Tim Bannerman's Diary of a Pantomime 8 - Bloomin' Sheep!
I’ve gone off sheep. Oh, yes, those nice little fluffy white things are all right, as are their large and devoted mothers. But the lively ones, a year old or more, well…
For the first time since planting our beautiful cider apple and perry pear trees ten years ago – the Hendre Huffcap is just coming into blossom now – I went for my customary morning stroll round the orchard and – catastrophe!
The twenty or so vigorous, young, yearling ewes had decided, overnight, to climb up the guards around all the sweetest apple trees and chew off as much bark as they could reach on their hind legs.
None of them quite “ring-barked” when they eat all round the trunk to cause a complete break in the bark, which is fatal, nevertheless, it was a horror story. I can only hope that the worst affected will, yet again, prove the astonishing resilience of nature and live to a grand old age for the future generations who come to live here. Much like the magnificent old Bramley that, with a rather more rickety Underleaf, felled in a gale three years back, were the only trees left from the former orchard planted, at a guess, 100 years before.
Meanwhile, last year’s cider sits down in the summer-house, patiently waiting for me to get round to the bottling ritual I would normally have started well before this, had it not been for the bloomin’ “phantomime”, as one of our actors has christened it. And the Big Apple Cider and Perry Trials in Putley are coming up at the end of April, a scene of previous triumphs with a 2nd place in the Sweet Draught Perry last year, and 3rd in the Draught Dry Cider two years before that.
An old bramley in blossom during a previous Spring
Hey ho.
Still, the “phantomime” comes on apace, with our Production Week only eight days away and this weekend’s rehearsals the last chance for the rather more sluggardly members of the team to put away their books and show the rest of us that we really do have a SHOW on our hands.
But, apart from sheep, there is, of course, another saboteur at large. Yes, Covid.
I have brothers, sisters-in-law, sons, daughters-in-law, grandchildren – and that’s just family alone – all stricken, some more incapacitatingly than others admittedly. But the production has been reeling as, one after the other, our transgender Lady Letitia, treasure-seeking front legs of the Horse, Head Witch, Head Mouse, cider-making younger scion of The Family, transgender elder scion of The Family, and no doubt others to come, have fallen prey to the blasted bug.
The Green Knight before…
Of course, some have had a Caribbean cruise to shake it off in a brisk Sou’-Westerly, haven’t they, Martin? But most of us are condemned to the rather more prosaic confines of our pastoral hovels until the wrong red line disappears and tells us that we can rejoin civilisation. The local village primary school from whence we recruited our Mice has been decimated over the last few weeks and they’ve even had to cancel the annual Race Night next Friday, on the eve of our Production Technical Rehearsal.
And after… After the Green Knight loses his head, that is
So the Big Question is: should we postpone? And my answer right now is: no. Not after all this work. Right now, Gill is making mediaeval walls from “shoddy” glued to cardboard and they look fantastic! Let alone the witches’ cloaks she’s dyed and printed, all eight or nine of them, over the last week or so. And the momentum all round is massively industrious and committed as we gear up to the First Night on 7 April. To pull the plug now would be agony, and yet…
Not yet, anyway. Should half the rest of our 33 cast succumb next week then, maybe it would be time for the nuclear option. I just hope that doesn’t happen, neither here, nor a different kind of nuclear option over there from the cornered rat in the Kremlin. So, come on, gods. Give us all a break, will you?
