First, harvest your bastards. Carefully. If you can find chainmail gloves, grab those. We have an abundance of bastards, also known as stinging nettles, in our sheep paddocks. When I was a novice country woman, I had no idea what they were until I attempted to pull up, bare-handed, a clump of what I thought were just weedy things. They are weedy things. But they are also nasty, stingy things. They have fine barbs which go for you and sting like fire. They are worse than triffids. As soon as I touched that first bastard I realised their evil. I did somehow know that in the event of an attack one should find a dock leaf and apply it. An old wives’ tale? Intensive research, in other words the internet, is divided on this matter. What really works is to stay away from the bastards.
So I decided to make nettle soup. Why? Because we are country dwellers and if you are to be a genuine country dweller you ought to go out into the country and forage for things. Also, have you seen the price of broccoli lately? Broccoli is horrible. It smells, when being cooked, like cat pee. It tastes, I imagine, like cat pee tastes, should one be mad enough to imbibe it. We call it the devil’s weed.
I decided to make nettle soup because Jeremy Clarkson made it, or rather got his chef to make it, on his telly farming show. It looked quite good. Also, anything free from the land must be a bonus – until you add up the cost of the good chicken stock, onions, celery, nutmeg and cream.
“What does it taste like?” said Greg. “Like soup,” I said.
The making of it cost about as much as a bowl of soup in some fancy pants restaurant. It looks like soup made from grass. It tasted rather good. As would any soup made from good chicken stock, cream, etc.
I was once persuaded to attend a foraging afternoon with the promise that this would be a pleasant experience. It wasn’t unpleasant. It was just very boring. We wandered about eating weeds, like bovines. Weeds are not pleasant to eat. A good thing did come out of this experience. It made you appreciate the fact that you were not born a cow.
On Sunday morning, Greg was woken to mooing. We don’t have any cattle nearby. So he thought he was dreaming. He drew the curtains. Outside the bedroom window were two enormous cows, happily gallivanting across the lawn. He woke me up and said, “There are cows in the garden!” I staggered awake, came to the window, and saw cow after enormous cow in the garden, eating the garden. They kept coming, leaping and eating. It was, I tell you, to use the most clichéd of journalistic tropes, like something out of a horror movie. Or a panto. Watch out, there’s a cow behind you! There is nothing quite as scary as a dozen enormous cows rushing towards you.
We had half of a somehow-escaped herd. Our neighbours Marie and Aaron had the other half in their orchard. Another neighbour, Tony, came down and phoned the cow farmer. It was agreed that we would get the escapees into one of our empty sheep paddocks. Marie and Aaron herded their lot up our drive.
What if they broke into a gallop and trampled us to death? It was a distinct possibility and would have given the local rag the most exciting headline since some busybody reported somebody smoking P in town. (They were vaping.)
We had to herd our fugitives from our garden first. Oh yeah, piece of cake. We know how to herd sheep and they can be a tricky enough proposition. It takes only one wayward one to lead all the others astray. Sheep herding is invariably accompanied by much shouting and swearing.
For a bunch of novices, to herd cows was akin to taking on an escaped tribe of enormous, drooling zombies. Greg armed himself with his trusty thistle grubber. I hid behind a tree. Somehow, the cows, which turned out to be placid and really quite nice, quietly meandered into the sheep paddock. A horror movie with a happy ending.
