A timely extraction ...

January 16, 2021

A timely extraction ...

If, like me, you are a devoted fan of John le Carré you will have been saddened by his death in December last year. I remember reading Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy for the first time and being enthralled by the murky rooms in the ‘Circus’ where espionage, intrigue and treachery dripped from the walls. The start of 2021 was very much like being in a le Carré novel for Cath and me. Instead of attempting to get someone out of East Berlin we were wrestling instead with the problem of extracting our youngest son from a protracted lockdown in Reading, England, and getting him back to Australia. By a stroke of opportunistic good fortune he and a friend secured seats on a newly released flight to Perth. The week leading up to the flight was tortuous. First there was the tricky hurdle of providing a negative Covid PCR test in a 72 hour window before the flight. A task made more difficult by the fact that the NHS will only provide this test for symptomatic individuals. Then there was the problem of getting to the airport on time. It turns out that the Uber app doesn't work in the Reading area. To top it all off the Australian govt. announced it was slashing the cap on international arrivals in half and we were convinced that the dreaded email would come informing us of a cancelled flight. Even once Tim was at the airport, Cath and I sat waiting anxiously for take-off, not quite believing that it was all going to happen. It all felt a bit like le Carré's protagonist, George Smiley, sitting in a darkened room nervously waiting for Karla, his KGB nemesis, to defect! Fortunately everything worked smoothly and our son is now in quarantine in Perth. Not a moment too soon it seems because today the headlines are all about airlines cancelling flights to Australia and desperate tales of Australians stranded abroad. We feel both very lucky and very relieved.

So far 2021 has brought a couple of house guests and some excellent summer weather to the Huon Valley, including some spectacular sunsets.

Looking South and North, respectively, from the living room window

Unlike Queensland, however, any really hot days are always tempered by a few days of wet, wild and chilly weather. Today is one of those January days where we are huddling in front of our woodburning oven.

On the farm front we are striving to complete a couple of key tasks before we leave at the end of January. One of these is the site preparation of the domestic orchard in which we plan to plant about 16 fruit trees (apples, pears, plums and apricots) for domestic use. We have a beautiful sunny slope reserved for this purpose but the downside is that the patch is incredibly rocky and digging holes is difficult, if not impossible. We have therefore decided to box up every tree and build a mound of organic material in which to plant the bare-rooted stock in late winter. The site is starting to take shape nicely. You will not believe the amount of horse manure that it takes to build the mounds! Luckily we have not encountered any "manure rage" recently (see "Take out the trash day ...").

The orchard with the boxed tree sites starting to take shape

In another interesting development, we stopped off at a truffle farm on the way back home after visiting Cath’s mum in the north of Tasmania last weekend. Truffles have always been on our radar as something to develop on the farm and our visit only reinforced this view. We had a fantastic time in the company of Doug and Poppy the truffle dogs searching for summer truffles in a gorgeous plantation of English oak trees. In an hour of desultory walking, talking and digging we must have unearthed about $3k worth of truffles. The day was rounded out by a lovely lunch in which we sampled products like truffle balsamic vinegar, truffle oil, truffle mustard and truffle honey (great with blue cheese by the way). Sometimes in the evening when Pepper comes indoors, we play hide-and-seek with her, in which we conceal her favourite toy (a squeaky teddy) and get her to find it. We are now considering rubbing ‘Squeaky’ with truffle oil and turning Pepper into a truffle dog! As yet she remains blissfully unaware of our Machiavellian machinations involving using her for financial gain. If she is to succeed in the rarefied and lucrative business of truffle hunting, however, our first task will be to cure her penchant for disembowelling poor old `Squeaky' when she finds him ...