Before Christmas, I tracked down a mint-condition copy of Kingmaker on EBay.  This was my favourite boardgame at boarding school in the 1970s.

The price was kind of expensive, but at about double what a similar game would cost in the shops today, I thought it was worth it.

Kingmaker is about the Wars of the Roses in England in the mid-1400s.  The counter for King Henry VI starts in London, and his rival Richard of York starts in York.  There are five other royal counters, of both the red and white rose factions, scattered over England.

The players typically start with two or three noble characters, possibly with special titles like the Marshal of England.  Each noble has a counter showing their unique heraldry, and (adding all their cards together) they command a certain number of troops.

The game is about controlling the royal pieces and eliminating rivals.  Combat is simple but effective.  There are many more wrinkles, as the game is actually quite complicated, but essentially that’s it.

This was the second edition of the game, produced from 1975, and the box had never been opened.  I was charmed to see an included note on software for the TRS-80, the first microcomputer readily available in Australia — with all of 4 Kb of RAM!  I remember them well.  So this box must have been produced in about 1979.

We’ve had two games so far, once with wwoofers and once with other friends too.  We didn’t get to finish either game (limited time, too many distractions) and we agreed that it shows promise.  It’s 30 years since I played this game, so some of the finer points of the rules are still coming back to me.

Dairy cows need to have calves every year to keep up their milk production.  Mostly the calves are turned into dog food in their first couple of days of life.

Some friends collected three baby calves from a dairy, fed them on artificial milk, then planned to raise them on grass.  As it turns out, growing calves need an enormous amount of grass, more than they had, and so they ended up at Cockatrice Farm.  With all the wet weather, we have had heaps of grass.

After a year, the steers (ie grown up desexed male cattle) started going through our sometimes dubious fences.  We asked about taking them to the abattoir, but that had a number of practical difficulties.  We don’t have an adequate loading ramp, for instance.

Allison found one of the steers in Barker’s Lane, from where he could have wandered onto the Hume Highway — a serious traffic risk.  So it became urgent to deal with them.

One of the people at my work recommended a Goulburn mobile butcher.  He was happy to come, and the price was excellent.

We rounded up the steers without incident.  We have a cattle crush coming off our round yard, and that worked well.

Each steer was put through the crush, and knocked out quickly and humanely with a stun gun, technically a “captive bolt pistol” where the bolt is fired with gunpowder but the bolt doesn’t actually leave the pistol.  The butcher slit the throat for bleeding and then the neighbour’s ancient tractor was used to haul the carcass away for skinning and quartering.

We had some initial problems getting the tractor going (thanks Jim for solving that one) but otherwise it was an efficient process.  The butcher has plenty of abattoir experience, and is a master with a knife.

The butcher left the quarters in a mobile coolroom at the farm for 10 days — the meat needs to hang to become tender and for the fats to harden.  Then the butcher came back and chopped the meat up into all the standard meat cuts.

To get the best price, we had to pack the meat ourselves into plastic bags the butcher provided.  So we would get a huge plastic tub with each cut, for which he printed labels showing the cut and the packing date.  For the most part we packed two of each thing per bag: sometimes it’s just Allison and myself, or us plus wwoofers, or random amounts of friends.

We got roasts, enormous numbers of steaks, schnitzels (which he tenderised), osso buccos, even ribs and soup bones.  There was corned beef, sausages plus about 50kg of mince per beast.  Immense amounts of meat.  We got a tongue, but didn’t take the kidneys and liver though we easily could have.  We decided not to tan the hides — too much work at the moment.

We ended up with a barbecue with our friends, for which the butcher joined us.  The meat is great and we’re very happy with the results.

On 7 December, someone wrote into the Sydney Morning Herald urging “that summer be adjourned to a date to be fixed”.

This has apparently been the coldest summer for 50 years on the eastern seaboard.  Lots of storms, heaps of rain.  I have to have long, hot showers to keep some freeboard in the rainwater tank.

I was never terribly keen on summer anyway.  Most days now are about 24 degrees, which I reckon is just about right.

I think we’re in for a long cooler period like the 1960s and 70s.  Just natural cycles in action.  Yes, I’m still a climate change “denier”, or rather I’m sorry that climate science has been subverted by a few individuals with personal or political agendas.

Christmas Day was our first real summer’s day – it reached 30 degrees, and has since cooled again.  We went for a swim in the dam.

In recent years, we’ve had a European-style christmas on the 24^th, then gone to Sydney for an Aussie christmas with Allison’s family.  This year, they came to us, so we had two christmas dinners with various combinations of friends and family.

I roasted two of our geese for the 24^th, followed by various flans for dessert – thanks to wwoofers Ryo and Sarah for help with those.  Then Allison did the Aussie christmas dinner on the 25^th – cold meat, salad and seafood – followed by a spectacular icecream cake amongst several rich desserts.

We were woken up at 5am this morning.  Or at least Allison was, and she elbowed me in the ribs saying “There’s somebody in the house.”

Cara the dog was sleeping on our floor, and she gave half a yap to confirm this, before going back to sleep.  I tell everybody that she would rip the throat out of an intruder, but I guess you can only expect so much from a labrador.

So I staggered out of bed and down the hallway, in my undies.  I’d like to say that I was alert and ready to launch a flying side kick at a thief, but I don’t think that was strictly true.

It turned out that our wwoofer Ryo had come into the house and knocked in our hallway.  Cara apparently doesn’t consider Ryo a threat.

Ryo is from Japan, and fits the stereotype of being quiet and unnecessarily well-mannered.  I have since explained that thumping and shouting might have been a more reliable strategy.

Anyway, Ryo had himself been woken up by a young New Zealander knocking on the wwoof house door, I guess at about 4.30.  He had got lost and had run out of fuel on the highway.  He was heading for work (fruit picking?) at Orange, three and a half hours away.

There are no houses near the road in that area (Breadalbane) so our lane was the first habitation he’d come to, after walking for about an hour — and the two other houses on our lane were empty or didn’t answer the door.

I offered the guy a jerrycan of petrol to get him to the Goulburn Service Centre (5 minutes away).  Ryo agreed to drive the guy back to his car, which at least meant we were sure to get the container back.  He was apparently out of money for fuel and out of phone credit, so I let him use our phone to ring a mate to put some money in his account.

I think we were being reasonable samaritans.  Allison said we could have offered him breakfast, and I guess we might have if I had been fully awake.

I wonder if I should have given him $50 to get him to Orange, but I’m not sure how far my obligations go to random New Zealanders rocking up at 5am.  People have been kind to me in somewhat similar circumstances, but his prior planning does seems a little poor.  Hopefully some other people will help him to extract himself from this situation.

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Ryo has been with us for about three months now.  He’s past the date we normally ask wwoofers to move on, but he’s still our hardest worker so we’re in no rush.

Along with Sarah and Vey, we got Ryo to bake some bread in a dragon shape for a little medieval event.  He made bread a couple more times after that, just to eat, and some biscuits for the wwoofers.  He says that kitchens in Japan have very small ovens, and he’s enjoying the opportunity to learn some cooking.

Allison lent him a cookbook, and Ryo has been working his way through it.  Quiches, tarts, pastries, something every day.  And yesterday he made chocolate eclairs, with homemade choux pastry.  Who knows where this will lead?

We still have JB from France; he and Ryo have cleared untold numbers of serrated tussocks.  We’ve just said goodbye to Henrik from Finland, with us for two weeks, who built us some equestrian mounted games equipment such as stands to hold rings which you catch on a lance.  And recently we have Sarah (our fifth for the year) who is from Germany, and works with our horses.

We won’t get any more wwoofers now till the new year.  We’re getting daily requests from wwoofers who strangely enough want to come on the 19th and stay for about a week, just in time for New Year’s Eve in Sydney….

Some of them explicitly say that they really want to have an Australian christmas, and have chosen us for the experience.  We must seem like soft touches!

We’re having a second year of the La Niña weather pattern.  Basically means lots of rain.

We had a beauty of a storm a few days ago, lots of thunder and lightning.

We had to drive into town during it, so we ran to the car and leapt in.

Ginger the (half-dingo) dog was half in the car door, so Allison told her to get out.

Instead, Ginger jumped in and hid at Allison’s feet, between the brake and accelerator, shivering.  Poor little thing.

We took pity on her at this point, and took her to the wwoofer cottage.  She’s not usually allowed inside, but it was time for an exception.

The storm kept going all night, so when we got home we brought both the dogs into our house.

Cara was pretty relaxed about the storm — unless there’s food involved, not much bothers a labrador.

Ginger jumped onto our bed, and was told to get off.  She did, but then reappeared between our pillows.  Some stern words, and she was off again, then somehow ended up under the covers.  Bad language ensued, and she slept the rest of the night on the floor.

There was an almighty thunderclap at about 3 am, and the house shook.  It seems that everything survived.

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Most of our seedlings failed this year; not sure why.  Maybe because we didn’t have any sand when we made the soil blocks; I thought it would be OK.

Fortunately, a lot of plants came up by themselves.  Celery, fennel, parsley, many kinds of spinach and salad vegetables, even one broadbean plant that has produced in bulk.

With the addition of some shop tomato and capsicum seedlings and some additional seed potatoes, we’ll still produce most of our vegie needs.  Not sure if we have eggplants this year.  My carefully-constructed planting scheme is in ruins as a result of this random resurgence.

In the orchard, a number of trees are coming along well.  The nectarine tree is now twice my height and covered in fruit; Allison says it’s had the most messy duck water poured on it.  Not bad for three years.

Many of our berry bushes are covered in fruit — I guess it’s a good season.

We had the Noxious Weeds Man around this week.  He wasn’t especially noxious, or weedy.

The Noxious Weeds Man is a government inspector, with the power to force us to spray chemicals.  As we’re using organic methods, that would be really disappointing.

When we bought the property three and a half years ago, it was overrun with a weed called Serrated Tussock.  Left alone for another two years, it would have covered the place.

Our wonderful neighbour Shane ploughed the two worst fields and sowed them with oats, which eliminated 99% of those tussocks, and gave us lots of oats as well.

The remaining areas we’ve been clearing by hand.  Basically, our wwoofers do an hour each day chipping out pasture weeds, except in bad weather.  This would have to be the favourite wwoofer job     Some have been more conscientious than others.

Our wwoofers in the past few months have been very good.  We had particular problems in our field with the big swimming dam, and also down by the highway.  (Not surprisingly, the furthest places from the Wwoof Cottage.)

Anyway, we have pretty well cleared all the property of these weeds, so all we have to worry about is 20 more years of germinating seeds lying in the ground, or blowing in from other properties.

The Noxious Weeds Man drove around the farm with me, and determined that Cockatrice Farm is “pretty clean”.  He did find the odd plant, but just a few and probably better than our neighbours.  He’ll leave us alone for three years now.

Many thanks to all those wwoofers and visitors who have helped us, over several years, to get on top of this problem.

The ones we’ve missed have now gone to seed (alas) and the grass is getting too high to find them.  We’ll have another go next winter, and get even closer to being free of tussocks.

Some changes with our cars recently.

We’ve had a Nissan X-Trail for a few months — pretty handy.

Our Camry (which takes both petrol and gas) needs some repairs soon, and as the car has done 500K it’s not really cost-effective to do them.  So we might let wwoofers drive it for now.

Our beaten-up old ute (“pickup” in American) is registered and roadworthy, but has developed an electrical fault such that the battery gets flat quickly.  So it doesn’t get used much.  We’ll probably sell it soon.

I’ve been driving the X-Trail into Canberra, which is a lot of kilometres and hence a fair bit of petrol.

Recently I bought a 2002 Holden Calais, in very good nick, to take over the Canberra run.  I’m getting the gas fitted in a couple of weeks.  It’s very comfortable.

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Last weekend we got to take the Calais on a long run.  The SCA medieval club had a national event in Dubbo, which is five hours north of Goulburn.  The car did a great job, except the CD stacker in the boot which died fairly promptly.  I’m going to have words with it.  Possibly involving a hammer.

The medieval group in Dubbo didn’t quite reach orbit and become an independent group.  They live on as a distant outpost of the Sydney medieval group, Rowany.  And they don’t have to write officer reports, which I rather suspect might be part of their plan.  They usually run one or two events a year, and this time they volunteered to run a kingdom (Australia & NZ) event.

Their main family has a 25 acre property just out of Dubbo, and they have built a rather charming tavern out of bush poles and recycled carpet.  Allison thinks we should build something like it.  Actually our Okewaite Feasting Tent is bigger, so I can’t see the value, unless we build something to seat 200!

It was small for a kingdom event, but then again Dubbo is a long way away from anywhere and you pretty much have to drive there.  There were still a good number of old friends there from Brisbane, Newcastle, Sydney and Canberra.

Lunch was cold meat and salad; decent fare though I object to the tomato and pineapple — we shouldn’t use New World foods as they weren’t known to Europe yet.  OK, tomatoes were known in Italy (as a suspected poison) just before the end of the SCA period.

Dinner was pretty well the same, which I don’t think is up to scratch for an SCA kingdom event.  When we ran one in Goulburn, we had a whole stack of well-researched period foods, but then I guess we’re foodies.

The tournament was good to watch — not too many entrants, so it was possible to follow it.  The final bout came down to Sir Agro, a very old friend of mine, and Sir Siridean, who I guess I’ve also known for a few years now.  Siridean won, and will be crowned in Perth in January.

We liked Dubbo, and would like to get back to the Tapas bar there for another look.  Dubbo has a large zoo there, which we visited on the Sunday — good, but perhaps a little overpriced at $48 each to enter.

On the way home, back in the Calais, we followed our friend Tig who was driving with the aid of a GPS system.  She took us down some ever-narrower country tracks, so we got to see some unusual country but we were wondering just what settings her TomTom was on….  Eventually we decided we’d had enough, and stuck to the main road when Tig headed into yet another goat track.  Sure enough, Tig got back nearly an hour before we did.

Our Goulburn medieval club is still running a monthly “Revel”.  This is where we all bring a dish to share.

Two weekends ago (sorry, I’m a bit behind on blogging) we took along some home-made bread and savoury butters, some dragons made from mincemeat and food colouring, then Allison made some berry foole.

We had a good time with our friends, after which we played a medieval chasing game called “Tierce” — which was very popular with the kids and the wwoofers.

Before that, our friend Tig had run a class on cloisonné enamelling.  She gave us little squares and circles of pure silver, on which to experiment.

I have wanted to have a go at enamelling for a long time, so was keen to participate.  Our four wwoofers also took part.

It turned out to be quite fiddly, carefully cleaning the silver then laying out tiny pieces of silver wire.  That first session, we really just got enough enamel down to hold the designs in place.

Tig brought her kiln over to the farm for a couple more sessions.  You have to lay down and fire quite a few layers of the enamel mixture, which is ground glass and water.

Once we had enough layers on, we filed them back to expose the silver wires, and then they had a final firing.  Tig then did some jeweller’s finetuning with her Dremel tool.

The results were as shown below.  The finest was that of Ryo from Japan, who did a marvellous cat watching the moon.  Vey from Germany did a detailed but abstract piece, Zara from Germany a moon design, Sarah from France a cinquefoil flower, and mine was a simpler geometric pattern.

(click to expand)

I’m quite impressed by the results.  I have to say though that there is a lot of painstaking detail to the work, which would probably drive me crazy.

And this is only one enamelling technique.  Tig can teach several, so maybe we’ll play some more another time.

Last Thursday night the dogs went berserk because a fox was about.

We’ve had yet another round of virus at my work.  I was mostly over mine but had given Allison a good dose.

We hadn’t yet locked the chickens up, so I raced outside to do so.  It was dark already, and our (three!) torches were not in their drawer.

I have very good night vision, so I didn’t worry.  But it was an overcast night with no moon or stars, just inky darkness.

I carefully picked my way to the chickens and locked them up by the light of my little mobile phone.  Then I walked back over the grass to go back in the house.

I had forgotten that we had left out a large goose cage.

I hit it hard below the knee; it shredded my work pants.  I rolled over and hit the other edge in the chest, shredding my work shirt.  I kept rolling and face planted badly.  There was a flash of light.

I staggered into the house, bleeding everywhere, and suffering concussion.  Days later, I’m still covered with scratches.

PS — we have four baby geese (goslings).

We have peacocks at Cockatrice Farm. They can be noisy, they shit everywhere, and they eat seedlings. But they are glorious to have around.

We have just one pea-hen at the moment, the Marvellous Miss Maud. We’ve had three, but they die very easily. I gather it’s the same for everybody as they are much more expensive than the boys.

Our peahen is locked away at the moment — in case she nests in the fields and is eaten by a fox. Our white peacock, Arthur (named after the king), is in with her at present. He’s not the eldest peacock, and is perhaps too young to breed, but he was hanging around outside Fort Knox (the enclosure shared by the ducks and the peahen) so I let him in.

We’re a bit sympathetic to Arthur. When we had the guineafowl, they bullied Arthur mercilessly. Guineafowl think they are peacocks, but have tail envy. They are now living at Jan’s farm, to the eternal relief of the wwoofers — after you’ve had guineafowl, peacocks seem quiet and unobtrusive by comparison.

We have two other peacock boys wandering around the farm. One of them has appointed himself chief watchkeeper. If there is a car in Barker’s Lane, or a fox in the distance, or anything else he doesn’t like, then Cornelius the Peacock tells us all, at high volume.

This then cues the dogs, Ginger and Cara. Cara is a labrador and not a real dog, so she’s only learnt how to bark recently. This means that she reacts to whatever Cornelius is bothered about, and runs around aimlessly trying to figure it all out. Ginger then runs around because it seems like fun.

We bred some peacocks in the incubator last year, but we had a sudden cold snap and they all died in the days following. We’re hoping for a natural brood this year, or maybe we’ll try the incubator again. My aim is to hold a feast and serve a roast peacock to every table.

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On things poultry, we’ve been having trouble with our rooster, “You Bastard”.   He was given to us a few months ago to replace “Shut Up” who was the noisiest rooster we had ever had.

You Bastard had been attacking us all, and we ran out of patience.

Our friend Sharen has convinced us that on a farm you want to breed for docile stock — her Dad’s been doing that for decades and has the most placid cows.

So You Bastard got the chop on Sunday and was stewed up yesterday.