Luckily it wasn’t like this on Saturday when we barrelled over to Reaseheath College for a beginner’s course on keeping poultry. Living in the Greater Manchester urban sprawl certainly doesn’t have its advantages when you want to do outdoorsy things, which is why we travelled for an hour to sit in a classroom at Cheshire’s agricultural college to learn how to keep poultry, with a general focus on chickens.
There were twelve of us there, eager to learn. Two women already kept chickens and, as they reminded us throughout the day, knew pretty much all there was to know about the birds. Except where the nose and ears were, as I heard her asking while we were outside. We got to learn a lot over the course of five hours: housing, feeding, breeds. The instructor was an ex-farmer who had been drafted in to take the course and, unfortunately, it showed. His idea of how much food they needed (‘Oh, a kilo a day per bird should be ok’ – it should be 130g) was off, as was his vague notions about housing. Disease weren’t mentioned, except for a brief nod to Newcastle disease. His excuse was he liked classes to be informal, but I think his experience of hens was on a large scale where feeding is done by the bag, not the handful, and hens are left to get on with it, ill or not.
The best bit of the day was when we got to go outside and get down with the birds. While they don’t have a big poultry unit at the college they do have meerkats, a valuable addition to the average agriculture student’s knowledge base. Agnieszka was torn, therefore, between looking at the meerkats, and watching me chase scraggy arsed hens round a muddy plot.
Having never held a chicken before, let alone caught one, it was good experience as now I know I can do both. Whether I can wring its neck, should the time ever come, remains to be seen. What the day did teach us, was that we are capable of keeping them and I am really looking forward to getting our own for the yard, while I know Agnieszka is looking forward to me moving the hen house out of the front room to somewhere more suitable.
Cut to a second visit during the recent spell of crisp, cold weather. All 26 of the turbines were visible and we had a great walk up to the top of Knowl Hill where you could see the majority of the giant blades turning in the stiff breeze. It looked fantastic, like giants waving their arms about in a regular but slightly manic fashion. Standing underneath I wondered if, should one of the blades fall off (ok, so I think about things like that, get over it) would we be able to run out of the way quickly enough. At 40 metres long I doubt it. Let’s hope that never happens, otherwise the 40,000 houses this wind farm supplies will be affected.
In recent weeks attention has turned once again to the Russian gas producers and their ongoing spat with Ukraine over alleged stealing and non-payment of bills. In retaliation, Putin has thrown his dummy out of the pram and cut the supply to Ukraine. This has the knock-on effect of reducing supplies to other east European countries such as Bulgaria and Slovakia who rely on gas from Russia and whose access to it is via a pipeline that crosses Ukraine. The whole of Europe is now concerned they’ll be freezing over the next two months as power-mad short-arse Vladimir Putin shows what a mighty country Russia is and tries to improve his position by bullying neighbours and blackmailing them over gas.
If ever an event showed us it is time to look at more alternative sources of energy it is now. Stop using the excuse this technology is too expensive to invest in, you poured enough money into failing banks over the last months, and provide incentives in cleaner, greener energy that make it affordable. Then we can all do what everyone wants to but no-one dares – stick two fingers up to Putin.
That aside, we had the most wonderful break. We spent New Year’s Eve in a small and almost empty pub, sat by a log fire, playing dominoes and drinking real ale, while the hippy-rasta barman crocheted to pass the time and where, at midnight, six small rockets were set off. Once they’d exploded, the silence descended again, to bring in the new year as it has done for centuries.
On the Friday we woke to find a dusting of snow and drove the short distance to Ravenstonedale and followed a walk from the local paper, cut out by the landlady of the B&B. Although a gentle walk, it was made more difficult by the 44 gated stiles that we had to get through. Designed for people with very long legs and no bum or belly, they involved plenty of both stretching and breathing in. As we reached the halfway mark, we noticed a cloud bringing snow heading our way and I kept an eye on it nervously until I realised it wouldn’t overtake us and envelope us in a blizzard. 
Finally, on Saturday we headed home via Glenridding and a hike up towards Helvellyn. Bitterly cold in the wind, over paths covered in sheet ice, but terrific views. Slight nervousness when Agnieszka’s knee went, giving her another bruise to match the one she got from a tumble on a slippy path, but it seemed to be ok and we got back to the car park without further mishap.
Over Kirkstone Pass and through Windermere took us back to the motorway and it was dark before we reached the M6. A clear run and we were home in an hour and a half. As we approached the Manchester area, the light pollution was really obvious, especially after three nights of almost total darkness. The following day in Farnworth, the notion we were back in a city was reinforced by the piles of crap littering the streets, the graffiti and the track-suited inhabitants of our adopted town. Welcome home, to 2009.