daioni..." I sang at him, rather hopefully, not to mention loudly and out of tune, in case cleaning him up and making him less smelly (he really did smell rather awful...) might make him become a good pig and not steal my artichokes. "Gofyn wyf am fochyn hapus, mochyn onest, mochyn lân." It was one of my favourite songs, and I'd adopted it as a sort of love song as it's all about how a pure heart is more valuable than the riches of the world. Or, in my modified version, how a clean pig might become a good pig and not an artichoke thief.

There had always been wild boar around the place, though they hadn't been too much of a problem since the fire and I'd become a bit lax about putting urine down along the boundaries to deter them. I hadn't expected to find one raiding my garden in broad daylight though! Cheeky thing.

Washing him had NOT made him happy though! As I'd lathered him up for round two he'd made a final, successful bid for freedom and shot out of the shower-room like a greased pig leaving me with soap in my eyes and unable to see which way he'd gone. I presumed out of the front door, which I'd left open as my hands had been rather full dealing with a smelly bundle of fury as I'd removed him from his new mud pit. Which was supposed to be my vegetable garden! I shut the door, wiped the soap from my eyes, and decided I should take a shower myself as I hadn't exactly got the through the ordeal smelling of roses...

As all the commotion died down, Rosa began to calm down a little and noticed all the springy things on the bed.

"What are they?" she asked, innocently.

"They are models of different wavelengths of light." Iggy explained. "Only they seem to be going in different directions, or something. We're trying to figure it out."

Rosa looked at them, and picked them up and looked again from different directions.

"Oh well some of them are S-twist and some are Z-twist."

"Pardon?" asked Iggy, who was quite bewildered that someone as young as Rosa and who wasn't exactly educated and in fact could barely even read would know something that sounded as intellectual as that.

"Look at those two brown ones - one twists one way and one twists the other!" she explained.

"I guess so..." Iggy agreed, going a bit cross-eyed as he studied them...

"It's a bit tricky to see with the springy things." Rosa admitted. "You can see right through them and it gets confusing because you end up not being able  to concentrate on the front slopey bits because you can still see the back ones..."

"Hang on a minute, I've got an idea!" she announced, and hopped off the bed and scurried over to her stash of fleece.



She grabbed a handful of white fleece, because she thought it would be easier to see the twist on white rather than black, and sprang back onto the bed. Though just before she jumped back up she thought she saw something hiding in the shadows under the bed. She put the idea out of her mind though as she wanted to demonstrate her spinning skills to the other dragons. It wasn't something they were usually interested in and it was nice to be able to share your interests and what you've been learning with your family.

"Look!" she said, as she took a pinch of the fleece and spun it in her fingers.

"You see - this is S-twist!"



Iggy stared at Rosa's freshly spun yarn but wasn't quite sure he understood. Yet. So he went off to research S-twist and Z-twist on my laptop.

Meanwhile Nigredo, my plushy raven, who tends to be drawn to shadows and those who lurk in them, also hopped down onto the floor and was peering under my bed.

Iggy found this diagram, which explained in one glance what Rosa had been talking about.



And then he took a closer look at Rosa's spun yarn and he began to be able to see the twist for himself. She was right - it was an S-twist!



Iggy picked up the brown springy thing he'd made and had a look at it, but was a still a bit confusing. Then he had an idea. It might be easier to see the twist if he slid it back over the broom handle. Rosa hopped off the bed again to go and fetch it. She sniffed. There seemed to be a rather unpleasant smell emanating from under the bed. It probably needed sweeping or something. The broom mostly gets used for making springy things these days after all...

She took the broom and helped Iggy slide his brown springy thing over the handle so it was easier to see the twist.



Iggy stared and stared.

Rosa sniffed. That smell seemed to be wafting up, and getting stronger by the minute. Nigredo braved the dust bunnies under my bed and went to investigate.

"I've got it!" declared Iggy. "It's a Z-twist! Look - if you imagine two lines drawn straight across the handle, one at the top of a twist and one at the bottom, it makes a Z shape!"



Rosa, however, had lost interest as somebody under the bed was making rude noises.

And she suspected it was Nigredo, the raven. Which led to a much more important question.

"Iggy," she asked, wrinkling her nose slightly. "Can birds fart?"

A few days later I'd gone outside again to see what was happening in the garden and check to see if the Jerusalem artichokes were ready to harvest, so the dragons took advantage of my absence to borrow my broom and Austin's electrical supplies to make up a few more models so they could get their heads around experiments to do and questions to ask Shiva next time they went off exploring the universe.

Roxa took some green-and-yellow wire and wrapped it round and round the broom handle.



She wanted to use this model to demonstrate a longer wavelength than the blue one, because green has a longer wavelength than blue, so she spread the coils out further apart, cut the wire, and slid the springy thing off the broom handle so they could compare the two models side by side.

Then Roxa and Iggy had a good look at the two models to see if there was anything interesting to be discovered.

"I think we must have put one of them the wrong way around" said Iggy. "The blue one has the loopy bits at the top on this side and on the bottom at the other, but the green-and-yellow one has the loopy bits on the bottom on this side and at the top on the other."

"I think you're right, Iggy. Let's turn one of them around so they go the same way."

And so they did. But it made no difference! And no matter which way they turned them around, they could never get the blue and the green-and-yellow springy things to turn the same way.

"Well that's funny." Roxa sighed "I wonder what could be happening?"



At this point I should probably point out that my dragons, being aspects of myself, are almost completely incapable of telling left from right. So some things are harder for them to 'see' than other things that most people might be able to understand straight away. And, also like me, they are ambidextrous. Which means they are just as likely to wind the wire one way around the broom handle as the other, pretty much at random. But I was out in the garden at the time. Getting very annoyed because I'd just caught somebody raiding my jerusalem artichoke patch and was busy chasing after them so I could teach them a lesson. So the dragons had to try to figure it out for themselves.

Roxa thought it might be related to the colour of the wire, so she tried with the brown wire. Which she wanted to have an even longer wavelength as brown is the closest colour she could find to red in Austin's stash of electrical supplies and red has the longest visible wavelength.



And then Iggy thought it might be down to who made the model, so he had a go with the brown wire too. That way they could compare the different coloured models with each other, and also the two brown models with each other.



And when they'd finished, they laid all the models out next to each other to compare. And this was the result.



"It looks to me," said Iggy "that it's not the colour but down to who winds them. Because the brown ones are different."

"But that can't be right!" insisted Roxa "Because I wound both the blue one and the green-and-yellow one and they go different ways."

But before they could solve the mystery Rosa turned up, looking very nervous.

"I think something terrible has happened!" she exclaimed. "Mum's been shouting at someone in the garden and now someone is squealing in terror and I think she's caught a thief. And she seems to be bringing him into the house. And now I can hear water running and I dread to think what's happening down there!"

The dragons all stopped what they were doing and listened anxiously as I carried a squealing, wriggling artichoke thief indoors, quietly cussing about him being a mochyn frwnt and dragged him forcibly into the shower room for a good clean up.

Ronaldo Montoya wrote:What wire gauge do you recommend? And material ?  

We used some that we happened to have around - 2mm plastic coated steel wire. I couldn't say that I recommend it, just that it worked. Personally I wouldn't choose plastic coated but it was what we had. And I suspect thicker would be better.

Ronaldo Montoya wrote:Do You think a rope tied to a Big tree would work?

~

We gave one of ours a wire to climb up towards a tree. It happily climbs right up it, then right up to the top of the tree too.

Here's one of my favourite ways to use the meatier scraps - pasta with a carbonara style sauce, green peppers, meaty scraps, parmesan and parsley.

Pure comfort food on a rainy day...