November 9th (Sun.)
I entered the dragon’s den again returning to the second hand store with the ‘dealer from hell’ once more since I had seen a shoe cabinet and a pine table set for the house. Since every body in Japan takes their shoes off in the hall way without a cabinet to neatly store them away the hall would be a smelly ocean of shoes. Actually some of my happy memeories of living in Sapporo were the house parties in tiny apartments and coming in from the minus degree conditions to an open door (nobody locked their doors until bedtime even in the city), the heat and voices within ,and just such a sea of footwear in a puddle of melted snow. Most people live in modern houses with built in shoe closets and these stand alone cabinets are hard to find. Obviously some one else thought the same since it had already been sold just hours before. So only the pine dining set remained.
Next year, time permitting, I hope to tackle the veranda. I have a grand vision, a pergola open trellis with
trained grape and wisteria above, to the side a brick oven and in the centre, table and chairs with the ubiquitous red check table cloth. A bottle of wine and a crisp green salad and some cut bread and my ‘office’ is ready for the summer !
So I found a suitable table set, a bench seat on one side, 2 chairs on the other (love the asymmetry of the arrangement) and one of those rustic style tables, all in pine.
I’ve haggled in the UK, Turkey, Paris, Spain and Italy. The Japanese will haggle too but past the initial ‘chotto makette kureru ?’ (could you come down a little ?) things often get sticky.
The world over the antique trade works in the same way, right?A seller buys at a price, and sells on at a higher price, somethings he flys close to the wind on his profit margin, others he has a large margin to work on having bought below the price he thinks he can get. Everything he wants to sell on at the highest price he can but on every item there is a hidden price tag that is the real price he’s willing to take. That’s the game.It’s not rocket science.
Unfortunately in Japan with the exception of antique market traders who seem to be a different breed, the seller too often ‘gets the ass ‘ at being asked to play the game and this is because, i guess, they are too infrequently asked to play it. Most customers, for whatever reason, will cough up the price on the tag missing out on the most satisfying part of second hand buying for me.
So after popping the question, since this labyrinthine shop is spread over 2 buildings, the seller phoned the boss (never good to have to negotiator via a 3rd party) and came back with a puny reduction (12,800 yen to 10,000 asked for came back with 12,000 yen). Now I have no problem with this because, as I said, maybe the dealer hasn’t got much room to move on this one but I have to be sure. However as I said this, as always, is were things get sticky:

Me: ‘mmm, we’ve just moved and have a lot of other things to spend out money on, I have to watch my budget, if it was 11,000yen I’d take it now’.
Purple haired Granny seller: ‘11,000yen, hang on’.
(phones again)
PHG seller returns with other granny for support: ‘No, 12,000 yen he says’.
Me: ‘Ok, I understand, well, I’ll think about it’.

It’s then that the surly looks start. The granny wonders off and comes back with a large pallet trolley.
PHG: Here you are, for all the things you need to buy.
Me: I’m not buying them here and now, I’m only interested in this for now.
PHG: hmmmm…oh. (wanders off with it again).

Why the hell would I negotiate on a single table if I was spending out more in the same store ?
Cantakerous old behemoth !
I ended up buying a few bowls that were wrapped in stony silence.

I live to have sparred with the ‘dealer from hell’s’ team of killer grannys.

November 8th (Sat.)

Yasumi had some work on so I had Eldan. As such, I stayed in the house with him mainly and relaxed a little. Our joint efforts were making a cottage pie (he had great fun mashing the potatoes and putting his beloved cheese on top) and potting a lavender plant. These twin endeavours are recorded in this single pic.

November 3rd (Mon. National Holiday)
The next day with the inevitable hang over I made a bee line for the field. I recalled little of the last stages of the party and wanted to reassure myself we hadn’t torn up the place and ended up burning the vegetables or some other act of drunken lunacy ! Actually apart from the puddle of beer and accompanying brewery smell on the garage floor (result of the ‘german beer incident’) the place was intact and indeed so successfully were our pyromaniacal endeavours that I now have a large space where all the felled trees from the back of the house had been placed. The ground is soft and yielding thanks to the leaves and twigs that have rotted down into it and completely devoid of weeds. So there’s a little unexpected knowledge
picked up along the way:

If you want a lush and easy obtained border and you have some spare felled wood and cuttings pile it high on the spot a few months.

So this will be the spot for my perenial vegetables and herbs, jerusalem artichokes, asparagus, saffron etc.

It was a misty and damp day with the lightest of drizzle hanging in the air, the perfect accompaniment to everyones post party slumber like state. Paul chilled out in the lounge with a book and tea, the girls in the living room watching dvd’s with Eldan and me cooking up a lazy spicy bean stew served with couscous.
Once everyone had departed I rallied myself up with a shower. Time doesn’t wait for hangovers. I’ve got a field that needs to be ready for ducklings in spring and olive trees in Autumn. That means an established pasture with lush grazing for the ducks, by the time summer comes with drainage channels dug in and mounds made up for the trees and calcium and stones worked into the soil to boot.

Stones you cry ?? Why would you put stones in a field. Well yes it’s fairly radical but I know the biggest problem with putting olive trees in that field is going to be the water when the phenomenal rains come. There’s 2 ways of handling that: raising the level of the soil, which means importing vast amounts of soil, or increasing the drainage of the present soil. Soil’s ability to drain is largely effected by the size of it’s particles, the smallest particle being clay, and the largest sand. Usualy the perfect soil for growing is something between that. However olive trees like above all, well drained and chalky soil, they can stand poor soil, they can even thrive in the salty air of a coastal cliff but they can’t abide having wet roots. So I’m considering reducing what would usually be considered the quality of the soil by adding the gravel we don’t need in the front garden and add a calciferous material to come towards the olives natural habitat.

First step was to cut back the high autumn grasses and rake it up, ready for ploughing next weekend. That was my day ’till evening. What could be more autumnal than watching the red autumn sun descend over the ridge of the mountains, feeling the nip in the air as I raked the purple, red and mauve grasses into heaps.

November 2nd (Sun.)

The big day ! Cooked a carrot cake of dubious quality and shored it up by putting ladles of the cream cheese topping that is everybody’s favourite on it. Then, end to end, 2 metres of garlic bread, loads of jacket pots in foil, hamburgers and chunky par boiled pumpkin for the barbeque. The sweet potato would be roasted in the firegrates embers too but I’d let the guests do the preparation of those, one less job to do.
Before we knew it it had rolled around to 4pm and the first of our guests was at the door. The local ALT (assitant language teacher) for the schools in town, I’d met by chance outside my son’s creche, got chatting, exchanged phone numbers and he’d been duely invited to this bash. With so few foreigners around friends are sometimes made in this free and easy way in Japan.
He’s a relaxed Canadian, who everybody quickly warmed to, especially my wife, who kept saying ‘he’s SO nice’ every time she passed me. Also he was a dab hand at getting a fire going, a skill learnt from numerous ‘pit parties’ in Canada.
‘Pit party ?’ I asked.

‘ A few guys get together, make a big fire and sit out around drinking beer till they’re blind drunk.’
‘Ahh..a lot like this then’ I quipped.

We christened the german wheat beer I’d bought, damn fine too, but once the tap had been set in motion the beer wouldn’t stop flowing and the canister was slowly dripping away, spilling it’s golden contents onto the concrete floor. No end of jiggery-pockery would stop it’s flow. Tipping it on it’s side was no good since there was a air valve in the top from which the beer also spilt. It was like some bad German joke ! We joked about just taking turns sitting under the tap’s flow and consuming it that way. At last I noticed if you pushed the tap in the flow subsided and stopped the beer waterfall.
A little bit more “Vorsprung durch technik” may be needed from the beer containment people in Munchen I fear.
At least it gives me added gusto to get some home-brew ready for next years bonfire night. A German style wheat beer may well head the list of beers on offer, just for sweet revenge for this years bought keg puking itself onto the floor.

Wellies on, and off we go to the top field. Just head for the 3metre high inferno of blazing timber.

Meanwhile back outside I was having problems with my embers. The idea had been to smother the fire with rice husk of which I had several big bags in the garage (it’s used to add lift to the soil). The gradual oxygen starved firing slowly turns the pale golden husks black as it spreads, engulfing the food which lies hidden in it as it travels. This technique works well with the roasted sweet potatoes I think because they are first wrapped in soggy newspaper then in foil shielding from the direct heat of the firing so they are actually partially steamed. Not much good with garlic bread and jacket potatoes were you want a hard crust or skin though and the temperature proved to great for these simply foil wrapped foods.
I hadn’t really thought much about the food, being too caught up in getting everything set up for the fire itself. Bonfire fare is real slow food which doesn’t fit with having 10 or so hungry guests arriving at your door at dinner time when you’ve just go the fire going.
I’m already planning for next year and think I’ll have some pre-made foods, a homemade pumpkin soup,
burgers and sausages (home made ?) ready to whack on a bbq to feed hungry mouths. Then when the fire has produced enough nice fine embers we can ship them by wheel barrow to the firegrate, accurately judge their temperature and lay them over the jacket pots and garlic bread to slow cook for eating when the firework display (we didn’t have) is well over and everybodys ready for more food. If guests initial hunger is satisfied it needn’t be a race, most people didn’t hit the sack ’till gone 2a.m.

Some time during the night I started to hear some monkeys screeching in the forests above. Now this is the first time I’ve ever heard that so far and the timing of it makes me suspect that just like humans they were drawn by curiousity to see what the unfamiliar light and noises in the night were. Fire may be scary at close hand but from the trees maybe it was just fascinating. I heard some noises quite at hand, in the field above and so decided to set off with Haine and a large stick to just send out the message so that they didn’t get into the habit of coming close and knew a dog was on the place.
Although I couldn’t see or hear anything up there Haine got really spooked and kept staring at the same spot in the forest, far from any aggressive growling the little coward ducked tail and hid behind my legs. Well he is a baby still I guess.

Anyway it was a roaring success (if you’ll pardon the pun). Our Japanese friends, indeed Yasumi herself, had no previous experience of the bonfire tradition yet the pleasure of a fire on a cold night is universal to all people around the world and touches something deep in all our hearts.
I was glad in a quiet moment at a time when all had gathered around the fire someone asked me what the meaning of the bonfire was. In as best Japanese as I could manage I explained that for me the bonfire is about the family and friends gather around a fire at the cusp of the season to ask for safe passage through the harsh winter months until once again
the warmth of spring is felt on our faces.

We lead lives far divorced from the natural cycle of life, eating strawberries in winter and pumpkin in spring, racing in heated cars to air conditioned rooms. Producing my own food is for me about finding that lost rythym again in some small part. The bonfire has a scintilating logic to it, the pruned wood of fruit trees and golden and purple hued cut autumn grasses, the summers growth offered up to the autumn sky in plumes and cinders of luminous tinge. Then the ashes ploughed into the field to garner the soil with the promise of next year’s growth.
For the celts this time was Samhain, the old new year. The year was divided into 2 halves, the dark, from now until May, and the light that followed. Thus the story of the year was a journey into the light and bounty of summer and the next years fortunes were dependent on the last years endeavour producing a continuum between past and future, dark and light.
With my farming hat on there seems an inescapable logic to this system and by contrast the setting of New year in January clearly abetery and a little ridiculous. I’m humbled by the wisdom of these ancients.

It is easy to forget that people of ancient cultures were of no less intelligents than ourselves. The human brain was of no lesser function than now. There is greater knowledge in the world than the ability to make a machine that delivers a caramel macchiato in your hand in 30 seconds. We are blinded by the notion of progress, that the history of mankind is an ever upward journey into light. Who is to say that it is, instead, just some big game in shifting emphasis such that we lose knowledge at a corresponding rate to that we gain ?

October 30th (Thurs.)
The algae in our little pond really built up during the long hot summer and so to combat it I bought this little solar powered fountain on ebay to disturb the water and thus inhibit it’s growth.

‘Little’ being the word, much smaller than I expected . Well small but powerful I hoped as I set it up outside and waited…and waited..then checked on the ebay ad to see if I’d missed something (it came in a white card box with no instructions). No all should be fine, I took it out of the water and shook it which sit it whirring then stopped.
Well I thought, it probably is buggered but then again it is 4 o clock with waning light so I’ll wait till we get full sunlight before sending any irate emails to the company I bought it from….in China (no comment).

October 22nd (Wed.)

With the Summer over and the first season of veg. growing completed in our new home it’s time to reflect on how things went.
So here’s a veg. by veg. account of the summer.

Celery – Bolted ! The lesson learnt is that putting them in the soil too early when the cold weather may return may make them put up flowers which is precisely what happened. Best to keep them in the polyhouse until sure of the weather. They’ll bolt if exposed to a prolonged period under 4 degrees.

Peppers – I had various peppers, red, chilli, green etc. Firstly nearly all were eaten by the deer so (as with a lot of following vegetables) I can’t really get a clear picture of how they would have been. After coming back from the green and chili peppers cropped well. Shield bugs were a pest in large numbers and it’s still a question how much a detrimental an effect this has on the plant. RHS claims although they feed on the plants sap even in large numbers they have no effect on the plant. I’m not so sure and would much prefer them to bog off. Finding an organic solution other than picking them off by hand is a priority.

Coriander – Fine, except, don’t plant coriander next door to flat leaf parsley because it is near impossible to tell the 2 plants apart ! Produced a good crop of leaves and seeds. Didnt have the longevity of the parsley or basil though so a staggered planting to ensure a crop through the season may be good. Picking out the flower heads may also prolong the season.

Aubergine – Oh my gallant aubergine, after being eaten down to leafless stalks by deer they came back and are still producing small fruit now. Shield bugs were about in large numbers. Come August huge monster caterpillars came forth which seemed to be able to consume leaves whole in one sitting. They average 8cm in length and I presume become the big moths we see. Picking off by hand was fine to control numbers.

Basil – all home sown. They were a hassle free dream. In truth a 5 metre row of basil is a little excessive for family use because by being planted right at the start of the growing season they had plenty of time to grow to their full height of around a metre tall. Even with pesto making not even half has been eaten. A small black beetle put holes in the early growth but the plants were well enough established for this to be purely cosmetic and explosive growth from June eliminated fears. I picked them off by hand but providing the plant is large enough this may not be neccesary. From August they bloomed and really brought in many pollinators to the field, the bees and butterflies loved them. A staggered planting of a smaller number of plants seems a good idea.

Cucumbers – They would have done fine and cropped heavily I feel had the deer not munched them. I sowed directly to pots for ease and this was fine and saved me from the work of potting on before planting out.

Tomatoes – ruddy disaster ! All plants failed before producing much crop. Above all else this is the crop I’ve got to work on next year. The price of Italian plum tomatoes is spiralling and it’s a main commodity in the family.
I’ll be looking into cultivation techniques suited to Japan over the winter but I think what happened is the heavy rain had them. Tomatoes are particulalry weak from rain from above and they did appear to rot where they were. I’ve noticed many Japanese growers make little tents over the plants by putting a high hoop over the row with plastic sheeting just at the top. This sems like an excellent idea since it doesn’t interfere with the ventilation but protects the plant from the brunt of the rain.
Planting early in 1 row poly tunnels to raise the temperature, then removing the sidesheeting to ventilate and eventually using a shading film over the top when the sun gets really hot may be a good cultivation process.

Zucchini – Wonderful ! Directly seeded, all plants (about 15) came up, only required a bit of irrigation when fruiting and attracted no pests, even the deer didn’t fancy them. After the rainy season when the heat rose the strongest pollination and hence largest number of fruit was cropped. Later, fruit abortion was seen a little. Attracting pollinators may help this.
I also tried removing some fruit prematurely which did appear to help get bigger fruit with the remainder.

Parsley and Oregano – I’ll lump these 2 together. Potted on from home-propagated seedling they did fine through the summer but come the cooler weather of September they took flight with explosive growth. In the case of oregano this could be very handy since the dried herb is more pungent than the fresh so soon I can clip it and dry it for storage. I’ll transplant the reamining plant to pot for a future herb garden and our oregano needs should be sorted.

Carrots – I put in a half row of carrots not expecting much…..which was exactly what I got. The soil will, as I expected, have to be worked to a fine tilth and worked deep to get anything other than the squat little fellas I harvested. There was no evidence of clubroot or any other major disease on any of the crops for that matter which is good news indeed.

I wasn’t expecting to get much this year, what with going away to England right in the middle of the growing season and not having amended the soil and being open to wild animal attacks.
I forget now but there was one morning after discovering almost all my plants had been eaten down to deer stems by a deer when I said to Yasumi with a heavy heart ,”We are out of the running this year”.
It’s amazing how many plants bounced back. At times though it seemed I was growing food for the deer and cultivating weeds more than food.
From now, as the crops finish the ground will be rested and supplied with the manure and nitrogen I’m sure it needs ready for the next season. And with the fence more or less in place I’m looking forward to focusing on the needs of the crops in a way I was unable to do this summer…..well that’s the plan anyway, ‘best laid plans of mice and men’ as they say.

Oct. 21st (Tues.)
We’ve decided to hold a bonfire night in the far field on around the 3rd of November. It’s something I’ve long thought about and we now have the means to make it happen. I don’t much like Halloween it seems to have veered far from it’s origin as All Hallow’s eve and seems largely aimed to boost shop sales in the gap between the summer holidays and the start of Christmas shopping. Bonfire night seems truer in spirit to me. On a smallholding there seems to be a natural logic and completeness in burning the wood that has been felled in the Autumn, punctuating the end of summer. Then on a more spiritual level the fire sees the family turning towards the cold months and hoping for warmth and sustenance through these times until the warmth of the spring sun is felt on our faces again.
Some may say it’s nothing but a waste of good firewood, and they’d be right and wrong all at once for there deserves to be something more than the mere sensible to life.

In any case I’ve started to put the wheels in motion, inviting guests, thinking about what needs to be done and vitally important buying the vittals. I now have a 5litre keg of ‘Hefe-weiser’ beer from Munchen on the kitchen dresser. I thought it only best to taste the brew before committing to 5 litres of the stuff so had the odious task of sampling a bottle a few days before, very nice too.

Looks like the fare will line up something like this :

Jacket potatoes
Sweetcorn
Roasted chestnuts
Pumpkin soup
Garlic Bread
Roasted sweet potatoes (yakiimo)
Hot mulled wine
I’m putting a nod of the cap at Halloween with that menu (garlic and pumpkin) just to be on the safe side !!

October 13th (Mon.)

I got another day to plug away at stuff this weekend due to it being a national holiday but took a break and had an excellent indian curry at a place just a half hour drive away (quite close for us). The jovial Indian waiter knows us　well and speaks English to Eldan who answers or feigns shyness as is his want. As I paid he surprised me by saying ‘You and your wife are looking fat’ with a beaming smile. It was delivered with too much smiling buoyancy to be taken as anything other than a difference in what is cultural acceptable so I replied ‘Yes, fat and happy as we say in England’　and left it as that.

Dragged my wife under protest to the second hand store we bought the piano from. I thought she was loathe to meet the ‘antique dealer from hell’ again but she was just loathe to see her afternoon disappear watching me going through every dusty aisle of the labyrinthine place looking for bargains. In anycase within 2 minutes of entering she’d found a full　length mirror going for a song and I felt vindicated in coming. On my part I found this rather nice wicker recliner for 2000 yen (10 pounds) and was even more taken with it when, on turning it over I found an antique price tag for 16,000 yen (80 pounds) on it’s frame.

One far off day when the garden lawn is established and the flower borders a riot of scent and colour expect to find me asleep on this in some corner of the lawn, one of those Islamic brass tables at my side with a ridiculously tall ‘Singapore Sling’ on it.
For now, it had a rather befittingly ride home on the roof rack of the jeep then worse still was shaken up a treat as on the way home I went down to the riverbank to collect rocks for the bed of the dry brook in the garden.
A fishing weir had been set up across the river and a few fishermen were casting lines out to hook fish in front of it.
This appears to be a mean way of catching fish to me, the poor things baffled and confounded in there attempt to get down stream.

On return home I leisurely put the rocks in to the brook bed then had a sudden ‘eureka’ moment.
On the last day of the first school term, just before the summer holidays, the primary schools in Japan have a big tidy up and ours was no exception. Loads of stuff was chucked out including a large geological collection of rare stones　 in their wood trays. I felt this was such a shame I ended up taking them home and spent several jolly evenings restoring　the rocks to their correct position in the display trays. Scintillating stuff I hear you cry !
Having done that I didn’t really know what to do with them except imagine some far off Christmas with me in my　dotage surrounded by nieces, grandchildren, and nephews all braying ‘Oh please, grandad show us the geological collection　again’. Mmmm…
Then it struck me maybe I could place some of these stones randomly in the brook bed among the ordinary stones.
Playing Indiana Jones style hunting games for them sounds much more fun than their being in stuffy old boxes.

October 12th (Sun.)

I cut another large swath of the old sakaki trees down today in the upper field. I take little pleasure in cutting any trees but it is unfortunately unavoidable if we are to do anything with the field. Eldan had a jolly old time taking up the tall dandelions which were left in abundance after the trees had been cleared. He does revel in doing these jobs with dad. I guess it’s one positive aspect of me being so busy; he’s learning the best way of being with dad is helping dad. That’s a very positive trend indeed. The best fun can be had in labour and anyway I’ll need another pair of capable hands around the smallholding. What do I sound like ? ha ha I wonder how many farming fathers have repeated those lines down the ages since man first put down his spear and put up an enclosure.

My wife’s family returned to their hometown, their nursing duties to Eldan being fulfilled and in the late afternoon, as I leisurely started to take up the wild grasses in what will be our future lawn the place seemed eerily quiet. This is a lovely time of day in a lovely time of year when the first bite of an chill is in the air. The air has an ‘edge’ you could say and the mournful cry of herons returning to the nests alone penetrates the stillness.

Once packed up and in the house it was nice to sit with Haine in the lounge with his head on my knee. Not least because with new curtains in place and a smart Alladin new parafin stove taking pride of place on the floor the lounge interior is just about finished and how I envisioned it.

I can’t wait to get some cold weather so I can light the stove. We picked it up on an internet auction for about 10,000 yen (50 pounds), I love these old Alladin ‘blue flame ‘ stoves whose design has hardly changed since the ’20’s and there are plenty from that era still around, testament to their toughness. Real classic functionality.

October 11th (Sat.)
Poor little Eldan was sick with an ear infection so my wife’s family once more bailed us out by coming to look after him.

I tackled the boxwood bushes that border the house in the morning. I’ve never cut a bush in my life as far as I remember but I gave Yasumi the old cock and bull story that ‘I’m English, it’s in the blood to be good at such stuff. We are practically a nation of hobbits.’ By which I mean isolationist minded peasantry ‘who like nothing more than well tilled soil’ as I believe Tolkien put it.
Talking of the great man, I have the green light from my wife to instigate something called ‘Tolkien fest’.
One of the most enjoyable thing about being the head of a bi-cultural ex-pat household is I am the ambassador for all things British within the family. Incorporating a certain amount of eccentricity is healthy and a good representation of my culture.
In this vein, I dreamed up Tolkien fest. Tolkien Fest will be a day in Autumn or early spring; under a large poster of the man himself the family and invited guests will gather for a small recitation of songs, poems or passages from Tolkien’s works by family members. After that we can have a bonfire, with the usual hearty bonfire fare and ale plus a few Tolkien based games and fireworks.

The great man himself
I’m sure in time my son Eldan (whose name comes from the same Anglo-Saxon linguistic roots that Tolkien drew a lot of his names from) through the years will enjoy listening to Tolkien fest, then later performing in it, before hating the very idea of it, and thinking Dad a right weirdo. Until one day many many years later he thinks back to the absurdity of Tolkien Fest with a warm heart and sees the worth in this singularly family event.

I crammed more seedlings into the field in the morning, mainly winter greens, broccoli tops, some red chard like thing I can’t even remember the name of, and a few of the pretty Romanesco broccoli just to try.

The beautiful fractal romanesco broccoli

Everythings coming up fine although I quickly realised I’d forgotten to earth up my potatoes which was quickly remedied. I’m experimenting in not using the black mulch film on this late crop, although we have the danger of typhoons the rainy season that can erode the ridges is long over and retaining moisture in the soil should not be such a problem.
Not having the mulch makes the ridge a much more flexible (pardon the pun) organic medium for growing. Since the earthing up disturbs the soil in effect weeding the row I’ve found it easy and enjoyable. We’ll have to wait to see how the crop turns out though.

As I said before the neighbours dogs barking their heads off at Haine when he’s tethered out in the field had to be addressed so I put up this brown sheet to shield them from each other gaze.
This stuff is really sold as ‘weed stopper’. For the busy businessman, they can peg out this plastic sheet in their garden, and cut holes in it to plug in the odd tree or bush here or there. The perfect plastic covered garden !
As I put it up a wind was whipping up and it became quite a job. On completion me and Eldan sat on the camp chairs in the garden and watched the trees in the mountain forest that borders the property swaying and billowing.
I love when the rough weathers comes to the valley, it’s so wild and wooly !
Through the night the storm raged.