It is a bizarre balance to life here between bounty and poverty.
On the bounty side of things, there are currently excellent quality chestnuts to be had for free, after the recent rain there may even be some good quality cepes. Our neighbour has a fishing licence for the year, and frequently brings back large carp, that feed him, his two cats and the chickens for a couple of days. There are fine quality walnuts going begging, while we are able to take advantage of absent clients' gardens for apples and figs, which would otherwise attract vermin and make a mess. We get our firewood for free from the One Acre Wood.
Yet life is also precarious for many of our neighbours. The one with the fishing licence eats well when he can catch a fish, and does have fresh eggs but he lives on the equivalent of £400 per month. In our village the average household income is 11,500 euros a year. For fans of my other blog, I will confirm that the average quoted is a median - so half the households have less than that. There are several houses in the village that are not connected to the mains drains or the mains water supply.
This gives a very different view to comfortable middles class views on things such as mice, blackbirds, pigeons, rats, coypu and muskrats. If something gets into your stock of apples or nuts or chicken food, they deprive you of a meal or two. If your roof slates get the acid treatment from bird poo, they have to be replaced at the cost of something else - food, electricity, a pair of shoes without holes in. If the river floods due to the banks being washed away following coypu and muskrat damage, you live with the mess as best you can, cleaning what can be, but leaving the structural damage, because you don't have the cash.
Another set of neighbours tend a wonderful strawberry bed, hoping to get enough for themselves and also to sell some at market for a bit of cash. When the mice go through and take a nibble out of each one, any hope of sales is gone. A good mouser is therefore an important asset, and will be forgiven for the odd indiscretion in a newly turned seed bed, if they can provide the tail and paws of the strawberry thief. Next door's cat catches rats and gets away with murder on the back of it.
The credit crunch will mean a hard winter for some. If wise words about the numbers of berries are to be believed, the weather could mean a harder winter for others. If that is the case, every nut, every stored fruit and vegetable will be needed, and anything that damages those food stores will be dealt with accordingly. Poisons are indiscriminate and unnatural, and affect a whole food chain - give me a good hunting cat any day.
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