The land of leeks and wizards

Never say Dai, and all that.

As you are no doubt aware; because he's world famous in my house, my dear old daddy used to race speedway bikes for a living in the UK. Way back in the dim, dark, old timey, pre stuff days, it was a fair trip back home in the off season, so he didn't make it. He would stay with a family in Wales on their dairy farm. He had many stories about this place and still corresponds with them (Hi Wlliams family.)(That narrows it down, huh?)

It gets cold in Wales. The house was old, like fourteenth century old. Add old and cold and you get walls four feet thick. The fireplace had seats inside it. There was a hole in the back wall of the fireplace which had metal doors in it. There were rings in the front wall of the fireplace. The idea was to stick the trunk of a tree through the hole in the wall, get the fire going and drive spikes into the tree trunk. As the trunk burned away you would put a chain around the spikes and through the loops and winch the trunk in a bit further.

We've all lived in places where you have to drain the radiator overnight to prevent cracks in the engine block, or where you fill saucepans with water before you go to bed so that you have water (ice) for coffee in the morning.

In Wales they had a tractor, which they would sometimes find a use for over winter. If they were going to use it that morning, they would put a kerosene burner under the crankcase and go for breakfast. By the time that they had finished breakfast the oil would be warm enough to flow that well that you could hand crank the motor. Still no hope on the key, though.

Crows are smart. Anybody who has ever seen one calculate the width, velocity and trajectory of your vehicle before taking the precise number of steps away from the roadkill carcass necessary to avoid your tyres by less than two centimetres could tell you that. In Wales, they're smarter. They had a murder of crows (which is the best collective noun, ever.) which were hassling their..., umm..., calves, I guess. Or something else, can't remember. Anyhoo, they had an oats paddock next to the house and the crows would all hang out in a row of trees on the other side of the paddock. You could go out into that paddock banging rubbish bin lids, drums, waving your arms around, nothing. You could get brooms, mops, hoes (not hos), whatever and point them at the crows like a gun and you wouldn't ruffle a feather. Walk out of the house with a shotgun and the crows would be gone before you could take a shot.

Smartarses.