Poo!

Or muck, or manure, or droppings, or dollops - however you wish to view the substance.

We have located a source of poo. Other than the chickens, of course, who have been providing copious poo for two years now and have done a sterling job (pardon the pun!) of making our home compost bin wilt down at a highly satisfactory rate. And you have to be careful where you chuck neat chicken poo as it is very strong and not all our plants would appreciate the acid burns.

So it's ridiculous how something like finding another source of poo can make you feel wildly happy and at one with the world. Our friend, Jean, has a friend called Sue, who has a horse called Dennis, who is liveried (is that the correct term? I don't know - it's a long time since I rode a horse) at a stables way up high on the Downs. And where there's horses, there's poo.

'Come and take as much as you like!' we were told.

So yesterday evening we took many empty sacks and a shovel and loaded up our car (sans its seats to give us more space) with poo from the stables. It was nice poo. Two years old, nicely rotted, full of worms. But when we took it to the allotment and spread it out, it didn't do very far.

'This is when we could do with a trailer,' said I. 'So we could get great wodges of poo in one hit.'
'I'd like a trailer,' said Andy. 'But where would we store it?'

This is the problem, you see. We are running out of space to do the things we want to do. By the time we've squeezed in our beehives times two, we're going to be full up. And we still want to do things like keep more poultry, maybe a goat or two. A couple of pigs. A cow.

And grow more veg so we can keep not only ourselves stocked up with food but more of our extended family, too. And I suspect that once we get going, we shall end up wanting a couple more hives.

So, pushing aside the frustration of not having enough space, we shall concentrate on collecting more poo via many mini-trips twixt stables and allotment. And make the most of what we have.
I had to nip to Sainsbugs early this morning to get cat food. Three hungry cats staring at you makes you do things like this.
'I can't believe you've run out of cat food,' said Tybalt, reproachfully.
'Me neither,' said I, reproached.
'What if we starve?' said Phoebe the Fat.
'I think that's highly unlikely,' I said.
Pandora declined to comment; she was too busy chewing a table leg.

So Andy dropped me off at Sainsbugs on his way to work. Actually, he dropped me in the middle of a three way set of traffic lights, which added a frisson of excitement to the morning. And because I made several other purchases and didn't want my knuckles dragging on the ground by the time I'd walked home with very heavy shopping bags I decided to catch the bus home.

There was only me and one other on the bus. And the driver, of course. So we got on, and sat, and waited for the bus to leave. The other person was a young girl. She sat at the back of the bus, plugged into her i-pod. And bearing in mind she was sitting as far away from me as she possibly could, I was able to hear her i-pod quite clearly. Which only went to prove my theory that in ten years time there will be a whole generation of people draining NHS resources with their self-inflicted hearing problems. But that's another blogsworth.

After 5 minutes, it became apparent the bus was going nowhere fast. I was okay, I had a newspaper to keep me occupied. But the young girl was getting tetchy.
'How long are we going to be sitting here?' she yelled down the length of the bus. I thought, I hope the driver doesn't think that was me shrieking like a common fish wife.
When no response came forth (perhaps the driver was i-podding,too) the girl got up and stomped to the front of the bus.

'How long before we leave?' she said.
'Well,' said the driver, 'there's a jam at the end of the bus lane consisting of four buses. As soon as they sort themselves out, we can get going.'
'Only I'm going to be late for work,' said the girl.
I thought, perhaps you could make a bit more time for your journey in the morning, thereby avoiding potential traffic stress. That's what I do. Factor in extra travel time. Ah, the youth of today. They could learn a lot from me.

The girl stomped back to her seat. The bus sat still for another five minutes. From the back of the bus there elicited a series of sighs and humphs growing ever more grumpy. The i-pod got louder.

And then off we went. The driver drove like a maniac. I stopped reading my paper because reading on a moving vehicle makes me nauseous. And then the bus stopped to pick up a man who, by the aroma of alcohol that followed him, was clearly more than a bit tipsy. He just about managed to state his destination, and then proceeded to pay his fare with a large collection of very small change, holding up the bus even longer.

I thought the girl was going to launch off her seat and clump him. However, she reigned herself in to a loud exclamation of 'OH MY GOD!'

I thought, I know what that girl needs. Poo, that's what she needs. She needs to get her wellies on, grab a shovel and spend an evening at a stables shovelling poo into bags, marvelling at its crumbly texture and the proliferance of worms and thinking how marvellous it will be for her vegetables.

It would have been nice to talk to her about these things. But something told me not to risk it.