Quail diary — 12. Slow bloggers

The quail love the perspex window in the nestingbox, designed to keep drafts out rather than as an alternative telly

The bantams at number 125 are good girls. Dusk finds them tidily inside the henhouse, huddled on their perch, heads down, six feathery bums outwards, eyes shut. They grumble at the draft from the opening door, but they don’t stir. They are producing an egg a day between them — which is four days to an omelette, but not bad for a cold, wet winter. It’s a start, I tell the quail.

The quail are not good girls. Nightfall finds them in a row at the wire, worshipping the outside light, or else in a heap under the straw, from which seven little heads pop up identically at my approach. (“We’re not sleepy”). They look like teenagers caught in wrongdoing. I half expect wisps of smoke to seep from their beaks. Even when the tarpaulin is drawn over them, blotting out the glow from the street and the last of the moon, you can hear them chuntering in the straw. At midnight they’re all still there. They don’t go to bed early, if at all, and they haven’t laid any eggs. Bad quail.

Still, it’s good to see them up and about again. For days and nights frost lay on the grass and they hid, fluffed up under the bedding with only their eyes visible, their freezing toes tucked into their tummies. They didn’t move if they could avoid it until I was so worried that I joined a chatroom to ask about solar heating and lighting for the hutch. Amazing. Everything I never thought to ask about coturnix coturnix, the common quail. My smoke signal triggered responses from Dorset to New Jersey NY. The internet ran hot: no light, leave them be, a break from laying is natural; the hutch is fine, don’t worry if they’re ignoring the nesting box, don’t bother with heating; they’ll lay when they are ready, probably next month, usually in thick straw where the eggs are impossible to find. Advice poured in.  A new world opened. One night I found myself sucked into the tragedy of Rose, in Chester, who died of sour crop, whatever that is — and please don’t let me find out.

I still don’t know why my blog merits Google’s automated adverts for the Spanish IVF clinic  (donor eggs), or the recipes (thank goodness the quail can’t read) or, most bafflingly – the slurry spreader .., but at least I no longer feel cowed by the snide little message WordPress leaves in the margins of my puny effort: “The widget has found no incoming links … yet. It’s okay — there is no rush.” I know. I know. I have been blogging for four months and have only managed 11 posts – 12, counting this one. But, oh joy, at last I am justified. No need to feel inadequate; slow blogging is, apparently, the new black — according to the Guardian newspaper. Slow blogging (ie with long gaps), slow food (grow your own – wait a year) and slow cycling (is there any other kind?) I’m not a fumbling idiot, I’m a trend.

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Actually, I’ve always been a slow blogger. Or so the dour old Yorkshireman who was my first boss told me. Or words to that effect. We didn’t have the internet, or computers, or mobile phones when I started work. A camera took 35mm film, and a phone was a big black thing with a tangled cord. There was no broadband, or Google. In fact, our office hadn’t caught up with the electric typewriter – I had an old Remington, the size of an engine block. If I got carried away, the “e” fell off – leaving a lethal metal stump to impale fingers on. We worked on paper. With pencils and reference books. And lived in rented rooms in damp shared houses, with windows and doors so ill-fitting that tides of slugs would ooze under the back door each night and hold motorcrosses on the kitchen carpet. In the mornings, the whole floor shone silver, which entranced me even as I squelched across. We wore drip-dry and woolly hats, particularly indoors, and were word perfect in Monty Python’s “paper bag in’t middle o ‘t road” sketch, which we’d break into in muted choruses down the pub where we huddled for warmth over a dimpled half pint glass. And you try and tell the young people of today that … they won’t believe you.

But I digress.

Quail refusing to go to bed, and the new hutch under construction

The days are getting longer again. The new run, unfinished but already flagging up a whole new set of design faults, hogs the remains of the lawn. A tin firebucket now adorns the back step, courtesy of Himself’s mum, who objected to the discarded butts  in the mud, (“That wasn’t the way he was brought up …”) and the quail are starting to make little nest-like hollows in the straw.

I shall continue to blog, slowly. And dream of eggs — and the days when diaries had covers and pages, and flopped out of the backs of cupboards years later, redolent of old paper and forgotten passions. Somehow, I can’t feel the same about an electric blog.

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