Digging for victory, self satisfaction and pride.......

A slender breath of winter's crisp air,

 I stop and turn to see who's there.

Brushes my neck with the lightest of touch

no one but the breeze so rare and nonsuch.

Tilling the earth with heart and spirit,

 unfolding the soil and all that is in it.

Breaking the sod weighed down by the year,

preparing the ground for Spring grows near.

Alone on the allotment with just God and the birds,

 lost in my silence, thinking only in words.

The Sun on my shoulders and Mother Earth by my side,

digging for victory, self satisfaction and pride .

Taking a break from the toil I stop and ask why,

then look up from the ground at the big Norfolk sky.

Watch that Buzzard soaring high, wild and free

and I'll know why, because you see that bird is me.

M. Thomas

There is no doubt about it, I have a lot of catching up to do down t' allotment. At least two months behind on the digging because of the 'full house' during the Thursford show months. That compounded by the failure to keep on top of the weeding during the preceding summer months. 

So you might think I feel that the allotment is a burden not worth pursuing, another chore and a commitment too far. You would be incorrect as I really do enjoy the toil. There is something so primitive about growing food from seed and at the same time so civilised. A patch of earth and a handful of seeds was the first step to the modern farming of today. 

For the first time since having the allotment I took a vacuum flask of tea down there as I planned to work for several hours. It was a gloriously sunny day, the winter sun was low but my patch is in a sunny position and the warmth counteracted the chill of the south westerly breeze.

After a few hours I pulled out from the shed the faded green patio chair that I inherited with the allotment. I placed it near the shed in a position that afforded me a 'Grand view' of the allotment.

I poured the tea into the funny little cup that doubles as the Thermos' lid then from a separate container I topped it up with fresh milk. There is (I am told) a persuasion out there that fill their flasks with the tea and milk combined! I know! I am sure that this is just an urban myth as there cannot be such philistines in such a civilised country as this.

So I sat there and contemplated for a minute or two. 

It was so peaceful and the clouds were forming wisps many miles in length in what is generally described as a 'Norfolk Sky' (vast). The Tornado planes occasionally ripped through the sky but otherwise it was just the odd Robin singing or the territorial call of a pheasant.

First question was which day of the week is it? Mmmm, Wednesday I decided. Gosh, two and a half years ago I would have known exactly what day of the week it was (*) and I would have been up to my armpits in all things Supermarket. 

For a moment or two I glanced back into those manic days, no single incident or store but my head filled with the constant hubbub of the tills, the constant alertness to any and everything and the claustrophobia of the work place.

I stole my self away and came back to reality, the reality of today, the here and now....  and it was good.

I compared the two worlds and quickly realised that they are incomparable for what I did then was another me but a job that was very worthwhile and had purpose. That was all very cool.

So what about now? Well, as I looked at this seemingly petty little allotment it dawned on me that here I am both producing food and serving it up too. 400 breakfasts, 300lbs of preserves and over 70 meals for which I have used my potatoes, parsnips, tomatoes ,onions, leeks, carrots, kale, broad beans, rhubarb, figs, apples, raspberries, strawberries, loganberries, blueberries and blackberries.

Not to mention the Pumpkins!

Oh and our own cut flowers for the guest rooms and cottage.

These have come from my garden too.

I realised then that actually I am still highly productive but my business is all about the provenance of the food I serve my guests. Along with the local sausages, the locally reared and smoked bacon, the locally caught crab I am able to serve the freshest of home grown veg.

And as I have tried to portray in the above poem there is a sense of enjoyment, satisfaction and freedom that I get down at the allotment which is so fulfilling it is almost spiritual.

Of course that will last right up to my next delivery of half a ton of cow's muck!

(*Editors note: he may have correctly identified what day of the week it was - on this occasion - but he doesn't know what year it is.....make that three and a half years!)





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Happiness and merriment with a nod of recognition that somewhere in the mix there is Jesus....

 "Christmas travellers braced for storms disruption and violent homophobic attack at Norwich..."


This, I thought, was the local paper's prediction for our Christmas ahead. That's a little pessimistic I mused and perhaps the homophobic attack is a little too specific. I was reading the local paper's web pages and it was a second or two before I realised that they were trying to tell me two separate headlines, firstly the weather prediction then secondly the attack in Norwich.

Despite this isolated grammatical ambiguity it is fair to say that the EDP (Eastern Daily Press) newspaper is probably the best regional paper that I have seen on my travels. It covers the entire East Anglia region and according to Wikipedia it is the only regional daily paper that out sells the Sun.

In the end the second bout of stormy weather did not materialise choosing instead to batter the south of the Country ....   again.

All in all it was an odd Christmas weather wise as apart from that extremely high tide at the beginning of December it was a surprisingly dry couple of months. This was good news for me as I offer to take guests to the Thursford Christmas Show, so they can have a glass of wine and don't have the worry of finding the venue that is situated in a remote village. This year every single guest took me up on the offer and as a result I frequently found myself standing by the entrance waiting to meet them at the end of the show.

This was not a chore as I quite enjoyed standing there amongst pine trees covered in thousands of Christmas tree lights (the pine trees, not me) whilst VERY Christmassy music tumbles out from secluded woodland speakers, all very Disney like. It was also interesting seeing how far some of the coaches had come from, this year Glasgow and Cornwall were the winners.
If you are touched with the cynical gene and/or can't take a little Christmas 'cheeseyness' then I would advise that you don't go to Thursford and perhaps you should stay at home and watch a few guys on TV getting cheap laughs by chucking a few expletives at you. However if you feel that Christmas is about happiness and merriment with a nod of recognition that somewhere in the mix there is Jesus and you also appreciate great (and I mean GREAT) singing and dancing in true old fashioned variety performance style then Thursford is definitely the place for you.

So every other performance I found myself waiting at the entrance to collect my guests in a venue deep in the Norfolk countryside 7 miles from the nearest small town in a village with a population of just 200. Then my challenge was to spot the two or four faces of my guests, most of whom I had only seen for about an hour previously, amongst the 1,500 audience exiting the venue. I am pleased to say that I lost no one! I waited there 25 different nights during November and December and it only drizzled with a little rain once, all the other times it was totally dry.

So the last two months of the year bring a lot of business our way and with the evening meals and the trips into the show they are the most intense of the year. But the year is now done, 2013 finished and with no guests over the New Year we have time to reflect on what we have achieved. At this point I will hand over to Alison for the scores on the doors as she lists some of those key statistics like how often the cesspit was emptied or suchlike....

Mike.

2013 at The Old Bakery in numbers and other such trivia

• 209 nights of B&B stays (105 in 2012, 53 in 2011)
• August was once again our busiest month with 42 nights of stays (out of a maximum of 62 ie 31 nights per room is maximum capacity). This compares with 23 in 2012 (in one room).
• February was the only month in which nobody stayed; although in January we only had a one night stay.
• 158 nights of stays in The Bakehouse cottage compared with 113 in 2012. We didn't have any Thursford cast members stay as we have done in the two previous years as we are trialling it to see if we save more on the cost of heating oil and electricity compared to the rent we receive.
• We've served over 400 breakfasts and at least 70 evening meals during the year. 59 evening meals were cooked and served in November and December for our Thursford guests.
• Popular additions to our supper menu this year have been Norfolk Haggis and during the summer, Crab salad with home-grown new potatoes. One couple had our Cromer crab salad three nights out of their stay of four nights!
• The allotment and our garden have provided us with lots of fruit and vegetables that we've used in our meals: potatoes, parsnips, tomatoes ,onions, leeks, carrots, kale, broad beans, rhubarb, figs, apples, raspberries, strawberries, loganberries, blueberries and blackberries.
• We've now bought over 300 jam jars in the last couple of years and have lost track of how much jam, marmalade and chutney we've made - but it is a lot!
• Our most frequent visitors have stayed with us four times (in the space of  one year).
• We have 35 nights of B&B stays already booked for 2014 and only 5 of these nights are from new guests.
• Our entry on Late Rooms went live on 4 July and before we even knew it was live we had our first booking for the next night and two hours later a second booking for the 6th of July.
• Since going live on Late Rooms we've had 42 nights of bookings and already 13 nights of bookings from people who stayed once with us via Late Rooms and who are now booking direct for further visits.
• 36 reviews on Trip Advisor and 5 on Late Rooms and all rate us as excellent - woo hoo!
• This year we've gone international with guests from Canada and Belgium in the B&B and from Holland in the cottage.
• We've also had a number of guests from Norfolk staying here again this year.
• Two different families have cycled here this year, one young family from Norwich and the other from Hertfordshire en route to the North Norfolk coast.
• Percy(the pheasant) has been back to visit us again in the last few months (we'd missed him).

Mike has been running things here since April when I started work in the NHS and has worked like a Trojan especially since we went live on Late Rooms.

We hope that in 2014 we will continue to build on the success and reputation we've built over the last few years. Our first priority needs to be to book us some time out throughout the year to help us keep up our energy and enthusiasm levels so that we can do it all (and more) all over again.

Wishing all our readers a very Happy, Healthy and Prosperous New Year :)





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