Toyota Prius as driven by Rambo.

Sometime I seriously wonder if I could live by foraging, hunting/fishing and brewing.

I’m talking about swapping my regular meals and trips to the off-licence for dandelion & nettle salads, rabbit stews, fish pies and ‘Jake’s Kidney Abuser’ home-made ale. This idea regularly grips me to the point of distraction. It’s not an uncommon occurrence for me to spend hours fantasising about myself as some sort of Ray Mears/Rambo survivalist type, wandering the woodlands and lakelands of my mind’s landscape, imitating complicated bird song, bringing down mighty stags with my trusty handmade crossbow, and retiring to my palatial tree house where I then crush juniper berries with my bare hands to make gin (I think after which point, I smoke a pipe. Which I made.) All of this, by the way, is happening to the soundtrack of Lord of the Rings.

Hopelessly childish beyond reason, I know, but I can’t help it. I love all that shit. Here’s the thing though: I’m crap at most of it!

I’m not really sure what plants you can eat, I can’t build anything, I tried shooting a rabbit once, but missed – terribly, I’ve caught 1 fish in 2 years of fishing……. and I don’t smoke. So that leaves brewing, which is something that I don’t know if I can or can’t do, cos I’ve never really tried it. My dad does it – in fact I was furnished with a couple of bottles of delicious wild plum wine the last time I visited him, which lit the fires of interest in the whole enterprise, and got me very pissed.

The idea of making beer/wine/absinthe at home intrigues me. If I do it right, I’ll never have to pay off-licence prices again (however, if I get it wrong I could go blind – swings and roundabouts). The trouble is that I have zero space to accommodate the micro-brewery I’ve got my eye on - It’s all buckets and test tubes and yeast (oh my!). I live in a top flat with no garden, and we’re already at spatial capacity, what with having a 10 year old girl and a 7 month old baby filling up every available nook and cranny with toys and nappies and JLS cd’s.

So, my options are:

1. Ask someone in my local area to house my crazy concoctions – I can’t offer any money, but if you do live in the Fiveways area of Brighton, and have a spare cupboard, you can have half of the poisonous ditch water I will inevitably produce as payment for your services.
2. Move house to somewhere bigger – This is actually on the agenda, pending us saving up a deposit. This is happening slowly but surely…. While our yearly earnings might not give our bank manager an erection, we’re managing to claw a few pennies a month into a savings account. However, if I want to be brewing up a batch of “Beer Battered” – a name I’ve just thought of, but will definitely be using – within the next couple of years, I will have to refer exclusively to option 1.

So while I wait for the offers to roll in, I’ll fill you in on what’s gone on since I last updated this here blog…..

I know it’s been ages since my last post. I seem to remember saying some time ago that I would have a ton of stuff to write about now that I’ve moved away from exclusively talking about cars – turns out I was wrong…. There appears to be bugger all left in my head when you take the cars away (apart from the occasional ‘Jake of the Jungle’ fantasy).

I’ve driven a ton of cars since the Bentley, but none as classy or fast, so there’s really been nothing decent to write about on that front for ages. That said, my friend wrote this on her facebook the other day:

“Had to drive a Prius today. Must be the only car in the world where you need an engineering degree just to start it!”

She’s not wrong! I had the same experience not so long ago. For once I was collecting someone who wasn’t pissed, moreover that he’d just had an operation that prevented him from driving (I didn’t ask what he’d had done, but from the way he was limping, it wouldn’t have surprised me if a surgeon had just done something inexcusable to his happy sack). He asked me if I’d ever driven a Prius before. “No” came my reply, “But I’ve driven a lot of other cars before, how different could this one be?”

His smile said it all. After what seemed like five minutes of the most frantic button pushing, horn blasting, windscreen wiper activating, radio tuning madness, he politely provided me with the list – yes list – of actions one needs to perform in order to start and drive his stupid bloody car. Right foot goes here, left hand goes there, press that button for 2 seconds, pull that lever, left foot up, right foot down, grab your partner, and dosey doe.

Once it got up and running, the Prius was actually a lovely car to drive…… until you stop at traffic lights, at which point the engine cuts out and you shit yourself at the thought of having to do all that twatting around to get the thing started again.

Fear not! It’s an oh-so-smug emissions saving device that turns the engine off when it’s stationary. Put your foot back on the gas *tip’s his hat to his American readers* and the engine starts and you’re off again. I had real difficulty coming to terms with this feature – it just felt like I kept stalling it, at which I would automatically apologise. We didn’t talk much, and I’m not surprised considering that I was saying sorry for no reason at every set of lights.

But back to the beer. If somehow a space is procured and I manage to brew anything half drinkable, I will of course review it here. If anyone out there brews their own, all tips/tricks and recipes would be appreciated J

Please leave comments below or on my facebook page www.facebook.com/ihavewrites

In the mean time, I’ll be out in a field munching grass and bothering rabbits.…… anything to get away from JLS.