Less is moor

The sun has been shining - actually shining, mark you - and I have been venturing out with the dog sans plastic pants and windcheater.

At first, I confess, I felt veritably naked - but as the days passed and rain failed to appear, I became so confident, I even shed a woolly and left my hat at home.

Unfortunately, for the children this means I have become more insistent on getting them into the great outdoors. When the sun shines, I can't bear to see them, pale and transparent looking, hunched over a keyboard. I feel the need to invigorate them with fresh air and vitamin D. But sadly, we do not see eye to eye on this.

As if getting them out for a walk wasn't difficult enough already, I decided to combine it with a learning opportunity - which, catastrophically, I told them.

'I thought,' I said, in bright tones, having ambushed them on the trampoline, 'we could go out for a lovely walk on the moor and learn some map reading at the same time.'

They stopped bouncing and stared at me in silence. 'Yes,' I said, clearing my throat a little nervously. 'I thought it would be a bit of an adventure. We could go somewhere fabulous like Hound Tor (right) and then you
could navigate the walk with the, er, map and compass.'

The girl child eyed me. 'What's in it for us,' she asked.

'Well,' I said loftily. 'Firstly, we are blessed with living in the heart of one of the most beautiful landscapes in this country. So, you get to pop out for an afternoon's walk somewhere people actually pay to come on holiday.

'Secondly, you get to learn something jolly interesting and useful. Not only is being able to read a map interesting and fun - but it could actually save your life one day. It's the sort of thing they should give more priority on the national curriculum. Nowadays, people think all they have to do is switch on the sat nav or the GPS app on their i, bloody, Phone and...'

Well, you get the gist.

'Thirdly,' I continued 'it's a beautiful day and we've just had a long rainy winter and you need to let your nasty pallid little sunlight-starved bodies catch some rays while you frolic in the sunshine.'

I finally stopped talking at that point. The children were still staring at me, this was an unexpected bonus. Normally, they listen for five seconds and then continue bouncing while I speak.

I thought I had scored a point. After a short pause the girl child spoke. 'Yes,' she said, speaking slowly and distinctly as if to one for whom the English language was a mystery or whose grip on reality was delicate, 'but what's in it for us?'

Later, I and the dog were enjoying a walk together - just the two of us, unsurprisingly. A little out onto the moor I encountered two jovial and youthful Americans with tents and sleeping paraphernalia on their backs. We stopped for a chat during which I warmed to them considerably for their obvious instant affection for the dog. They were very enthusiastic about doing some wild camping - despite the fact it was early March and a cold night was on the cards. I wondered briefly about adopting them.

I couldn't wait to beast my children with the tale of my two new best friends. 'I just met,' I shouted as soon as they were within earshot, which was about 50 metres away, 'two American chaps who have come all this way just to camp on Dartmoor in the middle of winter!'

'Yes, but they're American,' said the girl enigmatically.

And then they carried on bouncing.

When the cat's away

I have become reunited with taps and electricity sockets - and space - oh my goodness, glorious glorious space.

We are living in an ancient cob cottage in a lovely village below one of the most fabulous landscapes in Britain. There are parts of Dartmoor that are heart-stoppingly pretty, but we are living on the north side of the moor where the scenery is more spectacular - huge, granite-topped tors dotted with trees whose branches are caught in freeze frame pointing in the direction of the wind. It is so breathtaking, I still laugh out loud when I turn a corner and see Cosdon hill rising up before me.

So, yes, we have landed on our feet somewhat - after months of an increasingly desperate search for somewhere to live. More of which will come in another post.

But for now, we are in and sort of settled and I am still finding immense pleasure in the concept of running water. In fact, it was all going so well that I felt it was all a bit too good to be true. And so fate intervened to bring us back down to earth and engineered a cat to go missing.

Much of the struggle to find a suitable property revolved around the dog and cats. Especially the cats. They have lived all their lives pretty much in fields and we wanted somewhere that they would be happy and also not too close to any main roads.

We moved them over early on and they settled in very quickly adopting their usual routine of lounging around on people's beds during the day and spending the night waking me to tell me they required letting out or to noisily consume a mouse on the bedroom floor.

But about 10 days ago, Oscar didn't come home. And he hasn't returned since.

I have always affected a resigned tolerance of the cats. The children and I have developed a little psychological game where I am disparaging about the cats and they are rude about the dog. 'Why don't we just buy some poison instead?' I am heard to intone frequently while perusing the cat food aisle in the supermarket. And I make it my duty to point out their shortcomings as many times a day as possible.

The children in turn refer to the dog as the 'smelly fat pig' - and with some justification. She is, in truth, a little portly and when she lies on her side does bear more than a passing resemblance to a black sow. And she has a whiff about her that I find deeply comforting but Gully refers to as a 'stink'.

I am, as you can probably tell, one of those owners who is completely soppy about their dog. 'Look at those ears!' I coo. 'They must have been made in a special ear shop that specialises in perfect ears.'

I haven't quite reached the level of a friend whose previous nanny had knitted him a jumper that matched his large black and white dog. He was the news editor of a fabulous but slightly chaotic press agency I worked for. Liking dogs enormously was part of the job description. Ted was, and is, one of the most brilliant journalists I have ever met. He could simultaneously file a report about a kerb-crawling vicar from notes taken in court while flicking through the latest edition of Your Dog, to which he often sent pictures of his hound, Siva. She (for she was a she) was a magnificent shaggy beast who slept noisily in the corner of the office. She would awake for titbits, which she took with a ferocity suggesting she had never been fed. I will forever remember the look on the face of Geoff Lakeman, the Man from the Mirror, as he examined his fingers having  inadvisedly handed her half an unwanted pasty.

I am, in fact, pretty soppy about any dog and I never could see the point of cats - they always seemed to me, observing my sister's, to be a one-way street - appearing only at meal times with a persistence bordering on loutishness. The saying goes: A dog says, 'you pet me, you feed me, you shelter me, and you love me - you must be God'. A cat says, 'you pet me, you feed me, you shelter me, and you love me - I must be God.' And that pretty well sums up the difference between the two.

Oscar, when he was almost cute

But for all that, I have secretly become very fond of the cats. They are little works of art - so poised and neat and supremely built for purpose. Good engineering, I always think, is when beauty meets functionality - and cats do that in spades. So despite the cracks about poison and winter fur hats, I find I am really upset about Oscar's disappearance. I've put 'missing' posters everywhere and have been touched by how kind people in the village have been. Every night I walk around the village boundaries calling him and then stand in the garden shaking his bag of food. I invariably come back in with a wet face - and all because of a stupid cat - goodness knows how people with missing children or partners cope.

Neither can I bring myself to be rude about our remaining cat - Oscar's sister, Tanny, which means things have indeed come to a pretty pass. Still, if he ever does come back, I can fill my boots - and maybe I really might treat myself to a furry cat-shaped winter hat.

Smoke gets in your chai

They asked me, one day in a Sainsbury's aisle, how I knew whether I was getting a good deal on my utility bills.

I, of course, replied that I was getting a very good deal on my utilities thank you all the same, since they came courtesy of Mother Earth.

This caused a passing man to stop in his tracks, turn back, and comment: 'I just wanted to say, that is the best answer I have ever heard.'

I swelled a little with pride, which soon dissipated as I wandered around the shop. I felt a pang of sadness; it wasn't an answer I would be able to give for much longer since we will have to move off the land soon.

The mood continued, so it was that when I arrived back home I decided to cheer myself up with a nice cup of tea. Unfortunately, my tea tasted a little odd. I am very wedded to tea, and this was upsetting.

I put it down to some kind of human error in the cup maintenance (cleaning division) department. But a second cup proved just as nasty. By now, I had identified the oddness as a definite smoked taste. Had, I wondered, I washed the cups in the same water as the smoked mackerel pan?

I washed the cups again and swilled out the kettle for good measure. Then went and drew fresh water from the rainwater harvesting barrel. My tea still tasted smoked.

It was then, I realised, that somehow the smoke from the woodburner was affecting the water that comes off the roof. This is a mystery, however, since we have had the woodburner going all winter with no obvious effects on chai quality. I can only think that it is because the rain has slowed from a daily torrent to a sporadic trickle, and that the decrease in volume makes it more susceptible to being tainted by smoke if the wind is blowing from the south west, which it invariably is.

Thus far, I have been relatively pleased with our water system. I have enjoyed watching water drip into the barrel, I have coped with reasonable good cheer with breaking the ice on top of it - but if it's going to start messing with my tea, then it is a relationship that is doomed.

And this experience has led me to think fondly of the tap. Some form of which, it seems, has been around for a long time. The ability to regulate water flow was clearly desirable to early civilisations - and, of course, the Romans advanced a nice line in plumbing. Leonardo da Vinci predictably got in on the act and sketched out a few examples of valves - presumably somewhere in between the helicopter and submarine. And the globe valve, which is roughly the tap as we know it today, was patented by, just as predictably, an enterprising Victorian, J H Davis.

In rainy Britain, we take the abundance of water for granted - despite frequent fretting about hose pipe bans - but globally 780 million people lack access to clean water, according to the website water.org.

That means  really unclean water - as opposed to the smoked but fresh from the skies variety we have in deepest Devon.

All the same, I am beginning to view the prospect of a tap or two with increasing optimism.