Secrets from Chuckling Goat

by Shann Nix Jones

  So we fall back on the old word-of-mouth system, wherein you ring someone and ask them if they know of anyone who has a billy. The Welsh jungle drums… and they’re remarkably effective.

  This year we ended up borrowing a billy from a friend to take our Anglo-Nubian girls on – ahem – ‘dates’. Poor Hercules the billy. He was very young – if well-intentioned – and if he were human, he would have glasses, spots and buckteeth. He manfully did his best, but our glossy girls were about twice his size, and they would look at him, look at me and then roll their eyes, as if to say, ‘Is this as good as it gets?’

  But the thing about Hercules is that he was so easy to handle, and so easily intimidated himself, that I found myself changing my mind about males. They’re not so bad. They’re not so scary. And the weirdest thing of all – I kind of like the way they smell. Strange, I know. Suddenly, keeping our own male was sounding better and better.

  And then Rich kept looking at these two Saanen males for sale on a website. He just liked the look of them, he said. And then he announced his intention to expand the Saanen part of the herd because, as he says, ‘If Glenda had fingers, she would milk herself.’ Glenda, our Saanen, is without a doubt the most reliable, placid creature in existence. (If – don’t listen Glenda – a bit dull. I prefer the splash and verve of the Anglo-Nubians. If Saanens are like carthorses, Nubies are like thoroughbreds.)

  Anyhow, all of this added up to the fact that last Friday, we found ourselves in the car, trailer hitched behind, driving three hours up into North Wales to go and pick up this Saanen billy. He’s a handsome thing, with a majestic beard and a winning smile. Rich dubbed him Snowdon, both for his white coat and the famous mountain in North Wales by the same name.

  Snowdon was duly installed in the goat barn, and now, we figure, we just need one more male to make our lives complete. An Anglo-Nubian this time. We’ve heard there’s one for sale in Cambridge, just a five-hour drive away. Hmmm… Goats seem to be a growing addiction with us. And an expensive one, at that. I wonder, could they ever make us money, instead of costing us money all the time?

  26 November 2010

  Fat white flakes falling this morning, sky grey as smoke, and the snow lying thick on the yard, going crick underfoot with that satisfying crunch that tells you it’d pack into a perfect snowball. A white goose in the goose run beats his wings in the white snow, suddenly, like a very small archangel.

  The barn is warm this morning, filled with hay and the breath of animals, all bleating and mooing and wanting their breakfast. We’ve heard from the National Trust farm in Cambridge, and they’re going to sell us their Anglo-Nubian billy. Hooray. Rich will set out on the day-long drive to pick it up on Monday (weather permitting!), while I stay home and grapple with children, animals and farm chores. I wish I could go with Rich, but someone needs to stay behind and feed all the waiting mouths.

  I’ve just read something so lovely that I want to write it down whole, so that I can try and understand it. It was written by Sister Miriam Therese MacGillis, a Dominican nun who lives in a place called Genesis Farm in the USA, where they practise something called ‘sacred agriculture’.

  Sister MacGillis starts with a quote from the Irish scholar and priest Vincent McNabb: ‘If there’s one truth more than any other, which life and thought have made us admit, against our prejudices, and even against our will, it’s that there’s little hope of saving civilization or religion except by the return of contemplatives to the land.’

  She goes on to say that if we understand the Earth as a living being that exists to regenerate and transform itself, then the role of farmer would be raised to a sacred profession… that farmers act in a prophetic role, entering the sanctuary of the soil and engaging with the forces of creation. She says that the soils, microbes and animals are all revelatory and holy… and that if we understood it all this way, our obsessions with control and power would disappear.

  And she ends with this ringing call: ‘Let the contemplatives return to the land.’ I love it!

  6 December 2010

  A landscape of silver, copper and diamonds this morning, like the fairy tale of the Dancing Princesses. The beeches in the hedge have hung on to their leaves, rust and ochre-coloured, and a thick layer of frost has bleached and rimed all the twigs and grass and low-slung hills, like a coating of glass reflecting back a pale, bright blue sky.

  It all looks very lovely, but on the farm, the reality of a hard frost is that the outside spring tap has frozen solid and water has to be carried from the house, one bucket at a time, out to the animals. Each pen of pigs, goats and sheep needs the dirty water bucket to be thawed and emptied – to be replaced with clean, warm water. And since we’re now up to 10 goats that means quite a few trips.

  We have a lovely new male goat, a billy called Wilburforce. He’s dark chocolate brown with a black stripe down his shoulders and back – very handsome and dignified. He’s settled straight into his new pen, munching his hay happily and looking around with glazed pleasure at all the nanny goats, whom he confidently expects to be romancing before too long.

  We haven’t broken it to him yet, but since they’re all already in kid, he won’t be getting any action until around this time next year. Still, from the look in his eye, you can tell that he’s dreaming winter dreams.

  The inside of the barn is now absolutely packed, and swelling with expectant life – we’re hoping that all seven of the nannies are in kid. We could have as many as 21 goat kids come the spring! Marmite the Toggie princess is due to pop first, in February. She’s getting big and slow, and I find her lying down in the morning when I come in to feed – very unlike her usual pushy self.

  It’s easier to understand what the poets always say about the growth of spring hiding inside the death of winter, when I think of the barn filled with pregnant goats, warm with living creatures and fresh straw, and shuttered against the cold frost outside.

  I came home from my business trip to Copenhagen last Friday (four airports, three airplanes, three hours in the car), just as our good friends Chris and Justine arrived at the farm with their three children. Justine works with Rich at the Harp Centre, and she and Chris are a lovely couple. Our oldest girl, Ceris, had agreed to babysit the kids while we adults all went out to the harp’s Christmas party.

  The noise and preparations as we all got dressed were nearly as much fun as the party. And I must say that we all became fabulously glamorous in no time flat! Then Ceris’s boyfriend, George, acted as our taxi and ferried us to the party; he came and got us later, too, when we were all slightly the worse for wear. Bless him.

  We woke up with some difficulty the next morning. Then Joli, Ceris, Justine and I formed a little cottage industry production line at the kitchen table, wrapping and packaging 44 bars of my homemade goat’s milk soap, as we laughed and talked over the evening before. Each bar gets tied with raffia, affixed with a label explaining that it’s all natural, and has a star anise hot-glued to the bow.

  Looks lovely, but it’s a bit fiddly, so it was wonderful to have all the extra hands. The smell of mint, lemongrass and lavender wafted through the room, and the Alpha range, purring and grumbling, made the kitchen blissfully warm.

  Then it was off to the Christmas fair at Pontgarreg, where we set the soap up on a table and waited with bated breath to see if anyone would buy it. Two stores in the area are stocking my soap, but this was the first time I really had a chance to see people handling and smelling and deciding whether to buy, and I was eager to see the results. Joli and Ceris came with me, to take turns minding the stall.

  For the first 45 minutes, we sat miserably quiet, and didn’t sell a single bar, while people all around us were selling things like crazy. It was horrible – like being a wallflower at a dance, when everyone else is being asked. I was about to give up and go home, to spare myself further humiliation, but then someone bought one bar, and then another, and by the end of the day we’d sold 31 bars – nearly three-quarters of our stock!


  It was flying off the table. People seemed to love the soap; they put in requests for new flavours, and asked where they could buy more. I was terribly pleased and relieved, and full of plans to move ahead. Could this ever become a business, I wondered again? Something that we could do from the farm – a way that the goats could help us make a living?

  8 December 2010

  The frost has lost its novelty, but the bone-hard freeze lingers on… and on. The barn chores take twice the time they normally do, because of the pails of water that have to be hauled from the house out to each stall – a shoulder-wrenching job.

  Today I thought with envy of the antique wooden yokes I’ve seen in museums – they fit over your shoulders, so that you can dangle a bucket from each end without having to bear the weight on your arms. I finally really understand what they’re for. And I want one to make the chores easier. Maybe Rich could make me one.

  The sheep in the top field need bales of hay taken out to them (a wheelbarrow job for me – Rich can just sling one up on his shoulder) and the goats are looking wistful in their stalls, missing their galloping, leaping romps down the long goat hill into the woods. But it’s too cold for them, and they wouldn’t be able to eat enough of the frozen grass stubble to make up the calories they would burn off. No, better that they stay inside in the warm barn and eat the hay from the summer. And incubate the goat kids they’re carrying.

  Taking each bale of hay from the neat stack in the hay barn, and parcelling it out into the hay racks, gives me the same feeling as when I open a jar of homemade blackberry jam, bottled in the summer and opened in the depths of winter.

  When the first waft of sweet fragrance escapes from the jar, it’s as if all the days of late summer – the slanting golden light, the harvest and fresh tomatoes, the days on the beach, Rich, bare-chested, swinging his tractor in wide arcs across the field, the fêtes and fairs, and stallions galloping down the high street of Cardigan – come rushing back, preserved in the jam like amber.

  And the hay is the same. We watched it grow through the spring – fed it with the muck of last year’s lambs – checked it carefully every day, as the purple heads of the wild herbs came to just the right point of goodness. Waited anxiously for the rain to stop and the rare patch of three days’ worth of sun to coincide with the ripeness of the hay.

  Rich cut the hay on the tractor and baled it, and we all laboured, with the hot sun beating down on our backs, slinging the bales up onto the tractor. And all those memories, that time and effort, the stamp of this place, is in every bale that I pull down and cut open and distribute to the goats.

  The goats eat the hay, and their muck will go back out onto the fields to grow next year’s hay. A commonplace phenomenon, and one that’s taken entirely for granted in this part of the world. But I never get tired of feeling around the edges of this experience, and marvelling at it.

  You know, it’s strange, but I was just thinking today – as I tried futilely to tidy the barn without any running water – I’ve been on the radio speaking to more than a million listeners and I’ve written award-winning stories for a newspaper; I’ve written a novel and appeared on television; I’ve been photographed for a poster, and picked up in a limousine to give a speech, but I always felt that I wasn’t doing quite what I was meant to do.

  I tried to fix it. I looked for causes to support and ways to make a difference in the world, thinking that might help. I tried different topics and formats and ideas on my radio show, thinking that I just hadn’t yet found my voice. I kept waiting to climb just that one little notch higher on the career ladder, so that I’d finally slot into place – into my place, the one that was meant for me. If I was doing what I was designed to do, I reckoned, that nagging sense of being – well, slightly out of place – would go away.

  There’s a portrait of me, painted by Danni Dawson – a brilliantly talented artist friend of my parents – when I was 12 years old. It has a particularly penetrating, level gaze. When the picture hung over my fireplace in California, I often had the impulse to turn it towards the wall, to escape it. ‘What have you done with my life?’ the painted face would seem to ask, accusingly. And I didn’t have an answer – not really.

  But here, for the first time, as I struggled to chip dirty, frozen straw out of the wheelbarrow with a shovel, to make room for another load of dirty straw, I realized that I don’t feel like I’m wasting my time any more. I don’t feel like I’m spinning my wheels.

  I’m finally, in fact, doing what I was always meant to do. I could face that portrait of my 12-year-old self now, and she’d understand.

  She would approve. She might even smile.

  Funny, isn’t it? It’s all about change.

  I’ve come to believe that the whole lot – life, the universe and everything – is just a bunch of energy changing from form to form. At the moment, this energy is pig-formed – when it turns into food, and I take in the food, the energy will be me-formed. And in the end, that form, too, will vanish. Dancing from one form to another.

  As farmers, we have our hands on those changes. We’re present at the cusp of one thing turning into another. Life, into death, at this very moment. And we’re present at the beginning of life – the breeding of the goats, the birthing of the lambs, the planting of the seeds. The magic is in the transitions. We’re those lucky ones who are privileged to preside over the change points – where one thing becomes another.

  It’s the same with making our own food – there are all these magical transformations. The point where goat’s milk magically solidifies into curds, for cheese. The point where the living yeast makes the flour turn into bread. The point where the bones and water and vegetables magically become cawl. The point where the seed becomes the tomato plant.

  It’s about transformation – the pigs go from living to dead, and then into sausages. Magic is all about dramatic points of change. Benji said so in the car this morning, when we were talking about getting milk from the goats:

  ‘That’s magic, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s right,’ I told him. ‘What else is magic?’

  ‘When a sheep has a baby lamb.’

  ‘Right! What else?’

  ‘When a baby seed grows into a plant.’

  ‘Good boy! And what else?’

  ‘When Daddy makes a shed out of nothing.’

  Benji has got it nailed – and he’s only five years old.

  There’s no change in the plastic-wrapped food that I buy from the shop. It sits in eternal twilight, mummified, until it finally, gingerly, goes a little mushy and I throw it away.

  Like living wrapped in plastic, in a plastic house, working in a plastic cubicle. I remember living like that. Nothing much ever changed. People in that world seem to want to remain the same, as well. To stay forever young – lurking in a state of stale semi-hibernation.

  But for me, it’s putting my hands on the points of transformation that makes things exciting. That’s where you find the juice, the passionate engagement, the dance.

  My boss, who works in a strictly corporate environment and prefers to hire out even the mowing of his own lawn grass, was curious about how we handle all the work on the farm.

  ‘Doesn’t Rich work full-time?’ he asked. ‘Do you take care of all the animals and the kids by yourself?’

  ‘No, we do it together,’ I told him. ‘We both work; we both take care of the kids; we both take care of the animals.’

  ‘Aren’t you just scrambling all the time?’

  ‘We’re not scrambling,’ I said. ‘We’re dancing.’

  Shann’s Magic Cawl

  Experience the slow magic of watching leftover bones turn into delicious stew. Cawl is simply a traditional Welsh meat stew and it’s easy to make. You start with any meat that has the bone still in. It’s a great thing to make on a Monday after a Sunday roast – it will absorb all your leftovers. The secret to a good cawl is time – it can happily simmer away on its own, without any input from you – the
key is simply to start it going early enough in the day. This recipe serves 4–6.

  Leftover roast meat with bones (a chicken carcass, beef, or lamb by choice – I find that pork doesn’t work so well, as it’s too greasy). The bone should be cracked so that the marrow can escape into the broth.

  2 tsp salt 3 onions 1 swede

  5 whole black peppercorns 4 carrots 1 leek

  4 potatoes

  Put the meat into a big pan, fill three-quarters full of water, and then add the salt and the peppercorns. Bring to the boil and then lower the heat to a simmer.

  Simmer for at least two hours, although the longer the better! Check periodically to make sure the pan hasn’t boiled dry, and add more water if needed.

  Put a colander into another large pan, and sieve the broth into the new pan, leaving the bones and meat in the colander. Put the broth back on the stove top and return to a simmer. Allow the meat and bones to cool.

  Peel and roughly chop the onions, carrots, potatoes and swede. Pop them into the broth. Simmer for another two hours.

  Once the meat has cooled enough to handle, pull the slivers of meat off the bones, chop and add to the broth. Discard the bones.

  Thirty minutes before the cawl is served, slice the leek and add it to the pot. Turn off the heat 10 minutes before suppertime and allow the cawl to cool slightly.

  Traditionally, cawl was eaten in wooden bowls, with wooden spoons. It was served in two courses – the broth and veg first, and the meat after. As a real peasants’ dish, the idea was to fill everyone up on the veg first, and serve the meat more sparingly! But we just eat ours all together. It’s the ultimate leftovers soup – and it’s even better on the ‘second boil’, when you reheat it the following day.

  Rich likes to put slices of sharp cheddar cheese in his cawl bowl, and let it go all melty in the soup. Yumm…