Sherborne Times November 2022

It’s comforting to see the fieldfares arrive. Scandi-cool-cousins of the blackbird, their dead-car-battery-call rattles through the orchards, heralding the arrival of winter. With the newspapers these days reading more like a William Golding novel, it is reassuring to know that at least nature can be relied upon (please don’t make me admit the frailty of that fact). Late at night and weather permitting, I know that if I step outside I’ll hear the owls. I know that if I walk the dog early enough, I’ll be treated to a million glittering spiderwebs and that on my way I should always check the kerbside for toads.

We can find comfort in any number of corners. One such corner is 6 The Commons in Shaftesbury where Amalia Pothecary, James Osborn and their team at The Botanical Candle Co. handmake and sell blissfully fragranced natural candles in volumes that belie the diminutive size of their operation. Photographer Katharine Davies and our shiny new features writer Claire Bowman scoot eastward to find them in full flow.

Have a great month. Glen Cheyne, Editor glen@homegrown-media.co.uk

@sherbornetimes

Editorial and creative direction

Glen Cheyne

Andy Gerrard

Katharine Davies

Features

Claire Bowman

Editorial

Helen Brown

Jenny Dickinson

Elizabeth Watson

Print

Stephens & George

team

Barbara and David Elsmore

The Jackson Family

David and Susan Joby Mary and Roger Napper

Hayley Parks

Mark and Miranda Pender Claire Pilley

Joyce Sturgess Ionas Tsetikas

Paul Whybrew

Sherborne Times is printed on an FSC® and EU Ecolabel certified paper. It goes without saying that once thoroughly well read, this magazine is easily recycled and we actively encourage you to do so.

Whilst every care has been taken to ensure that the data in this publication is accurate, neither Sherborne Times nor its editorial contributors can accept, and hereby disclaim, any liability to any party to loss or damage caused by errors or omissions resulting from negligence, accident or any other cause. Sherborne Times does not officially endorse any advertising material included within this publication. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted in any form - electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise - without prior permission from Sherborne Times.

Elisabeth Bletsoe Sherborne Museum

Richard Bromell ASFAV Charterhouse Auctioneers and Valuers

Chris Bryer ReBorne Community Church

Mike Burks The Gardens Group

David Burnett The Dovecote Press

Paula Carnell

Cindy Chant Michela Chiappa

Paul Collins

David Copp Rosie Cunningham James Flynn Milborne Port Computers

Mat Follas Bramble Restaurant

Simon Ford Nico & Chrystall Goodden Andrew Griffin-Raphael Sherborne School

Wolfgang Grulke

Craig Hardaker Communifit

Angela Harding

Dawn Hart & Sandra Miller YogaSherborne/Wholistic Health

Andy Hastie Yeovil Cinematheque

Sarah Hitch

The Sanctuary Beauty Rooms & The Margaret Balfour Beauty Centre

James Hull The Story Pig

Richard Hopton Sherborne Literary Society

Lucy Jago

Naomi Laver The Lazy Barn

Lucy Lewis Dorset Mind

Peter Littlewood Young People’s Trust for the Environment

Chris Loder MP

Paul Maskell The Beat and Track

Gillian Nash

Paul Newman & Emma Tabor

Mark Newton-Clarke MA VetMB PhD MRCVS Newton Clarke Veterinary Partnership

George Norbert-Munns Stony Groves

John Osman Mogers Drewett Solicitors

Jan Pain Sherborne Scribblers

Emma Rhys-Thomas

The Art of Confidence

Mark Roca Sherborne Prep

Mark Salter CFP Fort Financial Planning

Anthony Sargent M.Phil., BVMS, MRCVS Kingston Vets

Jack Smith

The Green Restaurant

Val Stones

Joanna Weinberg Teals

Bernard White

The Sherborne Robert Woolner

ARTIST AT WORK

No:48 Robert Woolner, Flint, 2022

Imake paintings that aspire to be both quiet and contemplative. Abstraction provides a place where I am able to explore the layered nature of experience and find meaning in the manner and substance of paint and other materials. Flint is part of a recent series of paintings inspired by the small fossilised spherical sponges that I collect on my walks over the chalkland of Dorset. I am interested in surfaces and texture and ideas are often close at hand on the ground or on a wall. The act of working with mixed media can mirror the process of texture caused by age, wear and corrosion. I usually work in series, fascinated by the process of making and continuous struggle with chance and change, which permit me to think quickly. My media include canvas, board, card and texture paste often incorporating sand, stone and marble dust, oxides and other materials mixed with both oil and acrylic paint. Work accumulates slowly over time and may be worked on for over a year until no further changes can be made in my search for a complete and satisfying whole.

2015 ROH, photograph by Tristram Kenton

ON FILM

Andy Hastie, Yeovil Cinematheque

Cinematheque started its 41st season at a rush last month with three films, then this month… nothing! The Swan Theatre have two theatrical performances in November, from 14th - 19th there is Let It Be Me, followed by the Civil Players production of Lend Me a Tenor from 30th November - 3rd December. Both will be well worth investigating. As Cinematheque fits in around the Swan’s productions and rehearsals, our next showing is at the beginning of December, on the 7th, when we screen the muchpraised French film Petite Maman (2021).

This haunting, magical film is just the latest success (of so many!) for director and screenwriter Celine Sciamma, who has rightly become an internationally renowned figurehead in contemporary women’s cinema. Her films are intimate, relationship dramas of female experiences at different ages. Her debut Water Lilies (2008) follows three 15-year-old girls in a synchronised swimming team experiencing friendship, coming of age, first love and rivalry in contrasting ways. The follow-up Girlhood (2014) was her breakthrough into the mainstream. It is the story of black teenage girls living in a rough neighbourhood on the Paris outskirts, challenging conceptions of race, gender and class with characters who are generally unrepresented in French cinema. In 2016 she wrote the screenplay for Claude Barras’s animation My Life as a Courgette which won acclaim for its emotional tone, relating the back stories of children in an orphanage. The beautiful (and very well received at Cinematheque) Portrait of a Lady

on Fire (2019) followed, which concerns the affair between an 18th-century aristocrat, and the painter commissioned to paint her portrait.

At which point we arrive at Petite Maman, the story of 8-year-old Nellie, who worries that she didn’t say goodbye properly when her beloved grandmother dies. As her parents spend a few days packing up the woman’s belongings from her strange house in the woods, Nellie wanders off around where her mother played as a child. Here she meets a young girl, the same age as herself and sharing her mother’s name, who lives in a house rather similar to her grandmother’s. This quite profound, time-travelling mix of fairy-tale and a childhood ‘rites of passage’ journey, owes much to the Japanese anime genre, exploring the themes around overcoming barriers that grow between parents and children, memory and loss. ‘Superb...simple, elegant and very moving’ The Guardian. ‘Sublime...a sight to behold’ The Mirror. ‘Utterly spellbinding’ Mark Kermode.

Winning Best Foreign Language Film at the BAFTAs and the London Film Critics Circle Awards in 2022, Petite Maman is the perfect film to experience what Cinematheque has to offer. The Swan Theatre is a great venue for engrossing oneself in magical cinema with other like-minded people. Do come along as a guest, or think of becoming a member, with all details of our programme and dates on the website below. We’d love to see you.

cinematheque.org.uk swan-theatre.co.uk

Petite Maman

CONFESSIONS OF A THEATRE ADDICT

Rosie Cunningham

Juliet Stevenson stars in The Doctor, at the Duke of York’s Theatre until 11th December 2022. This is a really powerful story of Ruth Wolff, a doctor in a private hospital, whose patient is a fourteen-year-old girl dying from a botched home-administered abortion. She refuses a priest entry to her patient’s room to administer the last rites. The doctor has a duty of care and wants the patient to die peacefully but the priest has been asked by the girl’s parents to visit their daughter and save her soul. The doctor is white, female, and Jewish. The priest is

Image: Manuel Harlan

Catholic and black. Medicine versus God. It is not for the faint-hearted, and touches on many controversial subjects such as religion, racism, gender, and medical ethics. Embedded opinions are challenged, and sides are taken, demonstrated through naked ambition, politics, and heartfelt experience. The shifting sands of turmoil are exemplified by the slow ever-rotating stage, the pace of actors who enter and leave, and a lone drummer perched high up maintaining the tension with a constant staccato beat. Each actor is cast outside their identity, with women playing men and men as women, black actors play white and vice versa. This play, which was adapted from Arthur Schnitzler’s medical drama Professor Bernhardi, and directed by Robert Icke, is brave but also so rewarding. Stevenson demonstrates Wolff’s integrity, frustration but also obduracy in the face of a looming witch hunt and public hanging by social media which, as it gains momentum, is frankly terrifying. The ‘woke culture’ is lampooned by a representative on a talk show panel whose job titles get more and more obscure and ridiculous. When I left the theatre, I felt that I had been put through the wringer, but it was a brilliant experience.

Eureka Day, which had a limited run at the Old Vic and starred Helen Hunt, raised similar issues. Progressive parents of a primary school in California meet to discuss an outbreak of mumps at the school and clash over the MMR jab. Parents end up at loggerheads and accusations start to fly as ‘woke’ positions start to crumble. It was a tightly written gem of a play, written in 2018 by Jonathan Spector, with a sharp sense of the ridiculous.

I caught Stephen Sondheim’s musical, Into the Woods, at the Theatre Royal Bath after the original production was cancelled at London’s Old Vic due to co-director Terry Gilliam’s media bashing. This is a completely over-the-top, whacky retelling of well-known fairy tales, all with an unexpected twist, and the set design by Jon Bausor complements all that quirkiness. The giant is a baby, bits of whom somehow manage to squeeze on stage, Jack’s cow is adorable and cartoonish, Prince Charming has a wandering eye and is slightly too foppish, and the Wolf is rather lovely. There is a rumour that the production is coming to London soon. If so, pounce on it!

thedukeofyorks.com/the-doctor

NICHOLAS HELY HUTCHINSON

DREAM COUNTRY”

www.jerramgallery.com

THE JERRAM GALLERY

Half Moon Street, Sherborne, 01935 815261 Dorset DT9 3LN info@jerramgallery.com Tuesday – Saturday

– 30th November,

St. OSWALD’S BAY, TOWARDS LULWORTH

OIL

THE FADING WINTER LIGHT OIL

COUNTER CULTURE

Paul Maskell, The Beat and Track

No.15 Film and Television Soundtracks: What’s the Score?

Music, one way or another, creates atmosphere, feeling and emotion within the listener. This is no more evident than within film and television soundtracks where the accompanying music is used to heighten a scene, build tension or increase excitement. The soundtrack and score genres are increasingly popular but what’s the difference between the two? How are they used to best effect and how have they developed?

A film score is music specifically written to accompany a particular scene in a film or television programme to help solidify its impact. Years ago and in some instances even today, it was common practice to use ‘Temp’ tracks to create an eventual score for a film. This involves using an existing piece of music during the editing phase of film-making to use as a guideline for tempo and mood for a particular scene. Once happy with the ‘temp’ score the director will hand the reins over to the composer who will create an ‘original’ score to suit. This process can be very limiting for the composer and not surprisingly the final score can sound very similar to the ‘Temp’ score initially provided. One of the most obvious examples of this would be the Star Wars (main title) music composed by John Barry for the 1977 film of the same name. Performed by the London Symphony Orchestra it takes huge influence from the Erich Wolfgang Korngold penned score for the 1942 film Kings Row and Jupiter from Holst’s orchestral suite The Planets. Combine elements of both and you get the now world-famous theme to one of the most popular film franchises ever.

Blueee77/Shutterstock

It was the introduction of computers and synthesisers in music that revolutionised the art of scoring film. Hans Zimmer was one of the first to pioneer this technique and work by actually writing the music while watching the film and following prompt notes by the director. This process made it easier to achieve the director’s goal and also gave the composer more freedom to express the desired emotions in his/her own way. This process was less labour-intensive and gave a lot more flexibility to both composer and director. This way of working paved the way for the likes of AR Rahman, James Horner, Max Richter, Trent Reznor, Angelo Badalamenti and a whole slew of artists recording scores that not only help create a whole body of art in the film world but also stand alone as works of art on an individual scale.

Where a soundtrack will differ from a score will be in the actual composition of the ‘songs’ themselves. Most will have a traditional structure and a majority will have been written well before the film was even a consideration. These songs are pulled from history’s mammoth playlist to fit a scene and help build its emotion be it tension, excitement, melancholy or otherwise. Some great soundtracks have come from the films of Quentin Tarrantino where he used old, familiar, classic soul and funk tunes to create some iconic moments in film. The use of George Baker’s Little Green Bag to accompany the antiheroes of Reservoir Dogs as they walk down a street in slow motion. Also, maybe even more iconic, the use of Stuck in the Middle with You by Stealers Wheel to accompany the infamous torture scene. Other iconic moments in film accompanied by classic tracks would be Renton running through the Glasgow streets accompanied by Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life in Trainspotting, the use of Mad World by Tears for Fears (performed by Gary Jules) in Donnie Darko, the use of the piano section of Layla by Derek and the Dominos in the pink Cadillac scene in Goodfellas, the Cure and Nine Inch Nails in The Crow and the whole soundtrack to Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, Lost Highway, Baby Driver and High Fidelity.

There are so many combinations of songs and images which leave an enduring impact on us. Where a score sets the tone of a film and helps to emphasise a feeling or emotion, the job of a soundtrack is to make the film/scene instantly memorable and recognisable. Not unlike life itself, how many moments in your life have been soundtracked by the songs/bands of the time? What’s the soundtrack of your life?

thebeatandtrack.co.uk

ARTS AND CULTURE

EVOLVER MAGAZINE

Pick up your copy at arts venues, galleries, museums, art shops, cafés, libraries and tourist information centres (etc) throughout Dorset, Somerset, East Devon, West Wiltshire, Bristol and Bath

subscribe online at: evolver.org.uk

Every Monday & Thursday 1.30pm-4pm

Sherborne Indoor Short Mat Bowls West End Hall, Sherborne 01935 812329. All welcome

Every 1st Thursday 9.30am Netwalk for Business Owners & Entrepreneurs Pageant Gardens. @Netwalksherborne

Thursdays 7.30pm-9.30pm

St Michael’s Scottish Country Dance Club Davis Hall, West Camel. £2. 07972 125617 stmichaelsscdclub.org

Wednesday 2nd 3pm & 7pm

The Arts Society Sherborne Talk - Caravaggio: Rebel on the Run Digby Hall, Hound Street Free for members, £7 for non-members theartssocietysherborne.org/

Wednesday 2nd 7.30pm

Sunset Cafe Stompers Cheap St Church. £15 - bookings by email only raymondwood1949@gmail.com In aid of The Rendezvous.

Thursday 3rd 2pm

The Wessex Hillforts and

Habitats Project

Digby Memorial Hall, Digby Road Free to members of Sherborne Museum, £5 to visitors. Tea included.

Thursday 3rd 7pm

Workshop - Functional Medicine and Yoga Breathing Digby Memorial Hall Info: hello@yogasherborne.co.uk

Monday 7th - Sunday 13th 10am-12pm & 1pm-3pm (Wednesday 9th 7pm-9pm)

Loving Earth Exhibition Cheap Street Church. Colourful textile panels created by Quaker Arts Network highlighting the natural world and climate emergency. Free. Enquiries 07870 192599

Tuesday 8th 6.30pm for 7pm

Wild Light - Talk and Book Signing with Angela Harding The Butterfly Room, Castle Gardens. Tickets £5, from Winstone’s Books or shop.winstonebooks.co.uk

Tuesday 8th 8pm

Sherborne Historical Society Talk – Out of China: How the Chinese Ended the Era of Western Domination

Digby Hall, Hound Street Members free, visitors £5 sherbornehistoricalsociety.co.uk

Wednesday 9th 10.45am

Probus Talk – Sherborne Steam and Waterwheel Centre The Grange Hotel, Oborne New members always welcome. probus-sherborne.org.uk

Thursday 10th 2.30pm Sherborne & District Gardeners’ Association Talk - Care & Management of Trees & Shrubs Digby Hall, Hound Street Visitors £2. Info: 01935 389375

Saturday 12th 9.45am-12.30pm Craft Stalls and Bacon Baps Cheap Street Church Hall. In aid of CCLL Ukrainian Crisis Fund. ccllsherborneandyeovil@gmail.com

Thursday 17th 7.45pm

Leigh Talks! - Sun, Wind and Sea - Challenges and Opportunities for Energy Transition Leigh Village Hall DT9 6HL. Free entry.

Friday 18th 7pm for 7.30pm Adorned by NatureTalk with Wolfgang Grulke

Oborne Village Hall, Oborne DT9 4LA £10. Contact oborneevents@gmail.com (see article page 42)

Friday 18th 7.30pm

Opera Holloway – Opera Gala St Andrew’s Church, Yetminster 01935 873546. £12/£5 u18s/£30 family artsreach.co.uk

Saturday 19th 10am-12.30pm Books, Bric-a-Brac, Christmas Gift Sale St James Church, Longburton All proceeds to The Lily Foundation. Info: 01963 210486

Saturday 19th 10am-1pm (last repair 12.15pm)

Repair Cafe

Cheap Street Church Hall, Sherborne Bring household items to be repaired and avoid landfill. repaircafesherborne@ gmail.com or @repaircafesherborne

Sunday 20th 1.30pm-4.30pm

Sherborne Folk Band Workshop Digby Memorial Hall, Digby Rd sherbornefolkband.org 07527 508277

Sunday 20th 3pm

Wessex Strings Concert

Cheap Street Church. Tickets £10 from Winstone Books (cash only) or £12 on the door. 18-years & under free.

Tuesday 22nd 8pm

Talk - Early Modern Queens on Screen: Victors, Victims, Villains, Virgins & Viragoes Digby Hall, Hound Street. Members free, visitors £5. sherbornehistoricalsociety.co.uk

Wednesday 23rd 10.45am

Probus Talk - My Atomic National Service/My Real

National Service

The Grange Hotel, Oborne. New members always welcome. probus-sherborne.org.uk

Saturday 26th 10am-5pm

White Tara Day Oborne Village Hall, DT9 4LA centreforpuresound.org/events

Saturday 26th 7.30pm

Sherborne Chamber ChoirAve Maria Sherborne Abbey. Tickets sherbornechamberchoir.org.uk

Sunday 27th 2pm-4pm

Divine Union Soundbath Oborne Village Hall, DT9 4LA £15 advance bookings only 01935 389655 ahiahel@live.com

Wednesday 30th 7pm-9pm Wild: Tales from Early Medieval Britain – Talk and Book Signing with Amy Jeffs Digby Memorial Hall, Digby Road Tickets £10 (£9 members) from sherborneliterarysociety.com/events

Planning ahead

Saturday 3rd - Saturday 10th

December 10am-5pm Sherborne Christmas Tree Festival Cheap Street Church. Proceeds to Sherborne Food Bank and Sherborne Christians Against Poverty.

Sunday 4th December 10am-4pm Sherborne Festive Shopping Day Abbey church services, Christmas tree festival, music, bands & choirs, street entertainment, festive shops & stalls, Santa's grotto, children's competition,

Dorset Farmers' Market, parade & lighting the Christmas tree.

Monday 5th – Saturday 10th December 7.30pm

Amateur Players of SherborneBetrayal by Harold Pinter

Sherborne Studio Theatre, Marston Rd £10/£12 07786 070093 aps-sherborne.co.uk

Sport

Sherborne RFC

The Terrace Playing Fields

Men’s 1st XV (3pm KO)

Saturday 5th Newton Abbot (A)

Friday 11th North Petherton (H)

Saturday 26th Wellington (A)

Sherborne Football Club

The Terrace Playing Fields Men’s 1st XI (3pm KO)

Saturday 5th Torpoint (A)

Saturday 12th Saltash (H)

Saturday 19th Mousehole (H)

Saturday 26th Falmouth (A) listings@homegrown-media.co.uk

JOINED UP THINKING

For over 30 years, the future of Sherborne House has hung in the balance – a treasured Grade I listed mansion simply waiting to be brought back to life. With planning permission in place and a creative vision that will inspire the folk of Sherborne and beyond, I’m honoured to be part of the team of master craftspeople and engineers restoring our town’s glorious building. I’ve been on the project since February and work is certainly starting to ramp up. As a local resident myself, this extraordinary renovation project brings with it a lot of pride. I will get to see some of my handy-work daily – both from a distance and up close.

Having been a joiner for the best part of 35 years, I’ve worked on many old buildings across the globe. Most recently in New Zealand on a property about five times the size of Sherborne House – also destined to become an art gallery. But there’s something special about transforming something on your doorstep.

Grade I buildings are of special interest to the general

public but are absolutely thrilling as a tradesman. There is nothing quite like restoring an old building and picking apart its past to preserve for the future – all while saving the fragile fabric of the property.

We’ve met the challenge of making the structure secure, and now we are moving on towards rebuilding it, which in my mind is the best part. We’ll rebuild identically, not because it’s nice to build in the traditional style, but because we need the building to behave just like it was intended to and in line with its historic provenance.

Listed buildings are protected by law to prevent unauthorised changes being made to them. There are several different standards that must be met when dealing with the features on a listed building – from opting to repair instead of replacing features to documenting and photographing each step of the process to show you’ve honoured the visual and physical heritage.

When it comes to woodwork, both the interior and

Bernard White, Joiner

Image: Len Copland

exterior features of old properties often need restoring due to natural damage that’s occurred from daily life over the years. There are many challenges to look out for, but water damage ranks fairly highly. As wood is a naturally occurring material, it is quite porous and will take on water, causing it to swell, and then when it loses water, it causes cracks and warping.

We’re working from the top floor down at The Sherborne. The first step is to assess. We then repair where we can, to retain as much as possible from the historic building. The materials we use are ‘like for like’. We’ve kept the original pieces as far as we can, wherever we can. Unless it’s falling to pieces, we’re reusing it, scarfing new wood to the original – that’s the general rule. Some of the panelling is new, and that’s how it must be, but there’s no distressing as such to make it feel old. Rather we place the new beside the old and let the painters make a good job of blending it all together.

The first phase of work on the second floor has taken us about four months. The second floor is pretty much complete now in terms of joinery – the decorators have gallantly moved in. The paintwork is going to look stunning and it’s at that moment you get to see all your hard work pay off.

We’re currently on the first floor, which will take about the same time as the floor above. We’re in the midst of running services through the building, so the flooring cannot be fully put back, though our joinery team have repaired around 40 floorboards and laid down near to 300 in their original condition and position so far this year. Whilst we await the services, we’re concentrating on the historic panelling and the decorative cornice, and we’ll be doing the all-important windows shortly now that the scaffold is up.

The most intricate element so far has been repairing the original panelling, which had suffered a lot of

neglect and required a great deal of scarfing. In places right now, you can catch a glimpse of how dramatically changed Sherborne House will be after the restoration in its new life as The Sherborne. Beneath the centuries of life that unfolded within these walls, lies an extraordinary structural story.

We’ve uncovered a few little niceties, one being the fireplace on the first floor. We found that when we removed some of the jute around the fireplace, we discovered a mould underneath that had been covered up presumably not long after it had been built. We’ll never truly know why it was hidden, but fashions do change, so it could be that – the mystery is both a source of appeal and frustration.

Whilst working on the panels we discovered that they had in fact been reversed, and hessian had been placed over them. So, we took that off, which led us to realise how the room originally was, that being fantastic. It now looks a lot better than it did covered in hessian. We’ve put the panelling back just as we found it – reversed – to keep the history in line.

I’ve pretty much always worked on old buildings and just love them. They kind of fight back sometimes: things might crumble, features you think are sound turn out not to be, and many days require true ‘out of the box’ thinking. One of the biggest difficulties working on these kinds of buildings can be with the levels because nothing is level and ‘plumb’. You must take a look and manage it as you go, balancing it out by eye. Purists would probably put everything plumb and perfect but it’s horses for courses, and I personally enjoy keeping the character – and integrity.

Things never go to plan with buildings like this and that’s the thrill of it. thesherborne.uk

Join us on the first Wednesday of the month at 3pm and 7pm

Digby Hall, Hound Street

2nd November: Caravaggio’s Final Years - A Rebel on the Run

7th December: Toulouse Lautrec - The Golden Age of Cabaret NEW Programme can be seen at www.theartssocietysherborne.org

Come as a visitor or join now, gaining 2 months of free membership theartssocietysherborne.org

MARKET KNOWLEDGE

GEORGE NORBERT-MUNNS, STONY GROVES

Welcome to The Sherborne Market!

What brings you here?

Only being a stone’s throw from Sherborne, it’s a natural fit for us. The lovely people of Sherborne are a very welcoming bunch too.

Where have you travelled from?

Originally Christchurch, New Zealand, but we live in Stratton now – a little village northwest of Dorchester.

Tell us about what you’re selling?

We specialise in high-end food products, in particular, protected-status gourmet Kampot peppercorns from Cambodia, pink and smoked Himalayan salt from Pakistan, and fine loose-leaf caffeinated and herbal teas from Germany. We’re always working on bringing out new luxury products and are looking forward to launching some pretty special items next spring.

Where and when did it all begin?

My wife and I lived in Cambodia, Southeast Asia, for almost a decade. After leaving to start a family here in the UK, we wanted to keep a little part of it in our lives. One day we’d like to take our children there to see what we did in those years. During the Covid pandemic, my old business collapsed and I wanted to build something new, exciting and totally different from my previous interests in hospitality. After many, many ideas and months of research, we came to the conclusion that there was room for a high-end food business that would promote the world-famous incredible black, red, and white peppercorns of Cambodia. Now, after almost two years of selling at markets and food fairs, we’re taking a big leap into food festivals in Dorset, Devon, Hampshire

and further afield in 2023. It’s time to push the boat out and show the UK what Stony Groves is all about.

What do you enjoy most about selling at markets?

One of the most enjoyable parts of trading at markets is the people you meet and the ties that you create with both fellow traders and customers. In addition, it’s the responses from members of the public when they sample products and are blown away by the flavours and quality.

I think the most enjoyable part though is meeting people who already know about Kampot pepper and/or have been to Cambodia. They’re a real treat to serve as they always have the same passion for Kampot pepper that we do. They’ll usually buy some pepper too!

If you get the chance, which fellow stallholders here at Sherborne would you like to visit?

Elly Harvey Silver – her pieces are beautiful and go down a treat when returning home with gifts for my girls. Baycraft Studio – their steam-bent oak planters are lovely. Kat and Steve are pretty cool too.

Where can people find you on market day?

Opposite Looks Like a Right Lemon on Cheap Street. Look for ‘THE CHAMPAGNE OF PEPPER’. Sadly, we will only be at the November market as we’re going home to New Zealand for Christmas (the first time in four years). Don’t forget to pick up your Christmas gifts a bit earlier this year. If you are unable to make the Sherborne Market in November, then you can shop on our website – delivery is always included and we’re taking orders up until Thursday 1st December.

stonygroves.co.uk

OUR MAN IN WESTMINSTER

Chris Loder MP, Member of Parliament for West Dorset

Now, more than ever before, during this difficult period with the cost of living, we are seeing perhaps the greatest reality check on our food supply since the Second World War meaning we need to confront some of the concerning realities of our current land use policies that have implications for the future provision of produce given we only have a 60% self-sufficiency.

I am as passionate about the need to conserve and enhance the natural environment as anyone else. Indeed I always seek to take every opportunity to praise the work of West Dorset’s environmentally conscious farmers, many like Hollis Mead Dairy in my view are prime case studies on what productive, sustainable farming should look like.

We are heading for a conflict in the coming months – a conflict between the need to be more self-sufficient for food and the environmental agenda of re-wilding, carbon sequestration and solar energy provision – because our land can only be used for one. The unbelievable approval by Dorset Council of a 180-acre solar farm in Lillington on farmland has brought this into stark contrast.

We are seeing - not just in West Dorset - but across the whole of the UK, thousands of acres of productive farmland potentially being reverted to ‘rewilding’, being hidden beneath waves of solar panels, or removed from production by investment companies

to cover with plantations to offset carbon. That might sound good, but the situation we now face requires us to think about this again.

Should we be putting all our eggs in one basket? Much like the sudden push to switch over to electric cars. Although we are seeing real inroads in terms of setting up new charging points and infrastructure to accommodate them, is it really sustainable to base our transport network on electricity – a commodity that is notoriously difficult to store? Even battery storage would require vast quantities of lithium – a product often unscrupulously sourced at huge cost to the planet.

In Scotland alone, the percentage of forest cover is at 18% compared to 6% only a century ago, with the Scottish Government hoping to raise this to 21%. Similarly, the UK Government has hoped to increase English forest coverage by 2% before 2050. On paper, these are all easy pledges to get on board with and feel the right thing to do.

But that 2% equates to roughly another 2,600 square kilometres of land removed from food production. And, at the same time only 58% of English woodland is classed as under ‘sustainable management’. Much of the country’s current forestry is mono-cultured evergreens that harbour little biodiversity and I fear with such a drive towards carbon trading and offsetting, we will be inadvertently driving out natural flora and fauna that would normally thrive under traditional agricultural ecosystems.

Image: Len Copland

see the enhancement of our existing woodlands as a greater priority than further expanding the plantations, and to consider agriculture as a valid and necessary use of land, especially when we have only a 60% self-sufficiency of food. It is also important to remember that even tree planting schemes are ‘sequestering’ or storing carbon, not getting rid of it entirely.

There is a school of thought amongst some of the fringes of social media that traditional agricultural systems of livestock grazing for meat consumption are of detriment to the local environment and wider climate – and often drives the view that a vegan diet is better for the environment.

Some people are not aware that grassland also sequesters carbon, and does it more reliably, with 97% of carbon stored in the soil. This underground bank of carbon is 150% greater in temperate grassland ecosystems than that in temperate forests. When grassland is converted to cropland as would need to happen for us all to switch to a ‘plant-based’ diet, there is a 59% decline in soil carbon stocks. Even conversion to forestry would cause a 10% drop in soil carbon stocks. This should be a sobering statistic for anyone pushing for a plant-based diet on the grounds of climate.

This is an ongoing debate, but an issue we need to fully understand. Farmers will work within their means to enhance the sustainability of their farming model. But a crucial factor of sustainability is the ability for something to continue long-term, and to be financially and practically viable well into the future. Layer upon layer of bureaucracy and red tape is not sustainable. Disincentivising farmers from producing food in favour of tree plantations is not sustainable and removing thousands of acres of land per year from agricultural production is certainly not sustainable.

This is why I am taking the opportunity during the upcoming review of ELMS (the subsidy scheme replacing the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy) to consult farmers on their views, encouraging the Government to take heed of their insights which is mostly welcome, despite those pretending to know the farmers’ best interests disagreeing.

Finally, one of the most moving experiences you can have is to participate in the Remembrance Parade in front of Sherborne Abbey at 10.30am on Remembrance Sunday and attend the service in the Abbey Church that follows. If you can attend, please do.

chrisloder.co.uk

Clemmie Law, aged 8

Sherborne Prep

Clemmie was 9 months old when she started riding, her mum having safely strapped her into a little wicker basket saddle. 7 years on, she’s still going strong, now riding Rosie, her exracing pony and Reggie, whom she shares with her brother. It’s with Reggie that she has won most of her medals.

A unique and exciting element to Clemmie’s riding is her participation in Tetrathlon – a competition organised by The Pony Club comprising shooting, swimming, running and, of course, riding. Tetrathlon is a variant of, and major recruiting ground for, the Olympic Modern Pentathlon. Competitors progress through the levels with age and having turned 8, Clemmie will now be shooting with air pistols, running cross-country over 1000m and swimming as far as she can in 2 minutes. It’s a special kind of girl who receives a pistol for her 8th birthday!

Clemmie’s Cattistock Hunt Show Jumping Team took first place in the regional championships this year and has already qualified for next year’s event. Not one to rest on her laurels however, Clemmie is quite literally raising the bar and aiming to take on bigger jumps in 2023. She also helped the newly registered Sherborne Prep Show Jumping Team reach third place in their most recent competition.

Clemmie’s bedroom is proudly adorned with her pony’s winning sashes and rosettes. Another challenge for 2023 will be finding room for more!

pcuk.org

Children’s Book Review

The Very Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra by Tim Lihoreau and Philip Noyce, illustrated by Olga Baumert (DK Children 2022) £20 hardcover Sherborne Times reader offer price of £18 from Winstone’s Books

This excellent book is many things, all together. Firstly, it’s a picture storybook. Ava and Jayden hear sounds coming from a large, round building that looks like a birthday cake. They sneak inside and find a musician, playing the violin. At this point, the book turns into a fascinating reference book and tells us all about the violin and the piece of music being played. Then, you can press the page and hear the music, actually playing from the

book! Through their journey, Ava and Jayden find out about ten different instruments and ten different places and you get to hear ten beautiful pieces of music. It’s an inventive and beautifully illustrated book that can be enjoyed by children of all ages, parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles and anyone with even the slightest interest in music.

shop.winstonebooks.co.uk

Hazel Roadnight, Winstone’s Books

THE TABLE Michela Chiappa

FISH PIES IN A MUG

Iam always trying to find creative ways to cook fish as it’s not always a favourite for the kids but is so good for them. My family love these fish pies in mugs; they adore the novelty of having their own mug and it’s a really creative and simple way to cook – you can even get the kids to help you cut the pastry. I find getting the children to help in the kitchen will also help them explore new flavours and meals. Fish pie is one of my personal favourite dishes but a traditional method can be rather time intensive whereas this recipe can be prepared in 10 mins from start to finish. A lovely autumnal meal.

Prep time: 10 mins

Cooking time: 20-30 mins

Serves 4

Ingredients

600-700g fish (salmon, white fillet or smoked haddock) 300ml creme fraiche zest and juice of 1 lemon fresh parsley (you can also use thyme or dill) 1 pack of pre-rolled puff pastry (approx 320g) salt and pepper

Method

1 Preheat oven to 180C/Gas 4.

2 Cut the fish into approx 3cm chunks.

3 Mix the fish with creme fraiche in a medium bowl, adding the zest and juice of lemon. Season with herbs and salt and pepper. Set aside.

4 Use the top of the mug to cut out discs of puff pastry and set aside.

5 Pour the fish mixture evenly into 4 oven-proof mugs.

6 Place a pastry disk on top of each mug (optionalbrush pastry with some milk).

7 Bake in the oven for 20-30mins or until the fish is cooked through and the pastry is golden.

@michela.chiappa

TheChiappaSisters thechiappas.com

Baby at the Table: A 3-Step Guide to Weaning the Italian Way (Michael Joseph) £16.99. Sherborne Times reader offer price of £14.99 from Winstone’s Books

Simply Italian: Cooking at Home with the Chiappa Sisters (Michael Joseph) £22 (hardcover). Sherborne Times reader offer price of £20 from Winstone’s Books

HERE WE GO…

Mark Roca, Head of Sport, Sherborne Prep

‘In the end, it’s extra effort that separates a winner from second place. But winning takes a lot more than that, too. It starts with complete command of the fundamentals. Then it takes desire, determination, discipline, and self-sacrifice.

And finally, it takes a great deal of love, fairness, and respect for your fellow man.

Put all these together, and even if you don’t win, how can you lose?’ – Jesse Owens

For me, this quote from Jesse Owens sums up all of the benefits that sport experiences have on a human being, no matter the age. Nelson Mandela also once said, ‘Sports speak to youth in a language they understand.’ Every child can relate to sport; this is why it is important for schools and parents to use it as a tool to support their young children’s development. The physical, social and emotional attributes and skills that are gained, and the experiences they have, from sporting opportunities, help to equip them to deal with the challenges and demands of life.

Our ethos on sport is not too far from the perspective that Jesse Owens portrayed in his quote. We provide the children with sporting opportunities in a structured, competitive and fun environment without any pressure, and we focus on the development of the individual. If we win our competitive fixtures then that is a bonus, however, if we are showing desire, determination, fairness and respect whilst participating, then who is losing?!

I have been a Head of PE at two other schools and worked in three schools before working here and the sporting provision that was available at these establishments cannot even be compared to the provision the students have here. I am amazed by how much sport is put on for these lucky students. In each week we provide one hour of swimming, an hour of PE, 4 hours of games, 1 or 2 fixtures per week and our pupils have enrichment sport 4 days a week after school and on Saturday mornings. A single student could potentially take part in 13 hours of sport in the week – it is remarkable. There are a significant number of students who are currently taking part in rugby, hockey, cricket, football, swimming and gymnastics sessions, every week!

With the introduction of the Pre-Senior Baccalaureate (PSB) at Sherborne Prep, we are evolving our curriculum to provide a truly enriching academic and holistic educational experience for our children. The PSB model places more focus on learning skills and personal characteristics within lessons such as leadership, collaboration, independence, reviewing and improving, and communicating. We are finding that sport naturally provides plenty of opportunity for the students to practice these skills; they are leading the half-time talks, taking turns to lead warm-ups, being given tactical challenges to explore in groups, I could go on…

My aspirations for children in sport? Well, I aim to encourage all of our children to seize the opportunities on offer to them, to enjoy their sporting activities and to learn from them, to become the best version of themselves that they can be.

Sport provides experiences that our children will cherish and remember for the rest of their lives and I am confident they will leave us having acquired a love and passion for sporting activity – for life.

sherborneprep.org

Image: Katharine Davies

Image: Josie Sturgess-Mills

Andrew Griffin-Raphael

PRIDE

Andrew Griffin-Raphael, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Lead (EDI), Teacher of Chemistry, Sherborne School

In schools, we aim to educate our pupils, to create tolerant and compassionate young people, who are confident and empowered to go into the world and aspire to make a difference, to be themselves and to co-exist peacefully alongside people of different beliefs, cultures, backgrounds and diversities.

At Sherborne, we have an LGBTQ+ Society, International Society and the Equality and Diversity Action Group. Diversity Week at Sherborne School raised the visibility of LGBTQ+ support in the School and demonstrated our commitment to pupils, staff and our community to be inclusive and welcoming. An outward display of the School’s commitment was the raising of the Pride flag and colourisation of the Sherborne Penny on social media accounts.

This really brings me to the crux of why I am writing this piece. In April I was appointed to the new role of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Lead (EDI) in addition to teaching Chemistry. I’m really just at the beginning of my own understanding of the role but the more I learn the bigger the job gets, so where to start? Well, I’m going to start at the end of the title – Inclusion.

I have been told by many people that they are inclusive, and I consider myself to be inclusive. That is, we do not knowingly exclude others because of something we know about them. We even support our inclusivity with statements like ‘I’m not homophobic – I have friends that are gay.’ Or perhaps, ‘I treat everybody equally, regardless of their differences.’ Is this inclusion or just a lack of exclusion?

To be inclusive in a way that makes a difference, something needs to be done. In Sherborne, this means actions need to be taken that allow a person to see that they are welcome to bring all aspects of themselves to the School, whether they are a pupil or a member of staff. As a caring institution with kindness at its core, showing everyone that they are not just accepted but are celebrated for the richness they bring to the School is important. That all are encouraged to flourish and contribute fully, is one pillar of continued success.

Occasionally a student will ask something like, ‘Why do they have a gay rugby team? That’s not inclusive. Why can’t they just be part of a normal rugby team?’ That’s always interesting when you work in a single-sex

school. (A quick look at professional sport quickly goes to show that it’s not as simple as just being out, but it is certainly getting better.)

As the EDI role develops, I will champion inclusivity – celebrating the diversity we already have and shining a light on areas where perhaps we do not have pupils or staff represented so that anyone looking in and considering joining us will see that we are ready to welcome them and all of their experiences into our community. Celebrating specific days, weeks and months sometimes seems false but in reality, we use them to remind ourselves and learn a little more about the many different elements of our community and to celebrate their history and successes, whilst taking care to ensure we continue to highlight relevant examples throughout the rest of the year, as part of our normal routine.

A key element here is growing student voice, enabling different students to share their experiences in small groups and hopefully to the wider School community, to help others develop a better understanding of experiences they do not have. For example, having a Chinese-themed meal around Chinese New Year is not the same as knowing what really goes on in a Chinese community over that period and understanding what our pupils are missing out on whilst living in Sherborne. Imagine staying in China and an ‘English Christmas’ being reduced to a turkey roast dinner with a cracker! Having a better understanding of the experiences our friends are missing out on and perhaps being able to share in those experiences will build a community where people are not just included but feel that they belong.

Our primary aim is to educate and prepare boys for the world they are entering whilst making sure our own community demonstrates and grows the values we want them to reflect. Genuinely acknowledging and learning from others’ experiences will transform our young people from knowing the right thing, to doing the right thing. They need to be ready to embrace the diverse range of people they will encounter and know how to learn from them and build inclusive, welcoming communities where people feel they really belong.

sherborne.org

elizabethwatsonillustration.com

DRAWN TO THE LIGHT

Merveille Du Jour Griposia Aprilina Gillian Nash

Autumn moths now flying include one of our most striking and unusually patterned resident species. The aptly named Merveille du Jour, with the French translation of ‘marvel of the day’ is always a joy to see, even for those who record them annually. Each individual sports a variable and unique arrangement of black and bright mint green, whiteedged intricate patterns on its forewings, often with a slightly darker midway horizontal band. This design provides efficient camouflage in its daytime resting place, often among lichen on the bark of trees. In common with other ‘green moths’ the colour of newly emerged individuals fades quickly. The hindwings are slate grey, edged white.

You may see the adult moth by torchlight feeding on ivy flowers or overripe berries and fruit during its short single flight season of September to October – a truly autumnal species.

Larvae feed on various oaks, hatched in spring from

eggs laid on twigs in bark crevices of these trees in the preceding autumn. Early growth stages coincide with those of tender shoots and flowers. Later as they grow, the larvae feed at night, consuming larger leaves. When fully fed, they descend to form a pupa just below ground level, remaining there until the emergence of the adult moth the following year.

Merveille du Jour is a species unlikely to be encountered in urban areas where the tree species required to complete its life cycle are absent. It is, however, fairly common where it does occur in many areas of suitable habitat throughout the UK, the highest numbers being in central and southern counties of England, Wales and Scotland. Locally, it is frequently recorded in rural gardens, parks, woodland and hedgerows, with the first Dorset records in 1940. Sightings appear to have become more common and still increasing since 1970, indicating good news for such a beautiful species.

Image: Gillian Nash

ROOK AND MORE ROOKS

Rooks are often disliked, but I find them the most magical of birds. Rooks have, for many generations, been shot at as they are seen as vermin, but, like much of our native wildlife, they are misunderstood. Rooks are both very intelligent and very social; in the winter months they gather with other corvids, such as jackdaws, forming impressive noisy flocks. We are lucky to have one of these colonies on the edge of the village. If you get to this site at just the right time, you can see hundreds of these black birds returning home to their treetops after a day foraging for food. Seeing this massive flock as the light is getting low is truly spectacular not only for the beauty of such a sight but also for the sheer volume of noise.

An extract and scraperboard illustration from Wild Light by Angela Harding (Sphere Books)

(See Literary Review page 129)

Tuesday 8th November 6.30pm for 7pm Talk and Book Signing with Angela Harding

The Butterfly Room, Castle Gardens, Sherborne Tickets £5, available from Winstone’s Books or online at shop.winstonebooks.co.uk

ADORNED BY NATURE EXPLORATIONS IN THE SOUTH SEAS

Wolfgang Grulke

Ihave met many of you fellow residents through my talks or books about the future impact of technology, life in ‘Deep Time’, or as visitors to my fossil museum. No wonder then that I have heard some of you call me ‘The Fossil Man of Oborne’! Well, I’m actually not that old, but I do love nature and natural things. Looking back on it now, I have always collected stuff. Curiosity seems to be my defining characteristic. I have always surrounded myself with my own cabinet of curiosities. Each new focus fuels my imagination – it is always my way of ‘learning by doing’.

But there is another side to me: I have had a lifelong passion for marine life and for almost 30 years, in parallel to running a global consulting

practice, I have been diving and exploring the islands of the remote Pacific Ocean with my wife Terri. We always sought out the most remote places and fabled ‘never-dived’ coral reefs.

But, even the most avid divers must come to land sometimes. It was in New Guinea, the second-biggest island in the world, that started our interest in local cultures. New Guinea has almost no roads but is said to have more airstrips than France and Germany put together. There are more than one thousand languages. It was astonishing to think that people living just over the next mountain might speak a different language and have a completely different culture from one’s own. This was the only place on

Image: Olga Fontanellaz

earth where you could still meet someone who could remember what human flesh tasted like.

We would commune with the locals and watch them use natural resources to craft magnificent objects to support their everyday needs – physical, social or spiritual, but always eminently practical. Often these objects would end up being worn – to adorn, to celebrate or to display status, and bring prestige to their clan. Terri and I were captivated. Memories of astonishing adornments and celebrations stayed with us long after we returned home. Of course, on each trip, some items also came home with us. They inhabited shelves, cabinets and drawers until we realised that we had ‘a collection’.

What started as a passion for marine life, fossils and photography slowly morphed into a love of the exotic adornments that the islanders crafted from shells, plants and other natural materials. South Seas islanders had little access to metals or precious stones so they crafted superlative and fabled adornments from nature. They created currencies and ground-breaking trading networks that nurtured relationships and redefined value. In my latest book Adorned by Nature - a celebration of South Seas cultures, history and art, I tell their fascinating story.

We sometimes forget that these tropical islands were the centre of a dramatic theatre of war towards the end of WWII. In some cases, it was the first time locals saw a ‘whiteman’. When soldiers returned home from the war in the Pacific, they brought with them strange souvenirs from the beautiful and mysterious islands of the South Seas.

Enter Samuel George Meyers Adams (known as ‘Meyers’ all his life), renowned medal maker who produced one of the first medallions commemorating Churchill’s death. He recounted that, after WWII, he would seek out soldiers at train stations in London as they returned from the Pacific. Few of them carried any money but were happy to have him buy some of their ‘South Sea Souvenirs’. This was where he developed the taste for what he called ‘curious money’ – primal currencies made of shells, teeth and other exotic materials. I acquired some of his lovingly annotated collection when it was sold at auction. It amplified my interest in the existing South Seas objects we had collected on our trips. Gradually my collection expanded to include the social traditions and myths that gave the objects context.

The experiences of returning soldiers inspired myths

of a Paradise in the South Seas, inhabited by beautiful men and women, and easy-going exotic lifestyles that became the stuff of movies – such as South Pacific.

We found the actual lifestyles, myths and magic of these islands to be much more exotic than these imagined 1950s perceptions could ever be.

Adorned by Nature is a celebration of these cultures, traditions and myths. It’s about the consequence of curiosity and the thrill of discovery. It is unapologetically anecdotal and selfishly visual. That’s my way of understanding, loving and learning. I do hope you will share some of that passion with me –either in the book or at my talk at Oborne village hall later this month.

The book is a not-for-profit project and the many expert contributors have given their time, images and creative input pro bono. We have committed to giving something back to the people whose material culture we are celebrating. We are donating 100 copies of the book to local community groups, museums and galleries in the South Seas. It is our hope that this will help inspire young artists and crafters in some specific new projects – a reminder that a simple act of showcasing the culture can lead to its appreciation, and even preservation, by future generations.

Tribal Art is big business in ‘The West’. There is a certain irony in that the 40 million people of the South Seas islands, who speak more than 1000 languages, do not have a word, in any of those languages, for ‘art’.

Everything is made to be functional, to serve a specific purpose, celebration or spiritual need. There is no ‘art for art’s sake’ here.

adornedbynature.atone.org

Friday 18th November 7pm for 7.30pm

Adorned by Nature: Explorations in the South Seas – A Talk with Wolfgang Grulke Oborne Village Hall, DT9 4LA. Tickets £10 per person. 100% of proceeds go to the Village Hall Charity. Includes a glass of wine, nibbles and a £15 discount on the book. Tickets via oborneevents@gmail.com or 07866 933736

PROPOLIS

Paula Carnell, Beekeeping Consultant, Writer and Speaker

As I’ve been writing this, I have also been creating new recipes for lip balms and skin care products for myself as well as clients. As the bees are less demanding on my time, I have the freedom for creativity, which I love! The bees produce many wonders from the hive and propolis has to be my favourite – even more so than honey. I am often asked what it is, how I collect it, and what it is used for – I will address these questions one by one.

What is propolis? I have written much about this wonderful product and yet there is still much to learn and understand about it. There is no standard as each sample, from different seasons, hives, and countries contains differing properties, much like honey. The bees collect resins and balms from tree buds and bark, then mix it with their own beeswax and pollen and use it to disinfect the hive. Most beekeepers think of it as an easily staining, dark orange inconvenience which sticks the hive together making honey extraction tricky and sticky! In 1907, a German bee researcher suggested that propolis was instead largely derived from pollen granules. He believed that the pollen granules would swell up to five times their original size inside the bees’ intestines, and then burst to release a plasma. The remaining pollen husks would be processed into a balsam which, when excreted, it would be mixed with wax and other products forming propolis. Although largely disputed, it does have some grounds for truth as propolis can be found inside hives where they have no access to trees. In addition, maximum propolis production occurs when there is also maximum pollen production. Other researchers during the 20th century noticed that bees were collecting resins secreted by trees, using their mandibles (see last month’s article ‘Do bees have teeth?’). It is now accepted that there is still more to learn and that both types of propolis exist. Another bee researcher in the 1930s, Phillip, suggested that the pollen form of propolis was used inside the hive to line the cells before eggs were laid by the queen,

and that the tree resin propolis was used to line and protect the hive from outside threats, also strengthening the internal structure. Resins from trees, even without any input from bees have had a medicinal reputation – think of frankincense and myrrh, the most famous of tree resin gifts. We do know that bees add some magic, be it in their saliva, or whatever else they mix it with inside their hive. The list of medicinal properties is endless including anti-inflammatory, anaesthetic, bacterial, antiviral, antioxidant, anti-fungal, anti-parasitic as well as being an immuno-stimulant, which is particularly relevant at this time of year as our immune systems struggle to fight off winter bugs.

I collect propolis from my hives using various techniques. Firstly, during the summer months, when opening a hive, the still sticky propolis can be scraped off using a hive tool and put into a glass jar, which I try and remember to always have with me. If your bees aren’t producing much propolis, then you can stimulate it by placing metal queen excluders inside the hive along the walls. Many bee hives are planed to

be smooth inside which means the bees have nothing to attach the propolis to. By making the surfaces rough or adding the metal excluders with their many holes, the bees can’t resist filling the holes in. You can later pull the metal sheets out and freeze them which in theory helps the propolis to just drop off! You can also buy fine plastic mesh sheets which you can place above the supers and the bees will again fill in the small holes with droplets of propolis. When extracting honey, or removing the super boxes from hives, you spend the autumn (as I do), scraping the propolis from all the frames and edges of the box. It’s amazing how the tiny granules build up in your pot over time. If a colony dies out, you could have even more propolis to harvest. I have found that on the inside of hives by the entrances, there can often be large blobs of propolis, used to manipulate into ‘curtains’ when the bees needed to reduce the hive entrances. What I really love about propolis, is that it doesn’t harm the bees when you harvest it. I wouldn’t take any from July until next spring from which time the bees can more easily refresh it and replace what I have taken. In the wild,

bees will line their entire cavity with propolis, acting as a protective ‘skin’, not only with all its health-giving properties but also as a waxy resin. It can collect and distribute moisture, preventing mould growth and giving the bees a source of drinkable water.

When I have a reasonable pot of propolis I make it into tinctures. Mixing with alcohol and leaving for several weeks or months, the properties are preserved in the alcohol, ready to be used in lip balms, skincare and even as a pure propolis spray or dropper. I always carry a propolis spray in my handbag – I can spray it directly in my throat if I ever feel a pre-cold tickle or on a cut or wound. More often I spray it onto the hands of those wondering what propolis is so they can lick and sniff this incredible gift from the bees. Because propolis contains so many benefits, it is said that breathing in the air of a bee hive gives beekeepers a longer healthier life than other professions, and I have to say, the worst part of winter for me is not being able to lift the lid of a bee hive and take a deep breath of their delicious air!

Kosolovskyy/Shutterstock

What a scorcher! The summer of 2022 was England’s joint hottest, tying with 2018 and reaching an average summer temperature (covering June, July and August) of 17.1C. Four out of our five hottest-ever summers in a series of data stretching back to 1884 have happened since 2003, so it’s pretty obvious that climate change is happening. This summer was also the driest since 1976 – a summer that I vaguely remember, as I was in my first year at primary school, sweltering both indoors and out in my Aertex shirt. That summer stretched out in endless hot, sunny and rainless days, at a point in my life when a week felt like a very long time. I remember the scorch of hot car seats on the backs of my thighs and

the feeling of being slowly cooked whenever the traffic slowed, ending the cooling breeze that had been blowing through the open windows. Air-conditioning was considered a completely pointless thing in 1970s Britain.

So what about today’s young people? How do they feel about the way the climate is changing and what are their concerns? Towards the end of the summer term, YPTE helped Ellen Wingrove, a student completing her Masters in Global Environment, Politics and Society at Edinburgh University, with a survey. It asked young people - specifically those aged 10-11 - about their concerns regarding climate change. Did they feel that their voices were being listened to? What did they think they and the adults in their lives were doing

LISTENING TO YOUNG VOICES IN A CHANGING CLIMATE

Peter Littlewood, Director, Young People’s Trust for the Environment

to help? A small selection of primary schools from England, Scotland and Wales took part in the survey.

Today’s young people are going to be disproportionately affected by climate change in the future so they should have the opportunity to voice their opinions about the kind of world they want to inherit from the current generation of adults. Among our survey group, only 3% of children said that they were not concerned by climate change and only 5% said that protecting the planet for the future was not important to them.

A majority (57%) felt that their voice was important when it came to climate change, and only 13% thought it was unimportant. But in a significant

mismatch, only 18% felt that their voices were being listened to, with 40% stating that they felt they weren’t being listened to. When expanded to a global scale, 30% thought children’s voices, in general, were being listened to, while 43% felt that children’s voices were being ignored.

The children’s verdict on adults, in general, was pretty damning, with only 16% thinking that adults were doing a good job of looking after the environment and 60% stating that they were not. At a family level, things got much better for the adults, with 53% of children saying that the grown-ups in their lives were making at least some efforts to improve the environment, whilst an additional 34% thought their parents were making a lot of effort.

We also asked the children to think about the efforts they themselves were making and 66% felt that they were actively doing something to help, 22% said they were making a lot of effort and only 3% admitted to making no effort at all. Almost three-quarters (71%) said they would like to get more involved in protecting the environment if they had the opportunity.

Interestingly, the vast majority (95%) felt that protecting the environment should be a high priority for governments, which is something that politicians everywhere should take note of.

So, what can we learn from all this? That young people are concerned about environmental issues in general and climate change in particular; that they don’t feel like enough adults are listening to their concerns; that they want adults to do more, and to be able to take more action themselves. Today’s generation of adults must take note of the thoughts and wishes of generations that will follow them.

In order for young people’s voices to really matter, the challenge we face is to ensure that they are equipped with the knowledge they need to make informed decisions about climate change, both while they’re still at school and as they grow to adulthood. Children are hopeful, but in many cases anxious about the future and they want to be a part of the solution to climate change. We should be allowing them to have an input into what that future might look like, for them and their children. The more young people feel their input matters, the more inspired they will become to do more to help. And that has to be good news for the climate and the planet.

ypte.org.uk

Ink Drop/Dhutterstock

On Foot ST LUKE’S CHAPEL AND KINGSTON RUSSELL STONE CIRCLE

Emma Tabor and Paul Newman

Distance: 5 1/2 miles Time: Approx. 3 hours Park: Parking by Abbotsbury Castle just off the B3157 Walk Features: In the shadow of Abbotsbury Castle, this walk starts with a gentle ramble down Park’s Lane before heading into Ashley Wood and then a steady climb through and out of Ashley Chase Estate to meet The Ridgeway to take you along to Kingston Russell Stone Circle. There is a short descent to Gorwell Farm followed by another climb as you head back towards the drive running through the estate. The woodland sections are charming and there are good views across the Bride Valley from the track along The Ridgeway. After visiting Kingston Russell circle there’s also the opportunity to extend the walk with a detour to the Grey Mare and her Colts, a Neolithic burial chamber. The Ridgeway can be surprisingly muddy!

Refreshments: The Ilchester Arms, Abbotsbury >

Each month we devise a walk for you to try with your family and friends (including four-legged members) pointing out a few interesting things along the way, be it flora, fauna, architecture, history, the unusual and sometimes the unfamiliar.

We completed this walk as the trees were turning and summer yielded to autumn, but it would also make an ideal spring walk as daffodils, bluebells and garlic clothe the valley floor in Ashley Wood. The woodland around the Ashley Chase Estate shelters the beautiful and intriguing remains of St Luke’s Chapel. The route has an airy ridgeway section above the Bride Valley, rich with Neolithic history and good views across the Bride Valley and Abbotsbury Castle. The valley has a delightful, secluded feel, with a shifting sense of time. There are dips, climbs, twists and turns making for a varied and absorbing route.

Directions

Start: SY 557 864

1 There is parking next to the entrance to Abbotsbury Castle (at the intersection with the South West Coast Path) as well as a few other spaces along the road nearby.

2 Head down the road, away from the castle and the main coast road. After just under 1/2 mile, as the road bends to the right, bear left at a small triangle, to head along Park’s Lane, a stony track. Descend gradually for just over 1/2 mile and then leave the track at a dip to turn right into Ashley Wood though a small metal gate. Head along the stream and ravine, past impressive old ash trees, and in a ¼ mile reach the remains of St Luke’s Chapel. The chapel was built on land given to Cistercian monks from Netley Abbey by a local landowner around 1246, but after the Dissolution

the community left and the chapel fell into obscurity and all that remains now is the western end. A small altar has been constructed from the debris, and a wooden crucifix resides over the graves of Sir David and Lady Olga MilneWatson, who built the large house nearby in the early 1920s. They saved the remains of the chapel and requested that they be interred in this serene and peaceful spot. The surrounding woodland is a magical place for calm reflection as well as providing a natural canopy in the absence of the chapel roof.

3 After exploring the chapel, leave the altar behind you and turn left, heading slightly uphill along a path twisting through the woods and undergrowth. After 200 yards, leave the wood through a large metal gate with a stile, and make your way across a field, keeping the wood just to your left. Go through another large gate and head towards farm buildings to then pass them on the right. In another 200 yards, you will meet the drive which passes through the estate.

4 Turn left onto the drive and start to head downhill, soon meeting the entrance to Ashley Chase House. Keep on the drive, heading more steeply downhill between trees and after 300 yards the drive starts heading steeply uphill, with tracks off either side. In another 300 yards, look for a path on your right to leave the drive, over a stile. Now make your way diagonally across this field, still heading up, to meet the path running along the top of the hill.

5 Leave the field in the top right corner via a stile and now head along The Ridgeway. After ¾ mile, you will reach Kingston Russell stone circle. After visiting this you may want to detour by continuing along The Ridgeway to the Grey Mare and her

Colts, about 1/2 mile further along.

6 If not, turn right at the stone circle to leave the track via a large metal gate and stile and head downhill, keeping the hedgerow to your left. The path soon meets Gorwell Farm in the valley bottom. Go to the right of the farm and then turn left along a track to pass in front of the farm buildings. After 100 yards, turn right, almost back on yourself, and follow a track beneath trees to emerge into a field. Start to head towards the left and head slightly uphill into a pleasant, small, shallow valley. Keeping a hedge on your right, head up the valley and after 500 yards, leave the field through double stiles.

7 Ahead is a small copse standing in a large field. Go just to the right of the copse to pass it and at the other end, strike out across the field, starting to head downhill towards another valley bottom. Here, cross through a scrubby border with a pond to your left and then start to head uphill, keeping the copse behind you and passing sparse trees. In 300 yards, as you reach the top of the hill, you then turn sharp right and follow a fence and then a hedge, passing Ashley Chase House to then meet the drive you walked along earlier.

8 Turn left on the drive, to leave the estate and past the start of Park’s Lane to walk back to your car and the start of the walk.

Dorset AONB have a brilliant resource, Land of Bone and Stone which tells you more about the rich archaeology of the South Dorset Ridgeway area – dorsetaonb.org.uk/wpcontent/uploads/2019/04/Explorer_Guide_Download.pdf

A selection from Paul and Emma’s On Foot series will feature in a book of West Dorset walks, out in 2023.

Christmas

LOST DORSET NO. 29 MARNHULL

David Burnett, The Dovecote Press

With the annual Poppy Day commemorations due in November it seemed a good moment to remember those who joined up in August 1914. Here are volunteers for the Dorset Regiment lined up outside the Crown at Marnhull, some of whom look too young to shave, let alone go to war. But go to war they did, and of the 190 men from the village who served during the First World War the names of 35 are listed on Marnhull Memorial Market Cross in New Street – with a further nine from the Second World War. Initially the 1914 war was treated as a six-month adventure. The retreat from Mons that autumn, in which the 1st Battalion of the Dorsets suffered appalling casualties, and the harsh winter that followed, brought home the realities of an entirely new form of warfare. By the date of the Armistice in November 1918 the Dorset Regiment’s Roll of Honour had lengthened to 4,060 names. Four of the 12 battalions bore the brunt of the fighting. The 1st served on the Western Front throughout, tragically losing 60 men in the last week of the war.

dovecotepress.com

The Dovecote Press has been publishing books about Dorset since 1974, many of which are available locally from Winstone’s Books or directly from the publishers. This photograph is taken from Dorset 1900-1999, The Twentieth Century in Photographs.

TROOPER BROWN’S MEDALS

Elisabeth Bletsoe, Curator, Sherborne Museum

This medal set is one of the many museum artefacts that tell a story to ‘ignite the imagination’, but few tales can be so thrilling. They belonged to William Brown who was born in November 1891 in Sherborne, the son of a coal merchant living in Horsecastles. Baptised in the Abbey, he was one of five surviving children. William’s father was disabled by age 47 and on parish relief so the family all rallied round by working; William was apprenticed to a butcher, while his two older sisters were weavers in the silk factory.

William enlisted with the Queen’s Own Dorset Yeomanry in 1914 and survived active service in the disastrous Gallipoli campaign where soldiers lived and fought in appalling conditions. In November 1915 five thousand Senussi tribesmen, aided by the Turks, rose up against the allies in Italian Libya and western Egypt. The few troops, including the Yeomanry, that were left behind after the withdrawal from Gallipoli were sent to form the Western Frontier Force in order to meet this threat. On 26th February 1916, Trooper Brown was involved in a decisive action which saw the last great cavalry charge of British mounted infantry, led by Lieutenant-Colonel Souter at Agagia. It was made over open country with little cover, by men who were exhausted and horses which had not been watered for twelve hours. Later it was described as madness to send a hundred and eighty yeomen against five hundred tribesmen, known to be skilled desert fighters and armed with rifles and four machine guns, but the Yeomanry spread out in two ranks, with eight yards between each man in the front rank and four yards in the second. In this formation, they galloped for well over half a mile, straight into enemy fire.

Lieutenant-Colonel Souter, Lieutenant Blaksley and Trooper Brown all had their horses shot from underneath them but the three of them managed

to apprehend the Turkish commander Ja’far Pasha, who surrendered. Pasha, who was later to serve twice as the Prime Minister of Iraq, noted that the charge was: ‘Beautiful, but not according to the rules. No one but the British Cavalry would have done it.’

On 21st April 1916, the Western Gazette’s triumphant headline ran ‘SHERBORNIANS GAIN

DISTINCTION’, reporting how Trooper Brown, aged 24, had been awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal for gallantry during that memorable charge. It forms part of his medal set along with the Victory Medal, the British War Medal and the 1915 Star. William was feted as a hero on his return to Sherborne where he settled in Lenthay and, with his wife Gwendoline, raised his daughters Hilda and Gwenda. He became heavily involved with the Sherborne branch of the Royal British Legion and acted as their standard bearer in parades. He was also honoured by being made a delegate of the local branch of Comrades of the Great War and represented them in the procession to the Cenotaph in London and at the funeral of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey in 1920.

In a satisfying twist to the story, William and Ja’far Pasha met again in 1935 at a dinner in London, at which the Iraqi minister was a guest. Pasha recalled the battle with admiration for his adversaries. He later presented Trooper Brown with a beautifully engraved silver cigarette case made in Baghdad.

This, together with the medal set and a photograph of Brown, were generously donated to Sherborne Museum by his family.

sherbornemuseum.co.uk

Sherborne Museum is open Tuesday to Saturday 10.30am4.30pm. Admission is free but donations are welcome.

THE BLOODY ASSIZES

Cindy Chant

The failure of the Monmouth Rebellion had a tragic sequel, as the authorities punished those who had given any sort of support or encouragement to it, in a very savage and cruel way. Immediately after the Battle of Sedgemoor, constables had been ordered to search out, and report the names of all the men absent from their homes during the period of the rebellion. Over a thousand of Monmouth’s men were captured on Sedgemoor after the battle, but many more escaped, disappearing into the countryside, unsure whether to return to their homes or just hide and lay low.

A great deal has been written about the Autumn Assizes of 1685 and an unprecedented number of prisoners were sentenced to death or transportation, and the executions were carried out in the most barbaric manner. Despite the harsh punishments, the savagery of those dealt with at the Bloody Assize aroused widespread revulsion and hatred against King James II. The trials were not specially arranged, but were

conducted as part of the normal Autumn Assize of that year. However, with so many present for sentencing, the normal two judges would be unable to cope, so the Chief Justice was given four assistants on this particular circuit. Everybody knows, of course, that the villain of the piece was the Lord Chief Justice, Judge Jeffreys, and it was the Dorset section of the judge’s tour that earned it the name of the Bloody Assize.

Judge Jeffreys met up to his reputation as a sadistic bully and was noted for delivering verdicts required by his political masters. He, undoubtedly, was given precise instructions to make an example of the rebels, and this he did with great enthusiasm. It was the judges’ section that named it the Bloody Assizes, as more prisoners were sentenced to death in Dorset than in any other county, and it was in Dorset alone that all the sentences were carried out while the Assizes were still in progress. There are no accurate or reliable records of the proceedings, and the exact number of prisoners

Chris Dorney/Shutterstock

is not known. It appears that some 312 rebels were brought to trial and 94 were sentenced to be hung, drawn and quartered. Many were sentenced to be transported, some were fined or lashed at a pillar, and 54 lucky ones were acquitted. Jeffrey’s harsh treatment of these prisoners has always been extraordinary, as, by comparison, only 6 men were executed in the neighbouring counties of Devon and Somerset.

During the trials, Jeffreys was sending detailed reports to the king, and royal advice may have come back from London suggesting transportation. Maybe it was the king’s decision to transport so many, as it was a more profitable course of action. This was because planters in the West Indies would pay a good price for white servants.

But it was all too late for the poor devils already sentenced to death. The horrific process of hanging, drawing and quartering, was a common punishment for high treason, and it was carried out in public, for all those wishing to witness this sickening event. After being convicted, the poor wretch was dragged to the place of execution, where he was hung and throttled until almost dead. His abdomen was then split open

and he was disembowelled, while still alive - the organs being then burned on a bonfire. Finally, death came when the head was severed, and the torso was cut into four pieces, with arms and legs still attached. These pieces were then boiled in tubs of brine, and finally, they were dipped and covered in tar, to preserve them for a while. The heads and body parts were put onto spikes and displayed around the villages and towns from which they came, to serve as a warning to any other wouldbe traitors. It was a punishable offence for relatives to remove any of these, for a proper, decent burial.

For those that were transported, their plight was no less terrible. Those who survived the harsh crossing, usually to the sugar plantations of Barbados and other parts of the West Indies, became slaves and many suffered and died of ill-treatment and disease.

After the bloody deeds in Dorchester, the judges moved on to Exeter and Taunton, for further Assizes. In total, the Monmouth rebellion brought one thousand three hundred rebels to trial, and this in turn resulted in much sorrow and hardship, to their families in the West Country. Judge Jeffreys lived up to his reputation, and had done his grizzly job well.

Auctioneers

FULL STEAM AHEAD

Christmas is coming. No doubt some of you will be counting down to the big day and the shops will soon be stocking Christmas pudding and table crackers. We’re not getting the tinsel out just yet but our auction of model cars, trains, dolls and toys on 2nd December might just offer up the perfect Christmas present.

One great thing about being an auctioneer is seeing and handling all the lovely lots before the auction. Many of them bring back happy memories and nostalgia plays a big part in auctions. You might rediscover a toy you owned as a child or one that belonged to an elder sibling that you’d dare not touch. Maybe it was the one you spent hours dreaming about or peering at through a shop window.

For me, there is one lot which I always fall for – the train set – despite having little interest in trains or railways.

I was generally a well-behaved child and having two older sisters thankfully resulted in me having many of my own toys. Typical of the time, these consisted largely of toy guns and anything with wheels. One year, I received a train set (I’m not sure who from, maybe

Santa) but apparently, in a later tantrum, I destroyed it. Unsurprisingly, that was the last train set I was ever given.

Fast forward several decades and I’m cooing over another one – the iconic Stephenson’s Rocket locomotive – part of a beautiful, large set made by one of perhaps the most famous of all train set manufacturers, Hornby.

The set comprises a 31/2 gauge working steam train and 25ft of track. Also included is a coach, set of points and an additional 25ft of track, all in their original boxes.

This wonderful lot was found at an 18th-century Dorset cottage we had been asked to clear earlier this year. The owner had been a true enthusiast and spent his working life employed by a railway company – a career that, his family told us, gave him immense satisfaction.

Whether this train set will be bought by a fellow enthusiast, a collector or as a gift for a child, is unknown. One thing is sure however, I am under strict instructions from Mrs B. not to put my own hand up come auction day!

charterhouse-auction.com

Richard Bromell ASFAV, Charterhouse Auctioneers

The Joinery Works, Alweston

Sherborne, Dorset DT9 5HS

Tel: 01963 23219

Fax: 01963 23053

Email: info@fcuffandsons.co.uk www.fcuffandsons.co.uk

elizabethwatsonillustration.com

Carole Gomez/iStock

WINTER PROTECTION

Mike Burks, Managing Director, The Gardens Group

Perfect weather for the garden in the winter is for it to gently get colder over the coming weeks and a few decent hard frosts after Christmas is good news. What plants don’t like is dramatic weather changes, particularly in temperature as this can cause damage.

There’s plenty of time to enjoy the garden without starting too much tidying up or packing away. This will also provide a food source and habitat, particularly for insects, but also lots of spectacular displays when the frost sets on seed heads and old flowers.

But it would be good to be prepared and this can be done in several ways. It’s late to be talking about feeding regimes but reducing the levels of nitrogen fertilisers towards the end of the summer and either stopping feeding or in fact feeding with high potash fertilisers will help to toughen plant growth. Perhaps use this next year.

Autumn pruning is carried out by many gardeners and is sometimes necessary, but it can expose plants to the ravages of the winter. I often think that the best protection a plant can get is from its own branches. Some plants need a tidy-up prune in the autumn to reduce wind rock over the winter. This group would include shrubs, such as lavatera (Shrubby Mallows), buddleia and some spirea. But it’s just a tidy-up that is needed – leave the rest of the framework in place to provide protection and complete the pruning in the early spring. With other plants, the pruning can be used as protection. One example of this is with tree ferns where the fronds as they die back can be folded over to protect the crown. This won’t be sufficient protection in a really tough winter so a further wrapping of horticultural fleece tied around the trunk to bind on the fronds will complete the task.

Fleece can also be used as a form of protection for many plants. It is a lightweight material usually white in colour that is designed to provide protection in a gentle way. The material allows plants to breathe but will keep the worst of the cold and also the wet from the plant that is being protected. This is also useful

in some situations to reduce fungal problems such as peach leaf curl on peaches, nectarines and the like.

One layer of the fleece material will give a couple of degrees of cold protection and the soft nature is kind to plants. So good is horticultural fleece that I have had some thermal long-johns run up out of it and they keep me very snug for the winter and in a stylish manner too! Fleece has also been adapted so that ready-made shrub protectors are available and also adapted into mini tunnels using wire frames that are also helpful in the early spring when bringing on young crops.

Tubs and pots on the patio can give each other some mutual protection by grouping them together. This is best done by pushing them to the wall of the house and then covering the pots with hessian, fleece or bubble plastic if the weather gets very cold. Pots that drain well will fare much better than those full of water so be sure to check drainage holes are clear where you can.

If you are lucky enough to have a greenhouse even if it is unheated, then some pots can be moved inside for the worst of the weather. Beware when we get sunny days to open the windows so that the plants don’t start growing too early and remember to harden them off before bringing the pots back out in the spring.

In borders, the laying of a natural mulch will help to keep plant roots snug. A two-three-inch depth of bark either chipped or composted or the wonderful mulch Bloomin’ Amazing (a bi-product of a biogas plant near Poundbury), will reduce the amount of frost that gets into the soil. The benefits don’t stop there – with the mulch reducing weed growth the following spring, conserving moisture in the summer and as it breaks down, also assisting in promoting good quality soil structure.

But don’t be too worried about the winter in the garden. Plants may get knocked back, but some need a period of cold to perform correctly in the following year. It’s also good news to have a ‘normal’ winter to help control garden pests. It’s all part of the natural cycle.

thegardensgroup.co.uk

HARVEST

Iam writing this article in late September, when we are enjoying the ‘fruits of our labour’ in the garden as well as nature’s bounty in the woods and hedgerows.

We have been very lucky with many species such as apples producing a very heavy crop of fruit and the outdoor tomatoes have had an excellent year, with all of the summer warmth. Blackberries are going over now, after a decent crop, but conversely, sloes are a bit thin on the ground. The dry weather has resulted in fewer mushrooms and fungi as yet.

Old wives’ tales suggest that bumper crops will mean we will have a harsh winter, although it is more likely

that it is the result of favourable conditions last spring, when pollinators were busy fertilising the flowers.

Autumn fruits and vegetables have always been incredibly important for both animals and humans, to help us survive the lean winter months. Squirrels and jays bury acorns to come back to, wood mice hoard piles of hazel nuts and seeds, while hibernating species such as bats and hedgehogs will build up their body fat, by feasting on insects and snails.

Humans have tried various means of storage of food for millennia. On Iron Age hillforts such as Hambledon and Hod Hill, there are many pits which are associated

Simon Ford, Land and Nature Adviser

with the hut circles where ancient Britons lived, where grain is believed to have been stored. In our stately homes such as Stourhead and Montacute, ice houses were built in north-facing sites to allow food to be kept frozen or chilled for many months with large blocks of ice packed with straw.

With the invention of canning and freezing, we seem to have forgotten how to preserve food in Britain. Supermarkets provided cheap food, imported from all over the world throughout the year. However, as we are all too aware, things have dramatically changed recently. Food of all types has increased

enormously in cost and in some cases is no longer readily available.

Perhaps it is time to start thinking more about ways of storing fruit and vegetables to use during the cold dark winter months. Instead of thinking of ‘gluts’, where food is wasted or composted (or worse, sent to landfill), we can re-visit the ways our grandparents and ancestors kept food for lean periods.

Perhaps the simplest way is to freeze it. Our freezer has pots full of lovely blackcurrants, gooseberries and raspberries and bags of French beans and blanched spinach. If you are feeling more adventurous, you could make a multitude of varieties of jam, with the sugar acting as an excellent preservative.

Today, there were a large number of green tomatoes in the allotment, along with some blemished ones, which mixed with apple, onions and vinegar make a delicious chutney; far superior to that bought from the supermarket.

Vinegar can be used to store many vegetables (and even eggs), but we are generally not that adventurous in England – tending to keep to pickled onions and maybe beetroot. We have some Ukrainian guests, who pickle many things from mushrooms, tomatoes, cabbage, walnuts, cucumbers, carrots and peppers. Scandinavians also love pickled roll mop herring, which I am rather partial to, although I have not tried preserving it.

Drying is another good way of preserving fruit and vegetables. Many people will have tasted delicious sun-dried tomatoes, but this can be extended to things like apples and oranges and the Icelandic people even air-dry cod and meat. If you have lots of chillis, you can thread a needle with cotton through them and hang them as an attractive, but useful way of storing spices. Try thyme, oregano, bay, rosemary and lavender, tied in bunches in a dark dry spot, to liven up a recipe. Many mushrooms can also be dried to use later in the year.

With Christmas not so far away, another favourite is steeping gin or vodka with sloes, cranberries, blackberries or raspberries and some sugar for a month or two. Then sieve it through muslin to get a delicious warming drink to sip around the open fire. Don’t throw away the fruit, but have it as a boozy accompaniment to yogurt or cream!

No more waste and some reminders of those warm summer days, when the garden was full of produce and colour. Just remember to leave some windfalls for our birds and animals.

simonfordgardening.wordpress.com

Svetlana Cherruty/iStock

LIVING THE GOODDEN LIFE

November always feels like the year-end for gardening and growing. A chill in the air and the imminent first frosts mean we must finish clearing the last of our tender plants from the garden and greenhouse, protect our cacti collection by all means necessary and harvest whatever’s left that won’t make it through frosts. The truth is we often deliberately allow some tomatoes or raspberries to drop on the floor to provide food for the local wildlife. If it stops them climbing higher to grab them anyway, then it’s a win-win.

Our winter crops which Chrystall diligently sowed in July are now well-grown and established and protected by nets. Less sun intensity, more wind, lower temperatures and shorter days mean our winter salads, among other crops, will almost come to a standstill, growing extremely slowly. But that’s fine and

to compensate for their slower growth we just grow a lot more. That way we can pick some leaves off the outside of the plants every now and then and still allow the plants to keep growing at their own pace. We find nets and horticultural fleece can add a few degrees by creating a microclimate for what we grow. However unsightly they may be.

Thankfully, the greenhouse guarantees not only protection from hungry wildlife but also that sun rays will be put to good use and generate some precious heat too. I love being in the relative warmth of the greenhouse on a sunny but brisk autumn or winter’s day.

While October was undeniably the most abundant and busiest month, processing everything into sauces, soups and jams, we must extend our efforts a little more so that what we grew this year is looked after and preserved, either through ever more jars, dehydrating or

Nico and Chrystall Goodden

freezing. Why run the race if not to cross the finish line?

We tend to avoid dehydrating when possible as it uses a lot of power whether you do it in an oven or a dehydrator and the prospect of sun-drying anything is now long gone.

Tomatoes have been excellent this year – we grew more than ever and now have lots of tomato soup, passata and chutneys for the winter months. I estimate we grew about five to six hundred tomatoes, the heaviest weighing over a pound of sweet, juicy fruit.

Pounds of excess raspberries have been frozen on trays in the freezer to then be transferred into bags. We will use them mainly for desserts over the cold months with a generous serving of cream and crushed meringue. I like raspberry milkshakes too. We grew an indecent amount of them. From what used to be perhaps 15 plants when we settled here in 2017, through the magic of propagation we now have over 80 and there is no sign of us ever getting tired of them.

The last of the apples have been picked and turned into apple juice which we freeze by the litre, a good boost of vitamins when we most need it. I admit, some juice may have been accidentally turned into cider and I may have accidentally ingested some! We do store some apples in the garage. When stored properly and not bruised, the right variety will keep until January or February – the perfect time for a tarte tatin. In addition to that, we also make stewed apples or compote which freezes well.

Mushrooms have been abundant since midSeptember, really ramping up in October. We found so many giant puffballs, field mushrooms, beefsteak mushrooms, and ‘chicken of the woods’. I save every location where I find edible mushrooms on Google Maps for future reference as mushrooms come back year-on-year. I now know over 40 spots within a 5-mile

radius where I can find free delicious mushrooms at various times of the year. Most are gourmet mushrooms, at least when compared with shop-bought ones.

November shall too bring its own surprises. We expect oyster and ‘velvet shank’ mushrooms to be plentiful as we know the local spots for them. Meadow waxcaps are also mushrooms we find once the temperatures truly drop, as its name implies in meadows and pastures.

We have not bought vegetables since April and hope that this may be the first year we manage to complete a whole year, eating only what we grow and occasionally forage. There are some exceptions such as limes and lemons but ‘grow your own’ doesn’t have to mean that we can’t enjoy a margarita or whiskey sour at times.

Make no mistake, we eat very well! The food we grow and forage and consequently cook tastes better than any we could ever buy in supermarkets or eat in most restaurants – it inspires us to try new dishes. It keeps us happy and healthy. It connects us to nature, its rhythm, the seasons and the land.

Hopefully we can inspire some of you to embrace what nature offers and at the same time give back to nature by acting as ambassadors.

There is a visible decline in wild foods, often because of land development or land being reclaimed for intensive agriculture. It makes us sad but equally, it gives us purpose. If we can spread the message on the urgency of protecting what we all have or are about to lose locally, that’s enough in our book. We don’t need to necessarily highlight the destruction of the Amazon rainforest – if we all just looked at making changes locally, the whole world would benefit.

Nico: @nicholasgoodden Chrystall: @thegooddenlife creativebritishgarden.com

Manure & Chippings

THE BOTANICAL CANDLE COMPANY

Words Claire Bowman Photography Katharine Davies

It is mid-morning in the candle workshop of the Botanical Candle Company and the air is redolent of vine tomato, sage and basil. Row upon row of creamy white Greenhouse candles in amber jars are gently curing, having been poured the day before. A sweet-smelling hive of activity, the workshop team is working at full tilt, meticulously applying labels to lids and jars with evocative names such as Half Light, Quiescence and Laundry Day, tying moss-green linen ribbons to Candle Crackers, and adding cotton and linen wicks to scented tea lights. Meanwhile, across the road, the dispatch team prepares orders in the light-filled studio above the shop. If there is a buzzier place to be on a rainy October morning, I’d like to know about it. >

‘The eight weeks leading up to Christmas is our peak trading season, with close to 1,800 candles poured a week,’ says co-founder Amalia Pothecary, who started the Botanical Candle Company with her partner James Osborn in 2015. Alongside goodie-crammed candle crackers and advent calendars, the company has just released their seasonal Winter Light candle collection, ‘the cornerstone of our business’ says Amalia. The collection includes Half Light, with notes of clementine and clove (‘so nostalgic, it smells like childhood’); First Light, which smells of eucalyptus and myrtle (‘beautifully peppery and green, just like hanging a fresh wreath on your door’); and Last Light, which is made from essential oils of cinnamon and rosemary (‘all the sweetness and spice of Christmas’).

As well as their strikingly stylish black-fronted shop on The Commons in the heart of Shaftesbury, the company has a thriving mail-order business and supplies 200 stockists up and down the country, from Durslade Farm Shop in Bruton to as far afield as Norway and Australia. Ethically and sustainably produced with plastic-free packaging, the hand-poured soy wax candles are free of beeswax, palm oil and paraffin – the ingredient that alerted Amalia to the idea of making her own candles in the first place. ‘It intrigued me that my favourite candle could give off such a horrible black smoke. I remember jumping onto Google to find out just why that was, and the more I looked into it, the more I thought, ‘Why would a luxury candle be made of such a cheap, destructive

material like paraffin?’ It’s like burning petrol in your home with all the health implications that go with it.’

Being a ‘tactile, hands-on person who loves making things’, Amalia ordered a few kilos of soy wax flakes made in North America from vegetable soybeans and decided to start making candles as presents at her kitchen table – a ‘side hustle’, as she calls it, to the couple’s fulltime jobs working together at a local hamper company. Buoyed by the enthusiastic response from friends and family, they started to look into ways they could improve on the technique and grow their fledgling business.

‘It took a lot of practice and we really went into the science of doing it properly, with the right wicks and equipment, but when we started getting it right we took them to Frome Independent Market and started selling on Etsy,’ says James, who is the business yin to Amalia’s creative yang. ‘We’re opposite brains,’ he explains. ‘For 20 years I worked in logistics and stock management.’

Presented in beautiful vintage vessels such as French enamel canisters and tins, jelly moulds and marmalade jars, the candles were an instant hit with locals, many of whom would get up early to secure the pick of the litter. In 2017, finding it ever harder to stay engaged with the day job – and with one eye on the mortgage they had taken a few years earlier – Amalia decided to ask a financial adviser friend if he could look at the books and see if they could make enough money to make a go of it. His response was just the encouragement they needed. ‘Hey, this is very promising. If you ever need any >

investment, let me know,’ remembers Amalia. ‘Suddenly I realised that maybe the business did have legs after all.’

Five years, expanded premises and tens of thousands of amber jars later, the Botanical Candle Company now counts actor Daisy Edgar-Jones and Nigella Lawson among its customers. It now sells not only candles but beautiful homeware too, from Charlotte Miller brushstroke match pots, and Farm Soap Co. natural soaps from Abbotsbury to hand-blown glassware from La Soufflerie in Paris. Passionate Francophiles, ‘we should have been born French,’ laughs Amalia, the couple have recently returned from a brocante trip to Amiens in Picardy, where they filled their estate car with eclectic vintage finds, including huge rustic wine bottles that James plans to convert into lamps.

With close to 74,000 followers on Instagram, drawn to their daily glimpses of life behind the scenes in the candle workshop and dispatch studio, it is no wonder that customers are prepared to travel from far and wide just to breathe in the shop’s heady atmosphere and essential oils, and return home with a candle or three.

‘We recently had a lovely couple fly all the way from Brazil just to see us. As soon as they arrived in London they caught the train down to Gillingham and came to see the team, including our eight-year-old rescue collie, Paddy. The team is my biggest source of pride,’ says Amalia. ‘Paddy, in fact, has become a bit of a superstar in his own right. We have people coming into the shop just to say hello and bring him a dog biscuit.’

Of course, it doesn’t hurt that the market town of Shaftesbury is picture-postcard pretty, with Gold Hill and its steep, cobbled streets, thatched cottages and panoramic views of the bucolic Dorset countryside. Or that the Botanical Candle Company is in good company for browsing shoppers, with a handful of similarly stylish independent shops on the high street and the Grosvenor Hotel across the road. Since lockdown, Amalia says, she has noticed an increasing number of new faces popping up across the town. ‘James and I both grew up around here and went to school locally so after a while you get to know everyone. You can spot the people from out of town, walking around, browsing, taking it all in. It makes you feel quite proud.’

‘The black shop front could possibly look a bit dark and intimidating if you don’t know us,’ says Amalia, but this is far from the reality of their affable and inclusive approach to business. The couple are already planning the Christmas window display to include a selection of inexpensive gifts displayed on antique children’s easels. ‘We just think that keeping our feet on the ground is really important, not just for the team but for our customers,’ says Amalia. ‘We want people to be able to step into our shop and discover something that won’t cost a fortune to bring happiness and that cosy glow that everyone’s craving right now.’ Something tells me they won’t be disappointed.

thebotanicalcandleco.co.uk

elizabethwatsonillustration.com

Image: Ed Schofield

HOLY COW

Joanna Weinberg, Teals

Iam standing on a ridge overlooking a valley with a classic pastoral view falling away from me: a patchwork of hedgerow-edged fields dotted with cows. The wind blows and the trees sway – a timeless scene of the English countryside. Some of the herd are small brown Jerseys, others are slightly bigger with the familiar black and white markings of the Friesians that have populated our countryside over the past halfcentury. This is the dairy herd of Holy Cow Organics in North Perrott, 40-minutes down the road from Sherborne and supplier of the milk sold in our shop and used at the café and restaurant.

And holy moly, it is good milk. It is rich and sweet, with a mild yet characterful flavour. It is organic and unhomogenised, with a thick band of cream that rises to the top overnight. This is milk that harks back to another time, when milk came straight from the farm, and we were all more connected to where our food came from. It is also milk that nutritionists and parents love. Rich in protein and high in butterfat and essential amino acids, it’s more digestible as well as more nourishing than conventional milk, with no additives or preservatives.

‘One of the reasons our milk is so good is the range of crops we grow for grazing, including red and white clover, lucerne, rye grasses and other species,’ says farmer Matthew Senior. Automatic gates allow access to different grazing areas, changing the direction of the gates to send cows into the different pastures, making sure that they graze a combination of crops, and protecting the land and growth of the different areas.‘The dryness of this past summer was quite a challenge, and we had to go to our winter forage but we’ve made it through ok,’ he says.

Matthew and Coral established Holy Cow some thirteen years ago, at first with an exclusively Jersey herd for the quality and richness of milk, and over time, bred them with Friesians, to increase their yield. The cows spend 9-10 months a year grazing outside, and each produces 18-20 litres of organic milk a day – about half the volume you’d expect from a conventionally farmed dairy herd. They look, even to my untrained eye, healthy and relaxed, wandering between the grazing pastures and the yards freely, confident around people, their coats shiny, and, well, they look happy.

They are friendly animals, and beautiful, too – their big, liquid eyes fringed with thick lashes. Noticeable for a dairy herd, their udders are not swollen and distended with milk. This is because they are completely free range, gaining entry via the big black necklaces they wear, to a milking robot which opens the gates to let them in, as well as recording data from each milking session. ‘I call them their Pandora necklaces,’ smiles Matthew. The necklaces have mostly become established practice with large herds of primarily indoor animals, but Matthew finds them easy and rewarding to work with. Not least because it means his day starts closer to 7am rather than the 5am start that many dairy farmers endure. ‘We love them being completely free range,’ says Matthew. It’s the cows that choose when they want to be milked, whether they want to shelter from the wind for a while or graze their 350 acres.

About 10% of the milk produced goes directly to the local Holy Cow refill stations, the closest of which to Sherborne can be found at Teals. Holy Cow is also the sole supplier of milk to fabulous Dorset gelato-makers Baboo, whose string of beachside shacks have become one of the Dorset seaside highlights (and which coincidentally, can also be found at Teals, right next to the milk station).

‘You have your good days and your bad, but I love all the different elements to this life,’ says Matthew. A good day on the farm might be when a calf is born, or simply being outside in the sun all day. Soon, they expect their daughter, Bethan, back from New Zealand where she has also been dairy farming, and hope that she might put her experience to use on the family farm. She would be working alongside her brother Morgan, who does all the tractor work, and sister-in-law, Rachel, who works in the office. Even their tiny dog, Olive, a daschund-terrier-cross looks very involved in the everyday work of the farm, trotting confidently behind Coral. They have no plans currently for expansion. ‘We have the right number of cows for the land, and it’s possible to manage it as a family-run business. We’re proud of our milk and love being able to connect directly with our customers.’

teals.co.uk holycoworganic.co.uk

POACHED HALIBUT WITH TOMATOES

Jack Smith, The Green

This is a very simple yet well-balanced classic Georgian dish which always impresses friends and customers alike!

Ingredients Serves 4

600g halibut fillet

2 medium-sized shallots, peeled, thinly sliced and separated into rings

2 tablespoons chopped dill

1 tablespoon dill, chopped

1 tablespoon basil, chopped

1 tablespoon parsley, chopped

1 tablespoon of fine capers

100ml white wine

300ml water

4 whole cloves

3 allspice berries

1 bay leaf

2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

6 large ripe tomatoes, peeled, deseeded and diced

1 clove of garlic, finely chopped

1/2 lemon, juiced and zested Dorset sea salt Black pepper

Method

1 Season the fish with salt and pepper to taste and place in a large flat saucepan, arrange shallot rings and herbs over the top.

2 Add capers, white wine, water, cloves, allspice and bay leaf then bring to the boil. Cover and poach until fish is just cooked – approximately 8 to 10 minutes.

3 Meanwhile in a frying pan heat the oil and fry tomatoes over a medium heat with garlic, lemon zest, salt and pepper to taste. Cook the tomatoes for 4-5 minutes, occasionally whisking to help break the tomato apart.

4 Place your poached halibut onto a plate along with the shallots and herbs and spoon over the tomato sauce. Serve with mashed potato and enjoy.

greenrestaurant.co.uk

Image: Katharine Davies

Mat Follas, Bramble Restaurant

Image: Steve Painter © Ryland Peters & Small

This is a version of the mussel gratin I serve in my restaurant. It is rich and sumptuous and is always a popular choice for guests. Take care not to over smoke the mussels as it will overpower their delicate flavour. If you do not have a barbecue, simply mix canned smoked mussels with shelled freshly cooked mussels to achieve a rich, smokey flavour.

Preparation time: 45 minutes

Cooking time: 15 minutes

Serves: 4

Ingredients

2 slices of white bread

Pinch of salt

100g Parmesan cheese, grated

2kg mussels, cleaned and de-bearded

200ml white wine

1 litre shellfish stock

100g cheddar cheese, grated

2 tsp Dijon mustard

100ml double cream

a dash of Tabasco

2 tsp fish sauce (Nam Pla), to taste

Method

1 Preheat the oven to 180°C.

2 Put the bread slices directly onto the shelf of the preheated oven and bake for 5 minutes, until it is crispy and golden. Cool then place in a resealable bag. Crush to coarse breadcrumbs using a rolling pin, add a generous pinch of salt and 1/2 tablespoon of the Parmesan, reseal the bag and shake to combine.

3 Keep the oven on.

4 Put the mussels, white wine and 200ml of the stock in a large saucepan set over a medium heat. Cover and cook until the mussels just open. Strain the mussels, reserving the liquor for later. Take the meat out of the shells and place on an ovenproof plate, discarding the shells.

5 To smoke the mussels, sprinkle the soaked wood chips generously over the top of the preheated barbecue. You will need to use a baking tray that will fit under the lid of the barbecue. Cover the baking tray with a 2.5cm layer of crumpled foil, then place the plate of mussel meat on top (the foil is to insulate the mussels from the direct heat of the barbecue). Close the lid and leave to

smoke for 5 minutes (or longer if the smoke is not particularly intense).

6 Pour the reserved cooking liquor from the mussels and the remaining stock into a large saucepan set over a medium heat. Bring to a simmer, then whisk in the remaining Parmesan and cheddar cheeses, the Dijon mustard, double cream and Tabasco. Taste and add a little fish sauce until the sauce is seasoned to your liking.

7 Divide the smoked mussels between individual ovenproof dishes. Pour over enough sauce to almost cover them, then sprinkle with the breadcrumb mixture. Bake in the still-warm oven for 10-12 minutes until hot and bubbling and the breadcrumbs are lightly browned. Serve at once.

bramblerestaurant.com

Recipe from Fish by Mat Follas, published by Ryland Peters & Small (£14.99)

PREPARING MUSSELS

If you’re unfortunate enough to have suffered the consequences of eating a bad mussel, you’ll know it’s an experience best avoided. Here are a few steps to help minimise the risk of ruining an otherwise perfect evening.

1 Fill a large bowl with cold, salted water and add your mussels. After 20 minutes, discard any that are floating on the surface. Your mussels should be alive before cooking and if they’re floating they’re dead.

2 If you find any that are open, give them a gentle tap or a squeeze. If they close up, great. If they don’t, chances are they’re dead so bin them along with any that are cracked or damaged.

3 Give your remaining mussels a good scrub under cold running water, removing barnacles and anything scary like ’beards’ or tendrils with a knife.

4 Follow your recipe and, once cooked, make sure that you discard any mussels that have not opened.

PLAIN WHITE SOURDOUGH

Paul Collins, Chef

One of the things that cannot be beaten in my opinion, is a loaf of good bread, at any time – breakfast, lunch or dinner – no meal feels complete without it.

So, this month I’d like to share with the Sherborne Times readers, some of my organic sourdough starter. It is 15 years old, and it has moved with me whenever we have moved as a family, and it remains in the same tub

it started its life in.

As we keep hearing about the cost of living and prices of food, it is so much more economical to make your own and when you think that a loaf of good sourdough can command prices of up to £5 a loaf, it does make sense to have a go at making it yourself. If I told you that you could make it in the time it took to boil a kettle, then there is even more of an incentive to make it.

Image: Tory McTernan

Over

more,

you could save in the

year. We also use it for our

of

2 Weigh out flour and salt into the same bowl and mix thoroughly with the spoon. Knead for a minute or so. Leave to prove overnight in your kitchen.

a

so the cost is in the time and

I can make a loaf for about

but once you have mastered

it, there will be no looking back.

3 In the morning, knock back (knead out the excess air) and place into well-floured banneton, allow to prove again for 4 hours.

I am very happy to do a Zoom call

anyone who would want a little guidance on making it.

needed – a bowl, a tea towel, some scales, and a spoon. You can invest in a banneton if you like, but a bowl with a tea towel does the trick.

Ingredients

400g strong bread flour (I use organic bread flour)

240ml water

120g starter

6g salt (I use Maldon Sea Salt)

Method

1 Weigh the water into a bowl, add the starter and stir.

4 When ready, turn the dough out onto a floured tray and put in a preheated oven at 220°c for 30-40 minutes. If you feel creative you can score a cross on the top of the dough before cooking it. The cooked loaf will look like it has come from a bakery!

5 When the dough goes in the hot oven you need to throw a cup of water on the bottom of the oven to create some steam – be careful when you do this and shut the door immediately to keep the steam in the oven. Best to use an old tray.

6 Take out and tap the underside of the loaf to see if it is cooked.

7 Allow to cool before cutting into it…if you can wait that long!

chefpaulcollins.co.uk

Our Tamworth pigs are bred for

flavour. They are outdoor-reared and homebutchered to the highest

at our

in Sandford Orcas, just outside

Sausages,

sherbornetimes.co.uk

THE CAKE WHISPERER Val Stones FIG AND PUMPKIN SPICE JAM

Ihave a mature fig tree in my garden and it fruits really well, probably because it’s in a sunny spot. My sister and brother-in-law, Susan and Wilhelm, gave me the tree as a 2ft shrub and they have guided me over the years with tips for ensuring a good crop. It is now 8ft tall. I will keep it pruned to this height and let it branch horizontally.

I enjoy figs simply cut into quarters and added to my breakfast yoghurt, cereal or porridge. They are lovely baked in red wine and honey but this latest development is absolutely delicious. The jam can be spooned into your porridge, yoghurt or on top of cereal. It is perfect for spooning onto vanilla ice cream and folded into apples when making a crumble or a pie.

I use powdered pectin in this jam as the set would be too light otherwise – powdered pectin also works well when making jams with other low-pectin fruits such as strawberry.

Makes 3 x 1lb jars

Preparation 20 minutes

Cooking 20-25 minutes

Ingredients

1kg ripe figs, quartered (or if large into smaller pieces)

140ml water

1 teaspoon of powdered pectin

450g granulated sugar

Zest and juice of a large unwaxed orange

Zest and juice of an unwaxed lemon

4 drops of pumpkin spice extract * (or 1 level teaspoon pumpkin spice mix)

*Holy Lama Spice drops are available online

Method

1 Place 3 clean jars in the oven on 80C fan for 20 minutes to sterilise them.

2 Put the figs in a heavy-bottomed pan with the water and bring to a simmer. Allow the figs to simmer for 10 minutes or until the pieces of fruit are soft and juicy.

3 Stir the powdered pectin into the sugar until it is well combined and stir into the fig mixture allowing the sugar to dissolve, add the orange juice, orange zest, lemon juice, lemon zest and spice.

4 Allow to boil for 10 minutes stirring regularly (I set a timer for 3 minutes then stir). After 10 minutes, turn it down to a slow simmer and test the jam by putting a spoonful onto a cold plate. After 5 minutes if you run your finger across the jam and it doesn’t run back, the jam is set. If the jam runs back then bring the jam back to the boil for a further 5 minutes.

5 Remove the pan from the heat and allow the jam to sit for 10 minutes. Pour the jam into the jars, seal with waxed circles and seal with lids and label.

6 The jam will keep well sealed for a year in a cool dark place.

bakerval.com

A MONTH ON THE PIG FARM

James Hull, The Story Pig

Idon’t get off the farm much, actually mostly my own choice. Charlotte is the one who goes shopping. She loves it, even though it’s mostly for the cafe that she peruses. Me, I’m happiest at home, wellies on, doing pig stuff or happier still, at the end of a busy day on the farm, escaping to the lavenders and gently trimming them into shape for the winter. There I said it… winter, yuck!

On Monday we did leave the farm, although still strictly work-related – we were doing some market research, so we visited several other farm shops between

here and Bath. As I have mentioned here before, farm shops come in various guises, all generally bigger than ours though. Whilst looking around we are both always drawn to the meat counter, actually to the pork section. Here I always get a sharp stab of pride, that our meat is so different from what is on offer at these large farm shops. What’s different about it? I hear you ask, well, just look at the colour, lying there – it’s a pale, slightly insipid colour, wet and lacking structure. There was zero fat on it, actually just the skin. The person on the counter asks if they can help. I say politely, ‘I’m just looking as we

Image: Katharine Davies

have our own pig farm.’ ‘Oh,’ they answer, in a slightly disinterested manner. ‘Do you know where these pigs come from?’ I ask. ‘Sorry, no I don’t,’ they say, and that’s the natural end of the conversation. We leave sad at the standard of meat on sale, but happy and chatting for many minutes about the difference from our meat. ‘What’s different?’ I hear you ask. Well, if you come to us to buy our pork, it’s a dark rich red colour, more akin to beef. There is a marbling of fat that runs through the meat and there is a layer of fat that covers the meat. When you get the meat home and handle it you will notice how it has texture and a firmness that is different. And when you cook it and taste it, well, that’s when all the elements of our pigs and pork come together to give you pork that has flavour! You may think this is an unashamed plug for our pork, well it is really. You see if you come to us and ask Charlotte or me about our meat you will get the full story, if you want it, of which pig they are eating, how old it was, when it was born, which paddock it was from. We are so proud of the story of our meat and how our pigs live that we called ourselves The Story Pig and always have pigs outside the cafe so you can see for yourselves how they live.

So, why is the meat different? It’s surely not down to living next to a tipi? Well, it’s mainly in the breeding. Tamworths are an old-fashioned breed that haven’t been messed around with – they are so packed with flavour. Then there’s the fact that they live outside –they have the sun on their backs filling their fat with vitamin D. They run up and down our hills developing their muscles, giving them a depth of texture that is second to none – all this adds up to pork that is unashamedly amazing.

Meanwhile, as for winter, we have moved the tipi back into the barn for the winter time, the lights are on, the heaters are out, the bunting is back up and we are cooking pizzas as fast as we can. The lavenders quietly wait out these dark months, hunkering down in their tight balls. The garden is asleep and regenerating for the next season. The pig jobs have become a real chore for the next few months, mud and slipperiness a big feature of my days. It’s head down and look forward. Charlotte is good at helping with that – how lucky am I to have her by my side every step of the way!

thestorypig.co.uk

chef

PRIVATE DINING IN THE LUXURY

‘Not only was the food absolutely delicious, it was beautifully presented, and most definitely of the same

or higher as some

the

‘He turned our vague wishes into amazing dishes. We and all guests were totally delighted. A superb meal and most memorable dinner and evening.’

‘Paul is great on all the little details that make a simple dish into a great dish…a great way to entertain at home –we’ll definitely be booking again’

‘As a top UK

his resume says it all…’

WINES FROM THE AMERICAN ATLANTIC SEABOARD

David Copp

As a would-be historian, I have always taken an interest in the British attempt to colonise North America. Sir Walter Raleigh, one of our more dynamic if not successful adventurers, brought back tobacco and potato plants and encouraged British settlers to go to Virginia. But perhaps the most important influence on the development of American wine was that of Thomas Jefferson, the US Ambassador to France in the run-up to the French Revolution.

Jefferson was impressed with the great French wines and took advantage of his position to visit the great domains of Burgundy and Bordeaux, buying their best wines and sending them back to be cellared at his home in Monticello, Virginia. Jefferson experimented with many different grape varieties and eventually settled on those he considered best for the soil and somewhat humid conditions of Virginia.

John Couture/Shutterstock

At first, a profusion of wild grapes was grown but after the phylloxera blight agronomists developed French-American hybrids, several of which – Chambourcin, Seyval Blanc, Vidal Blanc, Vignoles – are still widely grown. The European grape, Vitis vinifera, only took root with the advent of modern fungicides and the development of techniques to prevent difficult winter conditions. American viticulture was blessed with the arrival of an outstanding oenologist, Dr Konstantin Frank who came from the Ukraine in the 1950s. There are now more Vitis vinifera grapes than hybrids and growers have learned to better match varieties with terroir.

The reputation of the wines of the Atlantic Seaboard is now on the rise as their unique character attracts growing numbers of wine enthusiasts. The thirst for different and more interesting wines is driving dramatic growth in wine sales and tourism. The number of East Coast wineries has tripled since 2000. The most promising regions are Virginia, Carolina and the New York States’ Finger Lakes, 800 miles to the north. They differ in terms of terroir, wine history, grape varieties grown, and development.

On my visit, I delighted in meeting such outstanding winemakers as Jim Law and Luca Paschina at Barboursville Vineyards, Michael Schapps in Virginia and Dr Konstantin Frank and Herman J Weimer in the Finger Lakes. The region is now beginning to attract young winemakers from all over the world. Homegrown winemaking talent is being developed in the ecology department at Cornell University and through the work of viticultural consultants such as Lucie Morton and the great Frenchman Stéphane Dernancourt.

Because the climate of the eastern seaboard tends to be humid with rainfall throughout the growing season, it puts a premium on grape varieties that have thick skins and good disease resistance. Of the white varieties Petit Manseng, Vermentino, and Viognier have shown the greatest promise. Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot are the most promising among the reds.

Climate warming has helped by extending the growing season. As a result, over time we can expect continued changes in the grape varieties successfully grown. There are already highaltitude vineyards in the Blue Ridge Mountains and prime sites in the Shenandoah Valley which are beginning to produce great wines from Pinot Noir and Cabernet Franc. Also look out for the Finger Lakes Rieslings which are growing in character as that region continues to warm.

LITTLE CRITTERS

We all know there’s more to a cat than its coat and stroking the luxuriant fur of a puss-full of purr is one of the great pleasures of feline ownership. It’s not surprising then that when a bald patch appears, often with an open sore, owners seek our advice at an early stage. The first thing is a really good look for unwelcome visitors; harvest mites in autumn, fleas and ticks all the year round. Harvest mites are tiny, orange-red critters that collect in small colonies on ear tips and toes and can cause intense irritation. At least the nuisance is temporary as they are only parasitic in August and September, being free-living the rest of the time.

Fleas are the commonest cause of skin problems in cats, sometimes just by their presence but more often, by triggering an allergic reaction. The paradox here is a flea-allergic cat (or dog) rarely has a living flea on it to be found. The answer to this lies in the short lifespan of a flea on an allergic animal as it is often regularly treated with anti-flea products and the over-grooming response of the host keeps the numbers down. The problem here is the itchy allergic reaction continues after the culprit has been eliminated, so when we look for a living flea, we often don’t find one.

Cats do like to over-activate a particular sort of white blood cell (the eosinophil, pronounced ee-

Mark Newton-Clarke MAVetMB PhD MRCVS, Newton Clarke Veterinary Surgeons

oh-sin-o-fil) that, when behaving itself, is a useful defence against parasites, particularly internal worms. For a proportion of cats, the eosinophils become far too enthusiastic and their capacity to produce excessive inflammation in the skin, the lung and the gastrointestinal tract are well-recognised. Obviously for the not-so-humble flea, the skin is the target tissue and the result of over-zealous eosinophil activity is often irritation enough for the sandpaper tongue of the cat to not only remove fur but layers of skin as well. This really can look quite shocking and the poor puss must be driven mad by the incessant itchiness. Luckily, improved flea control (paying particular

attention to the home environment where flea eggs may be lurking) and our old friends, the steroids prednisolone and dexamethasone, often provide if not a cure, at least good management of a bad state of affairs.

Now, I mentioned that the Ying-Yang eosinophil is also involved in allergic reactions that can affect not only the skin but the lung and the gut as well. Cats, as you may well know, can suffer from asthma. Like humans, inhaling an allergen triggers an allergic response that causes airway inflammation and constriction, resulting in coughing and shortness of breath. Often affecting young to middle-aged cats (2-8 yrs) it is estimated that 1% of domestic moggies and up to 5% of oriental cats suffer from asthma to varying degrees. With a little coaxing and practice, cats can be successfully treated with an inhaler or a nebuliser but sometimes steroid tablets are needed.

We all know about the legendary ability of dogs to exhibit vomiting and diarrhoea as symptoms, usually due to eating something disgusting. But when a cat presents in a similar way, the cause is likely to be different, as fresh is best for the discerning feline. For kittens, a virus or a parasite is usually responsible. For older cats, although there are many things to consider, inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) caused by over-activated eosinophils (amongst others) in response to parasites or a food intolerance/allergy is always a consideration. Just to close the circle, cats that ingest fleas and excessive hair can then trigger a gut response not so different from what’s happening in the flea-allergic skin – the result, a very upset tummy that needs some investigation before the diagnosis can be confirmed.

But here’s the rub; ‘investigations’ are expensive! The trouble is, without them, we are in the dark and treatment becomes trial-and-error, which can waste time and money and cause frustration for owners, patients and vets. There is some good news, as the skin is nicely accessible to our probing and biopsies are quite easy, although a short anaesthetic is often needed. The same cannot be said for the gut and the lung but a blood test to count eosinophils in the circulation can help point us in the direction of an allergic/ inflammatory cause of the problem, be it respiratory or gastrointestinal. In general, whenever possible, we perform diagnostic tests step-by-step so that if the diagnosis is made early on in the process, treatment can start with minimal delay and expense.

LEARNING TO SPOT MINOR INJURIES ON

AND

Voyagerix/Shutterstock

Training my own endurance horse and being a vet carries advantages and disadvantages. I am of the firm opinion that rapid response to an injury, albeit sometimes minor, produces a rapid resolution of the problem. This is not to imply that you should call a vet out for every minor ailment, but rather that you learn to notice subtle changes in your horse’s legs and take the correct action. These are warning signs of micro-injury which may then progress to macroinjury if ignored, and will then necessitate a visit from the vet.

The disadvantage of being a rider and vet is that if my horse goes lame just before a competition then I must make sure that I take my rider hat off and put my vet hat on. This is not always easy when one sees one’s hopes dashed after weeks of training!

It should be noted that the following remarks apply to all ridden horses whatever discipline you are doing, and to whatever level.

I am going to deal with the subtle, or sometimes not so subtle, swellings and filling of the legs below the carpus (knees) and hocks as these are the two most common. The forelegs are more commonly affected as 60% of the horse’s weight is carried on these legs, owing to the weight of the head. I check my horse’s legs every day and it takes just a few seconds. Starting just below the carpus (knee) the tendons and ligaments when normal should feel tight and almost like steel cords. They tie in tight below the knees, the groove between the suspensory ligaments and the flexor tendons is clear and neat, and running down to the fetlock there should be no filling or doughiness at all. Now of course after a hard ride the day before all the legs may be equally, and a little to moderately, filled, but on palpation there is no tenderness and the horse is not lame. This is micro-injury and is a normal part of any horse training, which hardens and toughens the tendons and ligaments. This is why it is sensible after a period of more than two months’ rest to walk your horse for six weeks to strengthen the tendons and ligaments against possible injury later. In addition, but not visibly, bone density increases with steady training. The critical part of the statement above about filling in the legs is that there is equal swelling or at least both forelegs and both hind legs mimic each other. If however one limb, more commonly a forelimb,

is more filled than the opposite side then this is a warning of what I would call an ‘overshoot’. The previous day’s training has been too intense and early macro-damage has been caused. The immediate response should be to back off for a few days, i.e. complete rest. If the swelling resolves steadily over the next two to three days, then the damage was not severe and rest alone will produce recovery. If however the tendon or ligament is at all painful after more than three days, then a veterinary visit is definitely advised. Further delay will simply increase the recovery time hugely.

At this point, I would like to bring in feet as a bruised sole is probably the commonest cause of injury. Yes, the tendon sheath will also fill with a bruised sole and we call this ‘teno-synovitis’ – this is inflammation of the sheath around the flexor tendon and is not the same as tendonitis or a tendon strain.

Interestingly, the feet have a physiological mechanism which perfuse the laminae with blood every hour or so, and in between times there are arterio-venous shunts which are open and shortcircuit the blood across the top of the hoof. This means that most of the time you would have noticed that all feet are cold to the touch, and then every so often you will feel four warm feet: this is completely normal. However if one foot is warm or even hot, and the others are cold then that foot is inflamed and your horse will almost certainly be lame. The best trot-up to assess the lameness is for someone else to do it for you on a hard grit track, concrete or tarmac. With forelimb lameness the head nods down on the sound limb.

The hind limb examination is the same: I start at the hock of which there should be no swelling at all, running down the back of the cannon bone the tendons and ligaments should feel tight and hard as in the forelimbs. However slight windgalls (windpuffs) on both hind fetlocks is quite common and acceptable in my opinion.

In summary: regularly feel your horse’s lower limbs and get to recognise those normal, very tight, cord-like tendons and ligaments. Feel the feet, check their temperature and notice if the shunts are open or closed. If symptoms are present and persist after the advised rest periods seek veterinary help.

kingstonvets.co.uk

A WINTER’S TALE

Sarah Hitch, The Sanctuary Beauty Rooms and The Margaret Balfour Beauty Centre

Winter brings a host of specific skin challenges. The major issue at this time of year is skin dryness which affects not only the facial area but body, hands and lips too. Loss of moisture due to such factors as blasting out the central heating (although this year hypothermia may be more of a concern!), taking regular hot showers or baths and low humidity are named as the chief drying culprits.

Skin is an integral part of the immune system, acting as a physical barrier against unwanted aggressors. The skin’s natural barrier becomes reduced through the natural process of osmosis resulting in barrier impairment and exacerbating conditions such as eczema, psoriasis, atopic dermatitis and rosacea. The skin’s ceramide levels also deplete during the winter months. They are the natural lipids (fats) found in the upper layers of the skin which have a waterproofing effect preventing trans-epidermal water loss to keep the skin supple and hydrated.

An impaired skin barrier contributes to tight, flaky and sensitised winter skin.

Water maintains the structure of the cells in our skin and the tissues around them which is essential for optimal function. The dermis is made of about 90% water largely held in place by hyaluronic acid. When our skin becomes dehydrated the cells and tissue around them shrink and the delivery of nutrients and oxygen decreases resulting in lacklustre skin, fine lines and darker circles under the eyes as lymphatic flow diminishes.

Review your current skincare routine before we get into the really biting weather because skin can

quickly become tight and uncomfortable. The best way is prevention rather than cure so increase the use of moisture-boosting products early and invest in intensive professional facials a couple of times during winter months. Gentle, creamy cleansers, serums, thirstquenching masks, overnight creams and rich body or hand balms are just some of the products that you can adopt into your wintertime skincare routine. Light day moisturisers should be swapped for richer formulations to encourage moisture retention for maximum protection against cold winds and dry indoor humidity, particularly if you spend time in and out of doors. Layer your toner, serum, moisturiser and primer to ensure skin is protected from the elements and critical moisture is locked in. If you’re more prone to dryness and flakiness during the winter season exfoliate to remove the dulling build-up of dead skin cells two evenings a week. This process helps further with the deeper absorption of any products applied afterwards.

Alongside a reshaped skin health routine, lifestyle actions play a vital role in ensuring the winter season passes in comfort and health – ensuring we drink enough water, exercise to increase blood flow, get enough sleep and have a varied balanced diet. Adding in targeted oral supplements tops up depleted nutrients when needed, helping support skin conditions under more strain in the winter months. Nurturing our bodies and skin with clever combinations of topical and oral nourishment supports them from the inside and outside.

thesanctuarysherborne.co.uk margaretbalfour.co.uk

ANGER

Lucy Lewis, Dorset Mind Ambassador and Assistant Psychologist

EamesBot/Shutterstock

Anger is an emotion that we all experience from time to time. However, the frequency and degree to which we get angry can vary between individuals, and importantly, so does the manner in which we manage and express it. Anger is sometimes referred to as a ‘secondary emotion’, meaning that it is produced as a response to a different underlying emotion, such as sadness, embarrassment, hurt, pain, jealousy or fear. This can happen for a few reasons. In some families, expressing emotions other than anger can be discouraged, i.e. little boys being told not to cry. For some people, the underlying emotion can be too difficult to process and make them feel too vulnerable.

Anger gets a bad rap, but the emotion itself is not the problem. It is always OK to feel whatever you are feeling, even if the feelings are big and uncomfortable. What is never OK, however, is using big emotions to justify unfair behaviours, such as shouting at or hitting someone. The fault lies not with the emotion itself, but the way in which it is expressed. Additionally, anger becomes a problem that requires professional help when it gets in the way of the individual’s functioning and wellbeing, for example if it interferes with a person’s

relationships, career, or causes them a great deal of distress. With professional help, someone who is more prone to anger can explore the reasons behind this disposition, the associated underlying emotions, and learn techniques to reduce the frequency, intensity, and expression of anger.

One technique to managing anger is Notice – Pause – Reduce – Process – Deal. This can be beneficial for people who find they are prone to acting without thinking once they lose their temper. However, it can take practice and patience to master the technique, until it becomes second nature.

Notice

For some people, their anger appears to go from 0 to 100 in seconds, where it is then harder to think clearly and make rational choices. However, often it is a case of not being aware of the warning signs of their anger. The first step is to pay attention to any changes early on, such as quickened heart-rate, clenched fists, and angry thoughts. It is also important to build awareness of their triggers, so they can be prepared to experience anger before they enter into a situation and manage it more effectively.

Pause

Once the anger is noticed, it is important to take a pause and become mindful. This can involve labelling the emotion in your head, i.e. ‘I am experiencing anger. I should think carefully before proceeding.’ The pause stage can be difficult due to the associated action urges; the anger emotion can cause a strong urge to act in a certain way, such as by insulting or shouting at the person triggering it. It can take practice to be able to resist these urges.

Reduce

The key now is to take some heat out of the feelings of anger. This can involve momentarily stepping away from the situation, counting backwards from 10 in your head, thinking about something amusing, or taking deep breaths. This will make it easier to proceed mindfully and avoid behaving in ways you will regret.

Process

Once the anger has reduced, it will be easier to think clearly about the cause of the emotion. You can consider whether there is another emotion underlying the anger, i.e. do you feel hurt, betrayed, embarrassed, or disappointed? What are the emotions telling you? What are the objective facts of the situation? Do you have any control over the situation?

Deal

Now that you have processed the emotion and are feeling calmer, you will be better able to deal with the situation effectively. Ask yourself, what is the most effective way to act to get what you want out of the situation? How can you respond assertively but respectfully? How can you calmly and clearly explain what you are feeling and why? Is there a problem to be solved and can anyone help you with the issue? Do you need to respond immediately?

If you would like to learn more about anger and services that can help, visit dorsetmind.uk. If you are struggling to cope with your mental health in general, please talk to your GP.

If you’re in a crisis, treat it as an emergency – call 999 immediately or The Samaritans, FREE on 116 123. NHS Dorset’s Helpline ‘Connection’ can be reached on 0800 652 0190. It’s also available 24/7.

Worried about your child’s emotional wellbeing?

Private online coaching for children, parents, carers and families

Dr Sarah Temple MA MBBChir MRCGP DRCOG

Text 07961 116819 mindfulemotioncoaching.co.uk

THE GRAVITAS OF GRAVITY

The evolution of the chair is the deevolution of mankind! Species can revert to supposedly more primitive forms over time (picture the reverse of the well-known depiction of ape to man). When looking at how we use our bodies in everyday life, then the suggestion is not so ridiculous. Just like the disappearing polar icecaps, there may come a point when our actions are

irreversible. However, agency provides opportunity to save us from our own fate.

The sad story of a sedentary life… When I am young I am on my haunches to explore curiosities around me; insects and muddy puddles, toys and books on the playroom floor. And then a grown-up sits me in a chair!

Emma Rhys Thomas, Director and Instructor, Art of Confidence

Paradise Studio/Shutterstock

I learn to slouch! The natural curves of my spine change shape – my muscles adapt to the new use and effort of my non-movement.

From chair to where?

When I am an adolescent I lounge. I am a comfortseeker, a sloth! I slouch on the couch.

From sofa to motor: as a young adult I drive to work on my Vespa. I take the lift to sit in ‘complete comfort’ in my ergonomic office chair, all day at my desk.

From Vespa to nester: I drive, the school run, the a-2-b of my busy life. My head is heavy, I slump. My spine is c-curved, as it once was when I was an infant, only now I am less inclined to pull myself upwards. The comfort of my home allows me to relax and put my feet up. ‘Alexa’ does all the channel swapping, and closes the curtains for me.

From rocking recliner to assisted riser: I can see the sea from my day room window!

Sedentary behaviour has long been permeating busy lifestyles. The pandemic has heightened our awareness of the potential harm – the advice is to take action now. There are a plethora of excellent activities and suggestions to move, and feel better. Of course, I would promote my own methods – I am a proponent for improving the nation’s posture and understanding its impact on physical and mental health (‘Posture Matters’ Sherborne Times, September 2022). But a good place to start, whichever movement improvement model you choose, is to use gravity as a training aid and grow your awareness of posture in daily activities.

It is limiting to think of posture as a static pose of sitting or standing – it should be considered also in dynamic movement. Attitudes are embedded in posture – it’s the unspoken body language between us all. We all know when we are tired, as does everyone else, for our bodies signal our feelings and state of mind through posture. Slouching may suggest negativity, unfriendliness, anxiousness, boredom, apathy or plain tiredness. Such poor posture may indicate a lack of confidence and self-esteem. Attending to posture not only improves our physical selves but also our mental state and communication with others.

When we slouch, for whatever reason, we feel heavy. Our weight is felt through the experience of gravity. Slouching causes the back of the head to be pulled down with the spine, a feeling of collapse.

Don’t give in to gravity! And there it is: feel a few pounds lighter and lift the spirits.

As alluded to earlier, gravity can be used as a training aid, as good as adding weights in the gym, but unlike in the gym we can do it all day long (if we are mindful of it) and that is when the magic happens: bodies change shape, they get stronger, we feel better, energy and productivity go up significantly when attending to posture and resisting gravity.

Take, for example sitting, an unavoidable daily activity. It can be made very effective when thinking about resisting gravity…

Lead with the head, just the head, not forcing the chest out, arching the back, or pulling yourself up with interfering shoulders that think they can do the job (all common mechanical faults when told to sit up straight). Elongate through an imaginary ceiling imposed by the force of gravity, using the crown of the head. Continue to lengthen the spine away from the sit bones, allowing gravity to continue its journey through the vertebral column, the natural curves of your spine, in a downward direction. The larger the bones in the body the more force or weight they can bear. Gravity follows a plum line and passes through the larger lumbar vertebrae of the spine. Feel the weight of this force through the pelvis. Be aware of the downward force of gravity and the upward lift you have created through the crown of your head.

It is this two-way energy flow that gives space in between for all of your body’s functioning, for example; breathing and turning on deep stabilising postural muscles. It is this two-way ‘pull’ that lengthens, strengthens and tightens the middle, getting longer and leaner. Often the abdominals can be felt waking up to assist in this new way of unsupported sitting. If that is the case, try to increase their engagement, a little like turning up a dimmer switch. However, in all your practice, it is important to avoid undue stress and tension. Avoid ‘gripping’, ‘squeezing’, ‘pushing’…these should be replaced with feelings of ‘expanding’, ‘extending’, and lengthening.

Now practise; when sitting, when standing and dynamically. It becomes easier – it becomes second nature. Resisting the urge to give into gravity is your way of throwing away the crutch of the chair, armchair or sofa and finding a way to signal to the muscles that support posture that they have a job to do.

quantockpilates.com

EXPLORING BREATHWORK

Dawn Hart, YogaSherborne, in conversation with Sandra Miller, Functional Medicine Practitioner

Iuse breathing exercises to form the foundation of every yoga class I teach. It has been literally life-changing for me and many people I know, especially in helping manage anxiety and long-term stress. However, I know that’s not the only benefit and I know there is so much more to learn. I wanted to speak to someone in a different field that uses breathwork – I met Sandra through the Sherborne Netwalk group. She is a Functional Health Practitioner and breathwork forms part of her support and education for her clients. I asked her some of the questions I’ve been pondering and that I’m sometimes asked after a class.

How do you describe Functional Medicine?

While there is huge variation within this field, I personally equate a lot of what I do with the term lifestyle medicine. At its core, all Functional Practitioners like to address underlying causes of illness and disease as much as possible.

I love bringing optimal health to myself and others through simple strategies which can form part of everyday life. Targeted changes have the potential to unlock a vast array of elegant mechanisms of healing in the body. The result is typically a release into a level of energy, focus and joy in life that simply cannot be achieved any other way.

Keronn Art-Shutterstock

How does this relate to breathwork?

Breathwork is a great example of one of the lifestyle habits I recommend and coach people in using to better their health. We all know it’ll only take a few minutes of not breathing to finish any one of us off! But there’s so much more to breathing than this rather ‘all or nothing’ view. However, might this reminder of how vital good oxygenation is for the body naturally lead us to consider what happens to the body if we chronically breathe in a way that is less than ideal? What then for our health? Might chronic poor breathing result in chronic disease? The evidence points to a resounding ‘yes’. Fortunately, addressing chronic disease is my speciality!

Why would I need to learn to breathe?!

We are so used to thinking of breathing in terms of bringing oxygen into the body but if we are to oxygenate tissue and not just the blood we need the right amount of carbon dioxide too. This is because of the Bohr effect, which is a cunning bit of biochemistry that makes sure that haemoglobin gives up the oxygen it carries in the bloodstream most efficiently when near the hardest working muscles. The increased carbon dioxide produced by exercised muscle causes a shift to a more acidic pH, resulting in a physical change in the haemoglobin that makes it better at releasing its oxygen. However, most of us are in the habit of over-breathing without being aware of it. That’s because it is, well, a habit! Overbreathing causes us to breathe out too much carbon dioxide. The most common cause of over-breathing is mouth breathing as opposed to breathing through the nose. Long-term over-breathing lowers our carbon dioxide tolerance which perpetuates the problem unless we consciously do something different. Far from simply being a waste gas (although it is certainly toxic in excess) at appropriate levels, carbon dioxide has many benefits in addition to releasing oxygen from the bloodstream into muscle tissues for better athletic performance. Better oxygenation of cells means better cell function. Properly oxygenated brain cells support good cognitive function while sweeping away brain fog. A properly oxygenated liver cell will be able to get on with its job of detoxification. Of course, good cell oxygenation is a prime way to combat fatigue. Not only this but the right amount of carbon dioxide actually calms the nervous system. This is why optimal breathing is cited as being so beneficial for anxiety and depression.

What are your favourite breathing practices?

If I wake in the night and can’t seem to doze off again too readily then I like to count my breaths in my mind. I’ll count ‘one’ to breathe in and ‘two’ to breathe out and carry on until I reach ten. Then I start again from one. For me, this recruits just the right amount of brain engagement to deter the temptation to start thinking about tomorrow’s to-do list. Conversely, I’m not thinking so hard as to keep me awake! It also offers a light breathing consciousness that promotes a calming longer out-breath. Longer out-breaths bring a shift to parasympathetic dominance, also known as the ‘rest and digest’ state, ideal for sleep.

A more advanced technique I benefit from is the Wim Hof Method. This challenging breathing practice causes a short-term, controlled stress (a bit like exercise) which shifts the body into a more energised state whilst also increasing carbon dioxide tolerance to promote healing.

I adore breathwork for being a free tool that is always available, for young and old, to bring nervous system regulation within moments. If you’d like to know more, please get in touch with either one of us.

yogasherborne.co.uk wholistichealth.co.uk

Respecting the past, embracing the future

In the 231 years since we were established, The Abbey Pharmacy has seen many changes in our society. We continue to evolve and are now, more than ever, committed to meeting the changing needs of our customers.

Our vision for the transformation of The Abbey Pharmacy invests not only in the health of our community but also our high street – we need your support in making this a reality.

To find out more about our exciting plans and to register your support, please visit www.theabbeypharmacytransformation.com

WARM AND FUZZY

What do you do to relax? is a question I ask all my guests coming for treatments. They usually reply with I don’t know how to or I don’t get time to. Relaxation comes easy to me, it’s my job. I spend my days helping people to feel relaxed and at ease in a tranquil environment. I am calm in myself, which allows me to fully engage and be present in my work. I often think of my guests and what they can do to relax - they are all at different stages of their life, facing different stresses.

We live in a fast-paced world, hurrying to have everything ‘now’ and striving to be our ‘best possible selves’. With the bar set so very high, we heap pressure on ourselves and often those around us. Sometimes even the pursuit of relaxation can feel like another item on our to-do lists.

Your mind is the most powerful system – it is your control panel. Often, we let our minds wander and before we know it, a million thoughts are ricocheting around our heads, leading to the inevitable ‘brain fog’. Think of it like a malfunction – too much information.

Does this sound like you? If so, there are very simple ways to help ease these stress points, freeing your mind to clear and be present in the moment. Here are a few suggestions:

Write a list

It can help to plan for the day, week, or month ahead. Get it on paper and tick off as you go. Giving yourself a solution to a problem and a plan for how to get there is a very powerful exercise.

Naomi Laver, The Lazy Barn

Exercise

It is very important to release your natural endorphins. Even if you walk, walk faster – you’ll never regret it!

Eat well

Where you can, try to cook from fresh ingredients. Not only will you get the satisfaction of a delicious meal you’ve created but it also skips the processed food which makes you feel unmotivated and lethargic.

Reduce alcohol intake (sorry!)

Alchohol can heighten anxiety and stress, causing ‘brain fog’ to become more apparent, making simple tasks and rational thinking much harder.

Engage with people

Whether it is a simple conversation in your local supermarket, a massage treatment, or a catch-up with old friends. It’s important to engage and be present in what you are faced with. Share your problems with people you trust and enjoy good uplifting conversations – sometimes strangers can make your day seem a little brighter!

Take time for yourself

Scrap the ‘I don’t have time’ excuse and actually make time for yourself. This is the hardest one of them all because guilt plays a big part but why do we work so hard if we can’t then relax and make healthy use of the downtime?

Surround yourself with nature

Go for a walk in the gorgeous countryside around us, listen to the birds and the wind, smell the trees and truly think about the nature that surrounds you. Try walking barefoot in the grass, focussing your mind only on what you see, feel and smell. It’s a very grounding exercise!

Being able to relax can be challenging as it boils down to a balance of social, occupational, leisure, environmental and emotional needs. If you have more or less of any of these, the balance can tilt, causing stress and presenting barriers to relaxation. You can regain control, but first you must actively address your wandering, striving mind and allow time to steady yourself.

Breathe slowly, reconnect, refuel and rebalance. thelazybarn.co.uk

PUMPKIN WORKOUT

Craig Hardaker BSc (Hons), Communifit

Image: Stuart Brill

Pumpkins take on many forms during Halloween but come November, with the celebrations passed, before heading to the compost heap why not put them to use as weights? These exercises may not be suitable for everyone, so please feel free to contact us if you need advice. Keep the repetition count to 12-15 for up to three sets, and only lift a pumpkin of suitable size and weight. This could be two small pumpkins, one in each hand, or one bigger pumpkin suitable to your strength. We have included exercises to cover all areas: upper, core, lower and cardio. Good luck!

Pumpkin shoulder press

We all need strong and mobile shoulder joints and this is the perfect exercise to achieve this. Either sitting down or standing, lift the pumpkin from your chest to above your head. How high can you lift your pumpkin? Make sure to keep your back straight with your core engaged, looking forward and maintaining a controlled speed.

Pumpkin body twist

Either sitting on a chair or on the floor, hold your pumkpin in outstretched arms and twist the body slowly to both your left and right-hand sides. Make sure you look at the pumpkin throughout to encourage the body twist. Are you able to rotate 180 degrees from

one side to the other? The straighter you can keep your arms, the harder this will be.

Pumpkin squat Stand tall with your feet shoulder-width apart. Keep your elbows narrow to the torso, with the pumpkin tightly placed on your chest. Whilst looking forwards, slowly bend your knees to a maximum of 90 degrees angle. Once you have reached your maximum, slowly straighten your legs back to the standing position. When bending your knees make sure to keep a neutral alignment of the legs – this is where the toes, knees and hips are all in one straight line.

Pumpkin shuttles

Walk or run an appropriate distance with your pumpkin to match your level of fitness. Then slowly squat to place the pumpkin on the floor. Head back to your starting position and back to your pumpkin to repeat this process for up to one minute. Make sure to focus on your breathing, in through your nose and out through your mouth. Slow down if fatigued.

So there you have it, a pumpkin workout to spice up your routine! A fun workout for the whole family and a great way to encourage children to exercise using their repurposed carved creations.

communifit.co.uk

CONTENTIOUS PROBATE

John Osman, Partner, Litigation & Dispute Resolution, Mogers Drewett

The scope of disputes under the banner of Contentious Probate is endless and in recent years there has been a significant increase in cases. Essentially, Contentious Probate is where there is a disagreement after someone has passed away about the distribution or administration of their estate. Below are some examples of typical disputes:

Challenges over the validity of a will

It may be argued that the will was not signed or witnessed correctly, that the deceased person did not have the mental capacity, that they were coerced, did not know or approve of the contents or that there is in fact a later valid will in existence.

Disputes over the administration or distribution of a deceased’s estate

The executors or administrator who is appointed refuses to administer the estate, does it wrongly, takes too much time, or seek to use assets and money for their own purposes.

Clarification

Sometimes a will is valid but contains a mistake or a provision is not understood. In certain circumstances a court will allow a will to be rectified or seek to determine the exact meaning of a clause or gift.

Fraud/Forgery

Unfortunately fraud does occasionally take place.

Wills and signatures can be forged, a deceased person impersonated or a valid will destroyed. To a lesser degree occasionally a party can be accused of unduly influencing the maker of the will.

Claims under the Inheritance (Provision for Family and Dependants) Act 1975

The act applies whether or not there is a valid will in existence and allows the court to exercise discretion and award reasonable financial provision out of a deceased’s estate, to a person who was dependant upon them.

Costs

There are often disputes over the costs incurred by those administering the estate, the trustees appointed, or the lawyers assisting them. It may be possible to apply to the court to reduce those costs.

Replacing Executors/Administrators/Trustees

Replacing executors, administrators or trustees who fail to take up their duties or deal with their duties adequately.

Trusts

Often people who pass away leave their money or assets in a trust and disagreements often arise as to ownership or use of property or money in that trust. Trustees may disagree or fail to adhere to the wishes of the deceased resulting in a dispute with those entitled now or in the future.

When seeking advice or bringing a claim, look to engage a solicitor who is a Member of The Association of Contentious Trust and Probate Specialists (actaps.com). They will help you resolve your dispute professionally and with sensitivity.

mogersdrewett.com

FROM LITTLE ACORNS…

Mark Salter CFP, Chartered FCSI, Fort Financial Planning

Iwas out for a run a few weeks ago, enjoying the view of Sherborne Castle and, whilst stretching some very tired limbs, I was fortunate enough to watch a squirrel collect an acorn and bury it only yards away from me. Comically, it then very carefully, delicately and precisely covered up the burial site with two freshly fallen leaves (which blew away only a few seconds later).

Squirrels don’t eat every acorn that they come across; they bury them to be retrieved at a later point when food may have become scarce.

Such a strategy could be considered one of the principles of financial planning. Rather than spending every penny that is earned, it is often considered prudent to put some money aside, by saving or investing, for the future.

As financial planners, we often refer to this as ‘delayed gratification’. Delayed gratification can take many forms – it might mean having more money to spend in retirement or retiring five years earlier than normal. It might mean spending less on day-to-day needs to help fund a trip of a lifetime. For younger people, it might mean saving for a deposit to buy their own house or having enough money to set up their own business.

It’s important to review your expenditure on a regular basis and perhaps even more important right now with the cost of living increasing. Checking your bank statements, direct debits and standing orders to see what we spend our money on is a very important part of being financially well organised. You can then question whether that expense is giving you value for money. For example, a gym membership of £35 per month is expensive if you’re only managing the gym once every few months but great value if you’re going three times a week. A cup of coffee and cake, every working day, can easily cost £100 each month so there are often savings that can be made even if the cost of other items is increasing.

Here is my 4-step plan to start changing your financial future Step 1 – Pay attention to your spending Step 2 – Find wasted money Step 3 – Automate savings Step 4 – Repeat

By being more careful with current expenditures it is relatively easy to start building up a cache of money for the future. By saving approximately £300 per month, rising by 5% per annum and obtaining a return of 4% a year, a deposit of £20,000 can be built up in less than five years.

For longer-term savings goals, like early retirement, the magic of compounding can come into play. Saving the same amount as shown above – £300 per month, rising by 5% per annum and achieving 4% return, would increase to over £396,000 in around 30 years. If you were able to achieve a 6% return the amount would be closer to £528,000. These are life-changing amounts of money.

Real financial planning, when properly implemented, enables people to live the life of their dreams. While it may sound simplistic, we can fulfil many of our dreams if we control what we waste. We all fritter money away; if we can stop frittering too much away – and crucially, invest the saving – we will be able to do so much more than we ever imagined.

professional,

based

Ithought it was time that I explained what type of computers we use, and the reasons behind this. I often get asked ‘Would you use that type?’, so here goes!

Approx 80% of our customers are Microsoft Windows users and 75% of those customers prefer to use a laptop over a desktop. The rest of our customers are Apple users and of those, I would guess 90% prefer a MacBook (laptop style) over an all-in-one iMac.

Laptops these days are by far the more popular option because they are mobile products and with the right extra equipment you can use them like a desktop, i.e. plug in a bigger screen and have a separate keyboard and mouse. The plus is also that once your work is finished you can pick it up and take it with you. All you need to achieve this is to either plug everything into the side of the laptop, if it has all the correct ports, or buy a docking station/adaptor which is (normally) plugged in with USB-A to give you everything you need. I personally use this at home when remote working. Some customers however love a desktop PC and that is fine. If you have space for it and only want to use it in the same space, it is generally the most reliable and easiest to be repaired.

Kelly, who runs our office, has an all-in-one PC which is basically a motherboard screwed to the back of a screen with a cover on the back. A great space saver, harder to upgrade/repair, but doable. If you’re looking to buy one, make sure you buy the right specification and allow for it to be future-proof.

I am more of an Apple man and once you are in

WHAT DO I USE?

the Apple Eco System (as they call it) it’s basically impossible to get out! I used to use a MacBook Pro because they looked smart and because I needed to know how to fix them if someone brought one in – I could try out all sorts on my own product before jumping into a repair on someone else’s.

Now I rock an iMac with 2 extra screens in the office, a MacBook Pro for home/remote work, an iPad Pro for an extra screen for the MacBook Pro and for holidays, and an iPhone Pro Max for texts and telephone calls. All of these are synced via 2TB of iCloud storage with business and personal emails synced across all of them. One of the main reasons I use Apple and iCloud is for the hundreds of photos that I take. I can take a photo on my iPad or iPhone and within seconds it will be sent to every device and backed up to iCloud. It also means that should I ever lose or break a device I can just restore the data from iCloud.

For most home users a Windows-based computer will do everything you want it to do, and it will cost you a fair price. Having an Apple-based computer will cost you quite a lot more, but still do most things a Windows computer can do and more, but bear in mind most people only use the very basics like browsing the web and email so is it worth the extra money?

This is not a ‘you should buy’ article, this is merely what I use and what I have noticed over the years of being in the computer business. The choice as always is yours, and as ever if you need help you know where to come!

computing-mp.co.uk

James Flynn, Milborne Port Computers

To treat all clients with the same courtesy irrespective of wealth or budget.

Many adviser firms now have minimum fund sizes or high minimum fees making it sometimes difficult to receive cost effective advice. We believe this to be unfair and unethical. Whether you have £10,000 or £10,000,000, we have no minimum investment size, there will be a service to fit your needs enabling you to receive quality advice, now and in the future.

Planning

Fee Planning

PULLING STRINGS

Jan Pain, Sherborne Scribblers

In the late forties, my parents and I would take tea with Uncle Gerald, my rotund and jolly relation with the deepest cleft chin I ever saw, intriguingly sprouting tufts of dark hair. His ebullient personality was a foil to that of his somewhat superior wife, Aunt Dot, whose languid manner and stylish mode of dress were equally captivating to a small girl.

They had been bombed out of their London home and, like thousands of others, were living in a prefab – the compactness and rectilinear design of which appealed to me after our sprawling house in the Surrey hills. It seemed like a cosy doll’s house, filled with utility furniture and donated household bits and pieces from sympathetic family and friends to fill that yawning gap of losing nearly everything.

Gerald was what in those days was referred to as ‘a card’ – full of fun and practical jokes and a competent pianist in the music hall tradition, thumping out on our arrival The Twelfth Street Rag from his rescued bomb-scarred piano, heralding our anticipation of scones for tea. As a precursor, Gerald would fill a Kilner jar with creamy milk, shaking it calypso style, and produce enough butter for our tea time treat. Entranced, I waited for the magic moment when a golden yellow nugget appeared and watched as he poured off the buttermilk. A pinch of salt was added and, together with Dot’s homemade plum jam, the indulgence was complete.

But it was late on those autumn afternoons when the highlight of our visit would materialise, thanks to Gerald’s thespian leanings and generosity. In Church Street, Chiswick, stood a little theatre – a two-storey house with a lofty studio above where John and Doris Bickerdike performed with their Ebor Marionettes. Ascending to the first floor into the cavernous, dark space seating around fifty people, I had no idea I was in the company of highbrows, lowbrows, artists, musicians and poets comprising the audience, only being aware of a frisson of excitement running through my veins. Gold crushed velvet curtains adorned the proscenium opening with an embroidered drop drape behind. It was a breath-taking setting, full of promise. A workshop occupied the rear where puppets hung in the course of creation and the walls of the auditorium were covered in photos from the Bickerdike’s West End glory days in the thirties, depicting costume and scenic designs of historical interiors.

The repertoire of this remarkable company included plays, operas, fantasies and performances by characters from variety theatre. John was a professional woodcarver by trade, whose ‘day job’ was fashioning angels to embellish

ecclesiastical buildings. He achieved great realism in his marionette creations, then handed them over to Doris who made the costumes and was renowned for her skill as a manipulator.

I can only surmise that a gramophone provided the source of music accompanying each act. I was introduced to The Peer Gynt Suite as trolls danced before my eyes in The Hall of the Mountain King where Peer finds himself captive, and the exoticism of Anitra in her Bedouin tent from Ibsen’s same story – each brought to life by the clever animation of the characters as the Bickerdikes controlled the marionettes.

The little cameos are too numerous to recollect fully but my undoubted favourite was Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street – that enduring, grizzly, Victorian melodrama sending shivers down my spine. It’s said that children enjoy experiencing this sort of terror and I don’t believe it left me traumatised! On reflection, the technical expertise of the operators was astonishing, as the barber’s chair tipped its bloody victim via the wings into the hands of Mrs Lovett below, shortly to become the filling for her meat pies! Deftly, the chair was restored to its upright position to await its next client.

Thrilled and exhausted in equal measure, I clambered into the back seat of my father’s Ford 8, where I slept on the journey home. This magical entertainment left its mark on my love of puppet theatre, which in later life has been enjoyed in most European capitals, where it still flourishes. Inextricably linked, for me, are tea time scones and the theatricality of Uncle Gerald whose introduction to this enchanting world was such an unsurpassed gift.

HARDWOOD LOGS FOR SALE

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Contact Charlotte Miller 07974 178442 charlotte@timbermillers.co.uk www.timbermillers.co.uk

This month if you are able, please consider visiting the Just Giving website to donate money, which you can gift aid. Your cash donations are valuable and enable us to buy items for babies, children and people with special dietary needs. www.justgiving.com/sherborne-foodbank

Thank you. www.sherbornefoodbank.org 07854 163869 help@sherbornefoodbank.org

AMY JEFFS

Tales from Early Medieval Britain Lucy Jago, for the Sherborne Literary Society

Image: Lucy McGrath

Amy Jeffs is an early medieval specialist but she is also a writer and artist. In her second book, WILD: Tales from Early Medieval Britain, she powerfully combines these skills to recreate for us the wildernesses, both geographical and psychological, experienced by our ancestors over a thousand years ago. Gleaning characters and tantalising snippets from manuscripts and artefacts produced between 600-1000 CE, Jeffs creates new stories and accompanying wood engravings. She brings our early medieval ancestors to life while simultaneously revealing their distance. Then, as now, humans had a profound affinity to the wilderness. They too battled with changing climate, extreme weather, violent incursion and pestilence; profound fears were both expressed and relieved by voyaging into the wilderness. ‘Bleak and chilly as the early medieval portrayal of the wild often is, the philosophies that lie beneath send up rays of brilliant hope,’ writes Jeffs.

Jeffs’ primary sources are writings of the period, especially the ‘elegies’. These non-rhyming poems of deep mystery and emotion are found in the Exeter Book, ‘the foundation volume of English literature and one of the world’s principal cultural artefacts’ (UNESCO). Jeffs also goes to Irish and Welsh nature poems from the 8-10th centuries and the insular Latin spoken here after the Roman occupation. Like a crow with jewelled eye, she picks through the treasures of Sutton Hoo and runes scratched in whalebone and stone. She shows us the wonder of these extraordinary survivals and keeps them alive for a modern audience.

These isles were a melting pot of cultures, ethnicities and religions in the Middle Ages. Celtic Britons ruled in the west, Germanic tribes were settling in the east, Irish kingdoms vied with Picts in the north and Norse incursions threatened the coasts; all this against the backdrop of a prolonged period of cold, stormy weather. The voices of the dispossessed Jeffs listens to particularly closely: exiles, lepers, ghosts, the enslaved, the wise mad and monsters, whether they be underground, at sea, in fen or forest. Her stories are powerful and tantalising. Each is followed by reflections on the sources and her own experiences of tramping similar ground. Somersetbased, she descends into Mendip caves and kneels among the bones of executed women in ancient barrows. She loses herself in a medieval hunting forest and the riddle landscape of fens. One medieval text contains an island of fallen angels transformed into singing birds; Jeffs finds in the dawn murmurations of starlings that same harmony of action and connection. She helps the reader use the modern world as a bridge to the mentality of the past.

In this beautiful and moving book, Jeffs shows us how our ancestors found hope in wildness, even in the face of betrayal, oppression, loneliness, illness, heartache, catastrophe and death. ‘I draw strength,’ writes Jeffs, ‘from people who, for all their fallibility and the perils of their age, saw in the wilderness a potential for harmony and took action according to their understanding. Now, we can do the same.’

sherborneliterarysociety.com

A Net for Small Fishes by Lucy Jago is published by Bloomsbury.

Wednesday 30th November 7pm-9pm

Wild: Tales from Early Medieval Britain –Talk and Book Signing with Amy Jeffs

The Digby Memorial Hall, Digby Road. Tickets £10 (£9 members) from sherborneliterarysociety.com/events

Richard Hopton, Sherborne Literary Society

Light is the elixir of art, ever different and ever-changing, sought by artists everywhere and in every age. Angela Harding’s new book is a celebration of light and of the natural world. As she writes, ‘Light can be enjoyed and appreciated in so many ways, in different seasons and different weathers…the thin light of winter and the shocking blast of the midday summer sun are two extremes.’

Angela Harding is a printmaker who specialises in depicting nature and animals, especially birds. Since training in the fine art of printmaking in the early 1980s, she has exploited the medium to portray the wonders of nature and conjure up the unique charm of the English countryside. Her prints are beautiful, intricately worked images, the product of her acutely observant eye and her close connection to the rhythms of the natural world. But it is light, in all its moods, which informs her work. As she writes:

‘Waking in our bedroom in Rutland on a bright summer’s morning is a very different experience to waking on our boat to a damp autumnal daybreak, which is different again to the gradual dawn of a winter’s first light at home, with its rosy hues that hold the promise of a day less grey than the one before.’

The book is structured around the course of the day to demonstrate how the ever-changing light affects the way we – and, in particular, the artist – see the world around us.

Wild Light contains ninety-seven of Angela’s prints, attractively reproduced. They were all made in her studio

in Rutland but record scenes from various parts of England: her father’s cottage in Shropshire, the Norfolk and Suffolk coast, Cornwall, Scotland, and her home patch in Rutland. The prints portray a roe deer, foxes, whippets, cats, hares, chickens, adders, a mouse, a hedgehog, and a sheep but the stars are the birds. We are treated to Angela’s depictions of a multitude of British birds: garden birds – blackbirds, woodpeckers, thrush, finches, robins, wrens, and rooks; field birds – owls, pigeons, partridge, pheasant, quail, plover, curlews, and nightingales; raptors – ospreys, a golden eagle, falcons, kestrels, and a sparrowhawk; and seabirds – cormorants, shearwaters, and choughs.

Early in her career, Angela created her prints by etching, a process which involves cutting an image into a plate to create a black line in the resulting print. Nowadays, by contrast, she uses predominantly block printing in which the artist creates a white line in the printed image, the opposite effect in which the ink colours the block, not the line as in etching. Silkscreen printing adds colour to her images where required.

If anyone, even vestigially, still entertains the notion that somehow prints are not ‘proper’ art, original and unique, on account of the fact that they can be – and are – reproduced many times over, should read this stunning book and be converted, once and for all. The originality and sheer artistic talent of Angela’s work is here for all to see.

sherborneliterarysociety.com

Talk and Book Signing with Angela Harding

Tuesday 8th November 6.30pm for 7pm

The Butterfly Room, Castle Gardens

Tickets £5, available from Winstone’s

shop.winstonebooks.co.uk

Wild Light by Angela Harding (Sphere, £25) Sherborne Times reader offer price of £23 from Winstone’s Books

PAUSE FOR THOUGHT

Chris Bryer, ReBorne Community Church

How can it be November already? Where has this year gone? It doesn’t seem five minutes (a slight exaggeration) since we were thinking about Christmas 2021.

Time remains constant, but our perception of it can vary enormously. When we are in the middle of difficult or trying circumstances time can seem to go so slowly. On other occasions time seems to fly by; ask anyone about their wedding day and the reply will often be that it went by too quickly.

In the past century, we have benefitted from the creation of many devices that have been invented to save us time. We have automatic washing machines, vacuum cleaners, tumble driers, microwave ovens and mobile phones, all of which leave us time to do other things. So what do we do with all the time we’ve gained?

We can watch programmes on our televisions that we can pause, rewind or fast forward. Some of us get so used to doing this that we wish that we could do this in our daily lives, pausing at precious moments, rewinding happy events or memories to experience them again or fast-forwarding through uncomfortable or difficult times.

The truth of the matter is that we all have 24 hours in a day, whether we are a Head of State or a newborn baby. Whatever we do, we can’t change that. We expect the sun to rise tomorrow, the day to pass and evening to come as it has done for millennia. As Geoffrey Chaucer noted, ‘Time and tide wait for no man.’

Some may remember that back in 1965 The Byrds released their version of the song Turn, Turn, Turn. The lyrics for this were taken directly from the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible and are the same words that Nicola Sturgeon read out at the Service of Remembrance for the Queen, held in St. Giles Cathedral in September. The author of Ecclesiastes, King Solomon, writes that there is a time for everything under heaven, including a time to be born and a time to die. These things, in the natural course of events, are not under our control. He also writes that, ‘God has set eternity in the human heart,’ so it’s not surprising that we are not always aware that our life on earth has an end date.

When Queen Elizabeth II died, many people commented that because she had been there for all their lives, they thought that she would go on forever. It doesn’t matter who we are, our time is limited. King Charles III recognised this when he said in his first official address as King – that his rule would be ‘For the remaining time God grants me.’ As a previous King, King David said, ‘My times are in your hands.’

JRR Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings, wrote, ‘All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.’

Time is a great leveller; we all have the same number of hours in a day, days in a week, weeks in a year. What we have to decide is what to do with this time. Maybe we could start by taking William Arthur Ward’s advice – he said, ‘God gave you a gift of 86,400 seconds today. Have you used one to say Thank you?’ Why not try it?

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