Mirabel plum delish

Does anyone know the English equivalent of the Spanish membrillo? Maybe it's fruit cheese, but that always sounds odd. But it's fruit and sugar (50/50) boiled well past the settting point for jam, until it's gloopy and leaving a trail like the parting of the Red Sea at the bottom of the pan. Whatever it is, I'd picked a heap of mirabels - cherry plums in English, corcodus in Romanian - and didn't really want jam. So I made this cheese wotsit, putting in a shiver of cinnamon, but only a hint. The resulting preserve was very good - solid enough to slice, really tangy, full of plummy flavour, aromatic and a lovely lingering taste. Highly recommended.

Two litres of cherry brandy

When the cherries were ripe, my neighbour Emilia came up to the house with a business-like glass bottle - the home-made wine making kind. She'd already picked the fruit off my trees, and now showed me how to make traditional cherry liqueur. Rinse fruit, remove stems and leaves, and stuff into bottle until crammed. Pour in sugar. Ram in cork and put bottle outside in sun for a week. Seven days later Emilia returned, and in the meantime I'd acquired half a litre of pure alcohol. Pour the sugary cherry juice through a funnel into a two-litre water bottle, top it up with the alcohol, screw the top on and bob's your second cousin. Delicious blood-coloured cherry brandy. Nothing like the muck you buy at Christmas - this is fruity, fresh, potent and utterly yummy.

Hobbs meets Smoke Alarm

After a nervous couple of minutes on all sides, Hobbs came to an arrangement with the chickens. If they squawked and ran when she bounced on them, they were fair game. Pom-Pom was a cert for this, but Smoke Alarm and Peachy were quick to point out to the cat that they were not to be trifled with. Fred tended to loom over Hobbs, being at least three times her height, and gave her a Look. She never bothered him, not even trying to filch a bit of bread from him. (Hobbs likes bread, and chocolate cake.)

Building to a climax

Into the autumn Bogdan and his crew were working like nutters getting the kitchen done, the stairwell plastered and the study given board walls and plasterboard ceiling. Actually getting the stairwell done involved cutting through the reinforced concrete floor: fireworks when circular saw met steel mesh. Pretty. Plastering meant the water boiler could go in, and the washing machine. First hot shower? Nope. Boiler not working. Turned out there was a leak under the floor so boiler was always on the boil but water was never more than tepid. Leak fixed, boiler boiled... hot shower. Utter, utter bliss.
In August the furniture and boxes finally arrived, after some narky phone calls to London and Bucharest. Not too much was broken despite the local carriers hurling boxes marked 'FRAGILE' from lorry to cart to stack in house. NB the Romanian word for fragile is fragil.
Bogdan tackled the stairs as a solo project and despite initial angst and much measuring and remeasuring, they went in sweet as silk, smooth as a nut, and at last I could trot up and down from kitchen to study without going outside. The cat designated them a play area. The bathroom ditto, except when the underfloor heating went in and on, when Hobbs learned that stretching out on the bathmat was a good plan.

Brazen, Peers

The sheep. Ah, the sheep. Five of them, belonging next door but believing my land, house, kitchen and vegetable matter was theirs by right. I've long given up trying to shoo them off, since giving them a fright made them run ten yards before stopping, turning, glaring and returning. I gave in and started offering them the discards of my veg, and tried them on banana peel. They loved it; fought over it. One of them is learning how to open the back door. Brazen, I call her, because she is. [Peers, because she does - under the bottom rail of the fence.] Brazen has already worked out the handle, but hasn't yet learned how to pull on it hard enough. Give it time.
Then there's the horses. Fana (down the hill) and Carina (up the hill)

are best friends and spent much of summer breaking out of their own paddocks to be with each other, often on neutral ground, which usually meant my patch. I gave them both their first taste of carrot - Fana's eyes almost popped out of her head with delight and surprise, and Carina was completely overcome. Neither needed to be asked twice, and one morning I opened the kitchen door to have both horses shove their heads into the house, sniffing out carrots, sugar lumps and other delights. If you know how to push horses backwards out of a doorway, let me know.

Black redstart baby

A Black Redstart had two broods in my house last summer - the first in May, another in July/August. There were so many holes in the attic that it was easy for her to flit in and out, and before I moved in she only had to contend with building noise downstairs. She didn't like it when anyone climbed a ladder and invaded her space, and would flit round the attic tutting furiously. Her first nest was on the north wall, propped on a beam; the second at the top of the king post in the roof. By the time her second brood was fledging, I'd moved in. One baby mucked up his first flight from the nest and had fluttered to the floor of my 'bedroom' - there being no floor/ceiling between it and the attic. The baby didn't have the oomph to fly out again, so for a week or ten days he was stuck in the room with me. I'd wake most mornings to find myself the object of a beady-eyed stare from a disapproving feathery face. As soon as I moved, he'd go all shy and scurry behind a bit of plasterboard leaning against the wall. If I lay very still with my eyes half-shut, mum would tut about, her mouth full of grubs and flies, until she felt safe to drop down, feed her chick, and zip out again. The persistence paid off. I'd been worried about finding a sad little body, but mum fed him until he was strong enough to fly up and out, and for the rest of the summer I saw him perched on top of the hayloft, happy as larry.

He was fully-grown before Hobbs arrived, and she hasn't yet caught a redstart, so with luck he survived to migrate south and will be back this summer.

Fried stake and chicken witters

Only a couple of weeks late, we moved in, with a working loo, basin, bath with shower, and sink - albeit only air mattresses and cold water. First purchases were a mini fridge and a camping stove, with which we cooked a three-course dinner for six, reasonably successfully. The big fridge and gas stove arrived but had to take up temporary residence in the dining room as the kitchen was still a long way from readiness. Next door's chickens were making their presence felt, with the cockerel Fred

and a wily hen, Smoke Alarm (she made a piercing noise like a smoke alarm battery going flat) leading the raids on my kitchen. Soon Mini Ha-Ha (two feathers for a tail), Ruby 1 & 2 (identical twins), Burnt Pan, Scorchmark, Parkin (ginger), Peachy (the peachiest arse ever seen on any hen) Pom-Pom (mad hair) and Sam Tyler (pretty boy bantam) were breakfast regulars and developed a taste for watermelon, overripe tomatoes and left-over biscuit dough.