A day at home with Ian Moore

Despite flying solo with a menagerie of animals as well as B&B guests, today is a good day for Ian Moore…

Finally there was a light at the end of the tunnel. Well, I say tunnel, it was a fire grate, and the light was actual fire but as anyone with a real fire will tell you, if the thing is still alight when you get up in the morning, the day has already started with a win.

I’m all for a bit of old- fashioned hunter-gatherer, me-man me-make fire type stuff, but when it’s been raining for a week, and blowing a gale, that morning trudge to the wood store for logs and kindling is a heavy tread, I can tell you. The alarm had gone off at 6, meaning it was time to do breakfasts for the 10 B&B guests. I sloped begrudgingly into the kitchen, separated Kipper from whatever cat was playing chicken with him, and noticed the embers in the fire.

Today would be a good day. It would have been a good day anyway though, because after a week away, Natalie and the boys were finally coming home. It had been a long week. Ultime, our horse, is quite the madame. She wears an expression of permanent suspicion on her long face but this time it was vindicated. There was no way I would have enough hay to feed her and the goats for the full week. Obviously, I could just order more but that wasn’t the problem, the problem was that hay delivery is a two-man job because Ultime wants to get dangerously involved.

There was no way I could, or was prepared to, wrestle with Ultime and deal with the gates and the farmer’s tractor all at the same time. So I started ‘cutting’ her hay, like some, cheap chiselling drug dealer trying to enhance profits, and started giving her one part straw for every two parts hay.

By day two she was wise to it and literally started kicking out, eyeing me like a wild-eyed addict with a horsey “this stuff ain’t clean man!”. Gigi and Kipper were at the fence barking at her wildly too, which may very well have been the canine equivalent of “leave it Ultime, it ain’t worth it”, but unsurprisingly did nothing to calm her down.

Kipper soon found his own calming routine. The week for the two us began on the back foot when his new ‘no-pull’ harness arrived and I took him down the road for a walk. He pulled, so I pulled back, and the harness flipped him over leaving him looking like a struggling beetle. One of Natalie’s final instructions had been that, if I get the chance (yeah, right), I should take Kipper to dog training. I will, I said, but only if the harness works. Well, the harness doesn’t work. I’m all for dog training, it’s important, especially for Kipper, but I’m not going to be the only one there with an upside-down dog, dragging him around the course like he’s a sled. But like I say, he’d found his own path to enlightenment. There’s a toad that lives on the terrace and Kipper doesn’t know how to deal with it. He’s either barking at it, jumping up and down in its face or just generally making a nuisance of himself. Then one night, he licked it. Clearly this is something to be discouraged but a high Kipper is a calm Kipper, and since then he’s been a delight all week, like a slightly stoned harmless mate, just lollopping around and constantly having the munchies.

So it’s been an up and down week and on this final day I 1 have a choice: tidy and clean the house to the standards that Natalie would expect or just find that toad and spend the afternoon on the sofa in front of the fire instead… toad wins this time, I think.

lan Moore Comedian, writer, chutney-maker and mod who lives with his family in the Loire Valley. His latest book in Playing the Martyr (£8.99, amazon.co.uk)

ianmoore.info

lapausevaldeloire.com

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