Alton Downland Challenge 2007

On Sunday 7th October I ran for the first time since I returned from Mexico in the annual Alton Downland Challenge 10km race.

I managed, somehow, an excellent time (for me) of 46mins 53 seconds. I think this phenomenal performance was down to my running strategy in part and the change in the route of the run.

My strategy was based on the fact that I had no stamina, so I decided not to try and hold anything in reserve and to just 'go for it' at the start and run as hard and fast as I could for as far as possible (as it turned out about 3kms) and then 'hang on' and try to finish.

The Alton Downland Challenge is usually run over a very hilly 'Downland' trail across the very beautiful hills to the east of Alton, but this year because of the potential of Foot and Mouth restrictions the course was changed to twice round a flat boring 5km course, so everyone finished with good times...

If you want to see the result for yourself visit The Alton Runners Downland Challenge Results Page and you will find me about half way down the page (80th finisher).

The photo at the top does include me - I am on the right, and I'm in this one too, on the right (circled)

A tough old lady - another perspecive

I suppose the disadvantage of having a tough old lady as a mother is that she is tough to deal with, and my mother is a case in point.

As I mentioned in a recent blog after her fall and 19 hours on the floor she went into a local old people's residential home for what was meant to be 4 weeks respite care. She was in the end asked to leave early - literally expelled by the home, for bad behaviour. I can almost smile about it now, but it was very difficult to see the funny side of the experience while it was going on.

I gave her an old mobile phone of mine with a new prepaid SIM so she could keep in touch whilst 'inside'. She failed totally to master how to use it. I was phoned several times in the middle of the night (3 am) when she mistook the phone for the TV remote control!

If that was all then it would have been a breeze, but she also invented a range of invisible friends who dropped in and took her off on adventures (despite the fact that she could barely walk): there was the handsome man and his three naughty children, the three tall men who stood guard outside her window (she was on the first floor, and there was no balcony) and the three Sikhs who came into her room and made themselves at home on her bed (my mother spent over 25 years in India, so the appearance of the Sikhs was quite welcome to her and fairly normal). I wonder if it is significant that all of these apperitions appeared in threes. Then there was the man singing next door. He sang all day and part of the night, but only my mother could hear him. This was a little disturbing, particularly when she struck up conversations with these people when you were trying to talk to her or when she got cross when having shouted "Mind the baby!" at you as you walked across the room when you replied "There is no baby".

Even this would have been OK, but she refused to go down and mix with the other residents "My legs hurt too much" (but not too much when I offered to take her out to the pub), or "I don't want to sit with all the old people" and can I remind you my mother has just celebrated her 87th birthday.

No, what did it for the home was her vendetta with the night nursing staff. She refused to cooperate in any way shape or form with them after 3 weeks of being as good as gold. She refused to go to bed, then she tried to sleep on the floor, she refused to take her medicine and then she trashed the room - twice. So when I went to visit her a with a little over a week go to go, the manageress of the home asked me to remove her as soon as possible. Fortunately I had anticipated this (as a result of a series of very late night phone calls) and my oldest brother who was already scheduled to come up from Devon and look after her with his wife agreed to come up early and get her out of trouble.

As soon as she got home the invisible friends disappeared and she was as good as gold, for a while...

But now she is kicking up a fuss because we are trying to get her to face the facts that she needs to either have modifications made to her house so that she can live there in comfort (like a stair lift, and a walk-in shower), or move to somewhere more suitable, or find a more suitable residential home.

Everyone, her doctor included, has said she cannot go on as she was and while she agrees with the idea that something needs to be done she refuses to make any decision as to what. For example, her preferred option is to move into a more suitable house, closer to the centre of town, with level ground for her to walk on (she currently lives on a hill), but when anyone says something like, "Good, then lets get the ball rolling and put this house on the market" she 'throws a wobbly' and has palpatations at the thought of an estate agent coming round and valuing the house and the thought that everyone in her road will know her house is for sale.

Today she has just had a row with my brother who is still looking after her because he was trying to get her to face these facts and make a decision... and I am going on Sunday to relieve him and will be staying with my mother for 3 days - "Oh, Goodie!"

Cider 2007

It was a bumper crop for apples this year in my garden in Dockenfield - the trees were positively groaning under the weight of apples, well all of them except the oldest tree that is close to the boundary and swamped by another apple tree, a layladi hedge and the neighbours beech hedge. It produced no apples again this year, which is a shame as its apples are pentangular (possibly "Crispin"s)!

Anyway the other trees more than made up for it with a total harvest of 275kg (43stone 4lbs, or 5.4hundredweight, or 1/4 of a ton) of apples from the three trees (not counting a few dozen or so I left on the 'cookers' tree that weren't quite ripe). The big old 'cookers' tree, nearest the house, produced 164kg alone.

The three apple trees are of different varieties. The one at the bottom of the garden, nearest the road is about 3 metres tall and almost spherical in shape with its branches starting out horizontally from its short trunk at about 1 metre from the ground. I think it might be a Blenheim Orange Apple Tree (Malus domestica `Blenheim Orange`).

This tree almost fell over 3 years ago and I had to winch it upright and prop it up with a wooden beam. The apples it produces are russet (golden) coloured, sweet to taste but tend to have thick skin and a chalky texture.

The apple tree by the drive on the hill above the garage is possibly a Cox`s Orange Pippin Apple Tree (Malus domestica `Cox`s Orange Pippin`). The tree is tall and willowy and produces small, sweet, almost perfumed very rosy apples in profusion. The crop was so heavy this year that one of the main branches split and bent.

The third tree, the largest apple tree in the garden is old, possibly a hundred years old.
Its stem splits just above the ground into 4 trunks. The tree grows vigorously and has been heavily pruned at least 3 times in the 7 years we have been living here. It produces what I thought were cooking apples (cookers) but this year the apples turned from green to a wonderful buttery yellow so they looked more like grapefruit when ripe. Some were even rosy and the flesh was pinkish. Unlike previous years when the apples had been green and sour this year the tasted sweet and aromatic. I think it may be an Early Victoria (Malus x domestica Early Victoria).

I picked all the apples in one day and left them in large plastic sacks dotted around the garden and then a few days later on 27th September we started the crushing and pressing. It took 4 days to get through all the apples, though we didn't do them all on consecutive days, it was too hard work for that.

This year we used rubber gloves when procesing the apples which prevented our hands from turning black as in previous years. Otherwise it was pretty much the same procedure as last year. All but the smallest apples were cut into quarters before being put into the crusher. This year we put the apples from the two smaller tree through the crusher twice. We tried that with the 'Early Victorias' but the pulp turned into a purée which was almost impossible to deal with as it oozed out the sides of the press!

When we had crushed about a bucket full of apples they were then put in the press and squeezed down to about half their size and the juice was collected in another bucket and then added to a wine fermenter or demijohn.

Crushing the is not particularly hard work, you just put the apples in the top, crank the handle and collect the crushed apples from the bottom, but bending to crank the handle and the cutting of the apples, not to mention getting apple juice squirted at you as the go through the crushers makes it a tiresome activity, especially when done for hours and hours.

Pressing is a lot more physical. The crushed apples have to be put carefully into the wooden basket, trying to avoid dropping any. When the basket is crammed full the wooden pressing blocks are placed on the top and the wooden chocks and the threaded crank are attached and the whole lot wound down slowly with a metal bar in the crank. It is pretty easy going for the first 20 or 30 turns of the handle and the juice positively gushes out the sides of the basket, but the last 20 or 30 turns are hard physical labour especially for the harder Blenheims and Coxs which are springy and tough even when crushed. My shoulder are still aching!

I started with one 5 gallon wine fermenter but quickly realised that was not going to be enough and ended up buying too more. We finished pressing on 4th October. The 275kg of apples filled the three 5 gallon wine fermenters (probably with 7 gallons in each as I over filled them) and seven 1 gallon demijohns with apple juice; an estimated 120 litres (26 gallons(UK)).

I used cider yeast on the first demijohn, but as my homebrew shop had run out of that when I returned for more and additional wine fermenters I used champagne yeast on the remaining fermenters and demijohns.

The pressed crushed apples, all 155kgs, of them, were not wasted. I took them down to Sarah-Jane's house and they were fed to her pigs.

The storeroom above the garage is now a harmonious place to be with the gentle 'plop plop plop' of the airlocks. The cider will ferment there until the new year when I will bottle it; if I can find enough bottles.

This years crop has made last years 10.5 gallons look trivial. I still am drinking last years cider - it is excellent. I've got about 36 bottles of it left.