Let's make some beer

"Good morning Mr President. It's time to wake up Mr President. The Libyan ambassador is here and he needs to speak with you straight away".

I woke with a start, the dying remnants of the 6o'clock news still fresh in my subconscious mind. "Sorry, what did you say?" I replied, a little blearily, rubbing my eyes and stretching my legs and slowly realizing that I'd fallen asleep in front of the telly after yet another long hard day in the garden.

"I said, there's Richard on the phone and he'd like to speak to you straight away. I did tell him that you'd fallen asleep in front of the news but he said that he'd only take up a  minute of your time", said my clearly exasperated wife

"Oh right, I'm with you now, did you just call me Mr President?"

"No Ernie, and as I keep telling you, I'm not going to call you that and quite frankly, the more times that you ask me the stronger my conviction becomes", replied Jacquie as I stumbled, half-awake, towards the telephone.

I was appointed President of Caistor in Bloom at one of their committee meetings last week and I've been joking with Jacquie ever since about my new title.

It was briefly reported on by the Grimsby Telegraph, in a small box, on a side column of page 37, but if you blinked you could easily have missed it.

'As joint founder, with his wife Jacquie, former Grimsby in Bloom chairman, Ernie Brown has been instrumental in advising and guiding Caistor in Bloom', read the article in the Telegraph. 'Chairperson Deborah Barker said "Caistor in Bloom has a strong volunteer force and we are delighted to have Jacquie and Ernie as consultants. By making Ernie President, it rubber stamps the respect and gratitude the committee wanted to demonstrate, as a reward for his innovation and the fact that it was indeed his own brain child, nurtured from inception to our current silver status".

As you can probably tell, I was very pleased with the article which went on to say a lot more nice things about us both, it was indeed a very nice way of having our efforts recognised.

It'll work both ways of course, I will be able to wallow in the reflection of their forthcoming glory in this years regional competition and they will get my undivided attention throughout the run-up. Of course, I'd really like Caistor to win their category this year and hopefully win a gold award. Anyway, enough of that Bloom stuff, last week I told you that I'd explain the mysteries of beer making, so here we go.

 I've been making my own beer, off and on, for at least a quarter of a century now, but it's only been since the advent of the new millennium that it has become my 'staple' alcoholic drink of choice.

The basic equipment to start your own teeny-tiny-micro brewery is not expensive and because you can use it over and over again you'll more than recoup any initial cost. For example, my plastic brewing bin only cost about a tenner back in the mid 1990's and I can't see me ever having to buy a new one. The same goes for the funnel and the syphon tubing, I just wash it all properly between uses, swoosh it all down with some sterilizing fluid and it's as good as new again. . When you're working with yeast, everything has to be sterilized. A little bit of dirt will multiply and grow and you'll end up with loose bowels the next morning if you've not cleaned everything properly, so make cleanliness your priority.

Now, you'd have thought having mentioned to you  last week that I was going to be explaining how to make beer, that I would have gone out and bought a kit so that I could explain my method with pictures as well as with words. But, you'll have to wait a few days for the first stage pictures as I haven't had the chance to pop in to town to buy a kit this week.

So, why should you want to make your own beer? Well, with me it has to be the price. At only 20p a pint it helps maintain the family budget and I don't feel as though I'm spending a big chunk of our meagre income on ale. Imagine, if I went out to the pub and bought myself four pints of real ale, it would cost me over a tenner. I really couldn't afford to do that for many nights. Whereas, the same amount of home brewed beer would cost only 80p. Y'know I can't even go into pubs happily now, I begrudge them every penny knowing how much of my hard earned cash goes straight into the governments coffers through alcohol tax.

Apart from the money side of things, it's so easy to brew your own that it's actually quicker to make beer than to go out and buy it. From start to finish, it'll take about 3 weeks from opening your beer kit to pouring your first glass but, in real time, only about 1/2 an hour of that is actual work, the rest of the 3 weeks is spent waiting. So, it takes 30 minutes to make 40 pints, less than 90 seconds per pint. I live across the road from the brand new Lincolnshire Co-operative store in Caistor town centre and I couldn't get across the road and back and make a purchase in 90 seconds, even if I could, it would cost me a lot more than 20p a pint.

Anyway, enough of my babbling and on with the instructions. As I said earlier, look again at this blog in a few days time, when I'll have all the photos to go along with the first half of this process.

You can quite easily make your own beer using sugar, water, hops, malt and yeast and mixing and matching the quantities to blend your own perfect brew, but take my word for it, buy a kit, it's so much quicker, easier and cheaper.

I buy my beer kits from Wilko's on Bull Ring Lane. They used to sell them in all of the local Wilko stores and all the Boots outlets too but, due to lack of demand I suppose, you can only buy it at the Bull Ring Lane store now or at a slightly higher price, but with a much bigger choice from the Home Brew Centre on Freeman Street. Of course, being a bit of a skinflint I generally buy the cheapest Wilko's brand called 'Definitive' which costs £6.99 a tin.

I prefer the 'Definitive Bitter' myself, but do try the others as well and find one that suits your palette. I've split the task of making it into separate two parts, to make it even easier for you.

Tools and ingredients for beer making stage 1

5 gallon brewing bin with lid
measuring jug
plastic spoon
large saucepan
sterilizing solution
1 tin Wilko's 'Definitive bitter'
1kg granulated sugar
water

Take the label from your tin and remove the plastic lid and yeast sachet. Fill your washing up bowl with hot tap water and place the tin into the bowl to warm it up. This will loosen the contents in readiness for emptying it into the brewing bin later on.

Dilute some sterilizing solution. I put two caps full, of a brand more commonly used to sterilize babies bottles, into a measuring jug containing 1pt of cold water. Pour this solution into the empty brewing bin and with the lid tightly fitted, thoroughly shake the bin to cover every surface before returning the solution to the jug. Put your plastic mixing spoon into the jug of sterilizing solution and now all of your equipment is clean and free from germs.

Boil 5 litres of cold water in a large saucepan and empty the contents of a 1kg bag of sugar into the empty brewing bin.

Pour the pre-warmed tin of wort (brewing mixture) into the brewing bin along with the sugar and swoosh out the rest of the contents of the tin with some of the boiling water. Add the remainder of the boiling water to the contents of the bin and stir vigorously with your sterilized plastic spoon until the contents have dissolved.....mmm this bit smells great!

Top up the brewing bin to the 5 gallon mark with cold water and then sprinkle the contents of the yeast sachet  onto the surface.

Stir gently and leave in a warm place for 10 days, until the majority of bubbles have disappeared.from the surface.

As you can see, the first stage of brewing only takes about10/15 minutes

Tools and ingredients for beer making stage 2
syphon tubing
11, two litre plastic lemonade bottles or a brewing barrel
tea spoon
funnel
sterilizing solution
measuring jug
granulated sugar

I prefer to use 2 litre plastic lemonade bottles to store my beer in. Fizzy pop bottles are all pressurized containers, developed to withstand the build up of gases, especially when they get dropped. They're perfect for the job and can easily be cleaned, sterilized and re-used over and over again. In fact, it would be cheaper to buy yourself 11 bottles of 20p own brand value pop and throw away the contents, rather than buy an expensive beer barrel and the necessary co2 injectors to go with it. Our family tend to drink a lot of fizzy pop so we always have a few empty bottles laying about.

Clean your bottles and lids with sterilizing solution using a shaking motion, similar to the one you used in stage one with the brewing bin, then pour the sterilizing solution back into the measuring jug.

Using a plastic funnel to prevent spillage, put 4 teaspoons of granulated sugar into each bottle.

Put your brewing bin, full of once-brewed beer onto a table or work surface and put the bottles containing sugar on the floor below them, (it's a good idea to stand the bottles on a towel, that way you won't make a mess on the floor).

Using your sterilized syphon tube and with the wondrous powers of gravity, syphon your beer into the bottles leaving about an inch or two of air at the top of each bottle.

Tightly screw the lids back on to the bottles and shake vigorously to to dissolve any sugar that might have accumulated at the bottom of the bottles and leave in a warm place for 4 days so that your beer can brew again for a second time.

After 4 days, move the bottles of beer to a cold place (I put mine on the concrete floor of our garage). This will kill the yeast, finish the brewing process and encourage the sediment (lees) to sink to the bottom of the bottles.

After three more days it is ready to drink. Decant a bottle of homemade beer into a large jug before pouring into your glass and drink in moderation.......it will be strong!

Once you've got into a routine of brewing beer regularly, you'll find it so quick and easy to make a fresh brewing bin full of delicious beer, straight after emptying the previous bin into bottles. That way you'll have a never ending  supply of cheap, strong and extremely tasty beer, an essential prerequisite for any presidential beer cellar.

A winters ramble through the woods

The heavy rains this weekend really have scuppered my plans for work next week. I'm going over to Immingham for a three day course on Woodland management on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday and I was hoping to get out and do a bit of paid work at a garden in Scartho either today or tomorrow, to make up for my midweek absence from work.

Jacquie and I joined a local community group called 'The Friends of Mayflower Wood' earlier on this year, after attending a meeting of like-minded individuals at Conoco Phillips offices at Killingholme, in North East Lincolnshire. Mayflower Wood, I read last week, is the largest privately owned community woodland in England and if you ever get a spare moment, take my advice and have a walk around this massive burgeoning woodland site. There are over 70,000 trees planted here and they're all between waist to shoulder height but it'll only be a matter of a few years more and they'll be towering majestically above our heads.

We joined this friendly little group after I helped out at a couple of their intriguingly named 'Tree Spiral Removal' days last Autumn. A couple of years ago, when these young trees were first planted as 'whips' and 'heels', they were extremely vulnerable to the danger of being eaten alive during their first winter. Rabbits and deer, which live in abundance in and around these woods, always suffer from a lack of food when winter comes around and as their preferred diet of assorted fresh green leaves comes off the seasonal menu, they have to find an alternative food source in the form of the tender bark which grows on the newly planted young tree saplings. They never eat right through the trunk of the saplings and they only choose the youngest and sweetest of trees to nibble on, but once they've had a chew, the damage is done. The inner bark is very important as it's where the sap travels on its journey around the tree. Once the tree gets a little bit older and the bark gets a little more gnarled and woody, it becomes less attractive as a snack time treat.

"Excuse me!" shouted a chap out walking his dogs. "My curiosity really has got the better of me. What are you all doing?".

I stopped for a moment, straightened my back and with my hand shielding my eyes from the low lying autumn sun, I saw the stranger approaching. "Good morning", I replied. If you want to come over here I'll show you, it'd be easier than trying to explain". Before I'd even finished my sentence his two black slobbering labradors were upon me, licking, panting and bounding, with tails wagging so hard that I swear they could've been used to harvest some form of free eco energy to power the nation.

Before this visitor had arrived upon my peaceful scene, I'd been busying away, surrounded by people, yet obliviously adrift in a world of my own, removing tree spirals. "These flexible plastic shields were placed around these trees when they were first planted, to protect them from rabbits and deer. But, they've got to the stage now when the trees are big enough to look after themselves. In fact, if you look down here, you'll see that the base of this tree, where it's been surrounded by one of these tree spirals, is covered in mould caused by the build up of  loads of damp leaf litter and dead insects all of which have collected inside the plastic ring.That damp rubbish has caused the mould which could, in turn, allow infections to grow and the tree to rot. That one over there", I said pointing to another young tree about 10 feet away. "That poplar has grown so quickly that it's completely outgrown its protective spiral and it's now starting to impede its growth, and stilt its progress."

"Don't I know you from somewhere?" asked my inquisitive visitor. "I'm not sure" I replied. "I do get out and about and meet a lot of people in my role as Chairman of Grimsby in Bloom, maybe we've met doing something like that?"

"Ernie Brown!" he exclaimed "You're Ernie Brown. You write that column in the Grimsby Post every week. I do enjoy reading that, it's really nice to meet you." he said, shaking me firmly by the hand before stooping and roughly patting his dogs , which were by now champing at the bit with an excited enthusiasm keen to be getting off on the journey through the woods.

"I come here every morning with these girls", he shouted back to me when he was about 20 yards away. "They need a good walk at least once every day to keep them out of mischief. Would it help if I stopped every now and then and took a few of these spiral thingies off for you?.

"Yes, thanks, just leave all of the tree spirals in a pile near the the path edge and someone will collect them. With 70,000 trees, we need all the help we can get. Thank you! Bye." I shouted to my visitor as he strode off down the hill towards his 'girls' and they bounded, full of life up the other side, doubling the distance between them and him with every pace.

Because I've helped out on a few of these voluntary events and because we joined the 'Friends' group we were offered the opportunity to go on next weeks Woodland Management course at no cost to myself and as I keep saying, a bit of free knowledge should never be turned down.

As a maintenance gardener, I'm not a complete stranger to the practice of woodland management. For the last couple of years, one of my regular customers has been Healing Manor on Stallingborough Road near Great Grimsby.

Most gardeners really struggle to find enough work to keep them in full employment through the long, barren winter months when the drastic drop in temperatures means a drastic drop in the growth rates, no more grass to cut, no more hedges to trim and no more weeds to pluck from their secret undergrowth hiding places.

 Last November, the unusually early snow fell thick and fast and lay heavy upon the ground for weeks on end, not leaving the lawns of Northern Lincolnshire until the middle of January. For the first two weeks I couldn't even get the car out of the courtyard in Caistor until finally, after a mammoth community 'dig out' we all broke free from our snowy shackles. Fortunately, once out of the courtyard the roads were reasonably clear and I was able to continue my work in the 20 acres of neglected and ancient woodlands at Healing Manor, where I managed, even when the snow was knee deep, to find plenty to do to keep myself busy.

The woodlands at Healing Manor haven't been properly looked after in many, many years and in this, my third winter at the Manor, I've been able to continue my own quiet woodland management scheme. During my first winter I re-opened nearly all of the major pathways around the ancient woodlands surrounding this medieval moated manor estate. During my second winter I started to clear the brambles and elder shrubs which were beginning to take over in a couple of the larger clearings. This, in turn, let a lot more sunlight shine down onto the ground level and during last spring I was rewarded with a fantastic display of  spring flowering plants from snowdrops to bluebells and every narcissus in between. This winter, I spent my time in the woods coppicing the many years of growth that has been accumulating around the bases of scores of Lime trees around the estate and curtailing the phenomenal growth of ivy on just about every tree, again to let in more light, so that hopefully, we'll get even more spring flowers this coming season.

 The ivy was really out of control. Even in the depths of winter, when the leafy canopy of these major trees had all been thrown to the ground, the all invasive ivy continued to shade the woodland floor. Its branches  reached high into the loftiest  branches of  tallest ash trees, over 250 ft into the air. They needed curtailing before they begin to pull the trees down with their weight. During the winter, when we have the strongest, harshest winds, the trees are bereft of their summer complement of leaves, helping them to ride out the worst of the storms. With a full dressing of ivy foliage to act as a sail, the winds are able to catch and pull the weakest, uppermost branches causing lots of damage to the trees. So, out came my bow saw, my loppers and my secateurs and with the snow lying above the tops of my wellies I began my journey around the hundreds of trees on the Healing Manor estate.

It was a lovely time, when the snow lay thick on the ground, to be out in the woods working. The peace, the  silence, the solitude, it really was a beautiful place to work. There were the occasional dog walkers and the odd poacher or two and one lady who jogged around the pathways every morning. We all greeted each other with a smile and a wave but nothing was said, we were all happy in our own individual little worlds. My sister and her husband came along as well one morning, a couple of weeks before Christmas. They'd come, with permission of the owner of course, to collect some greenery to decorate the chalet where they live on Humberston Fitties, ready for Christmas. I showed them where all of the best and easiest to harvest holly, ivy, yew and laurel plants were and gave them my secateurs, while I got on with my work behind the 'rose walk', on the edge of the medieval moat.

When they'd finished, they came back across to where I was working. As I watched them trudging knee deep through the snow with arms full of black bins bags bulging with green plant matter they looked to all the world like the ancient 'Stickers', granted permission from the landowner to collect fallen firewood for their winters hearth.

 A police helicopter suddenly swooped down low above us and hovered just above our heads for what felt like minutes but was probably only a few seconds. As I said earlier, I've worked at Healing Manor for just over two and a half years now and I'm quite used to it being on the police helicopter flight path between Kirmington and Great Grimsby. It passes over twice, sometimes three times a day, you tend to get used to it. But this time, for the first time ever, it stopped, came much, much lower, waited and watched us, before flying off in ever increasing circles into the distance and was gone, out of sight beyond the treetops. "That was odd", I said to my sister as she and her husband stood next to me, each of them clutching a brace of black bin liners filled to the brim with fresh, green holly boughs and ivy trails. "They must've wondered what on earth we were up to on such a cold day".

And now, at last, the rain has stopped and I can get a bit more work done in the garden. Don't forget to tune in next week when I'll be brewing some very tasty beer indeed.

If Rome falls.....

"Thats not like you Ern", said my friend Dave on the telephone a couple of days ago. "Being an outdoors man, I wouldn't have thought that a chap like you would ever be catching a cold".

Dave was right, it's years since I've had a cold, especially one as debilitating as this and I'm blaming it all our youngest son Leon. He came home from Franklin College earlier this week with a pounding headache and a nose that was running faster than Seb Coe on steroids and I'm certain that I must've caught it from all of his free flowing nose germs. It certainly wasn't the best of weeks to find myself  'under the weather' and the option of taking any 'duvet days' was definitely not on the table.

Jacquie's not been very well for quite a while now and consequently, she's not been able to contribute towards the family budget, so the burden of earning a living to support our family has fallen squarely upon my shoulders. Not that I'm complaining, I do enjoy my work, but as I'm now approaching 50 years of age, hard, physical labour and working outdoors in all weathers does sometimes cause the thrill of being a maintenance gardener to lose a bit of it's shine. Being self-employed certainly has its pitfalls, especially when it comes to having a few days off through illness.

It hasn't been all hard physical work this week though. I had 24 hrs of almost non-stop meetings and talks on Wednesday and Thursday. On Wednesday evening, Jacquie and I travelled into town from our home in Caistor, to give a talk to the Scartho Methodist Wives Group about our role in the Grimsby in Bloom Gold Award winning campaign. On Thursday morning we travelled back to Grimsby where I took 32 WI members on a guided heritage tour of Great Grimsby town centre, before dashing hot foot over to the Second Avenue Resource Centre on the Nunsthorpe Estate, to deliver a vegetable gardening workshop to a group of 10 ladies and gentlemen from infant schools and children's centres throughout North East Lincolnshire. We then travelled back home to Caistor for dinner, before returning to town a couple of hours later to give a report, as Chairman of the Heritage Committee of the Grimsby, Cleethorpes and District Civic Society, to its executive committee.

As you can see, that was an awful lot of travelling, 6 journeys between Grimsby and Caistor in one 24 hour period. From floral community building to historical guide, to vegetable consultant, to civic pride advocate all in 24 hours.

I've decided not to do anymore talks about the Grimsby in Bloom campaign though. It turned out to be the most of difficult of the whole day. I've been successfully giving talks on Grimsby in Bloom to scores of groups over the last few years, but after a lapse of only 6 weeks since my unexpected resignation from the position of Chairman, I truly felt, for the first time, as though I didn't even recognise the corporate minded adult which appears to be growing from the community based infant which Jacquie and I created all those years ago.

"During the first year of the Grimsby in Bloom campaign we decided not to enter the town into the regional East Midlands in Bloom competition because we wanted to take things slowly. As a group we chose to walk before we tried running. The worst case scenario, we all agreed, would have been to enter Grimsby into a gardening competition which we had no chance of winning. It would have utterly deflated our voluntary committee with one fell swoop", I told the ladies of the Scartho Methodist Wives group last Wednesday evening.

I did have one of the recently appointed officers of the present day Grimsby in Bloom committee at my side throughout the talk and we were working together quite well, building up a picture of our campaign all the way through to the present day as well as entertaining our audience with a little light-hearted banter.

"In our second year we entered the regional competition and set about choosing a route on which to take the judges. The route can only be 3 hours long and it would be impossible to cover all of Grimsby in that time, so the voluntary committee decided to change our judges route on a three year cycle. That way we could cover every community and every neighbourhood throughout Grimsby, eventually bringing 'The Bloom' to every part of town (and not just the prettier, more affluent parts of it either).

What I didn't want, as Chairman, was for anyone to accuse our voluntary committee of  "Never coming to their part of town!" Apart from that more obvious reason for changing our route every year, there was also the added bonus that came with a change of view and a change of focus."Every year we let those good people at NELC know where our route will be travelling and every year they would 'deep clean' all of the areas that the judges would see. By changing the route every year, a different area of town would get a thorough scrub down every 3rd year at least ".

"And this year, that is if the Grimsby in Bloom committee are still going ahead with these plans", I told the ladies of the Scartho Methodist Wives group, " The organisers will be bringing the East Midlands in Bloom judges for a tour around the horticultural heartlands that are your very own, Scartho village".

"Err....no, Ernie, I don't think that we're going to do that anymore. We haven't decided on whether to continue with that previous plan or not and I haven't heard back from North East Lincs Council about which route they wants us to take this year", my colleague added.

In 2009, Great Grimsby won a Gold award and the coveted title of 'Best Small City in the East Midlands' with a score of 47 out of 50 for community participation, this was a very special achievement. The Royal Horticultural Society, who organise the Britain In Bloom competition, very soon after the event contacted us to say that it was the first time ever, in the whole history of the competition that any town, city or village from throughout the UK has ever won a Gold Award and topped their category with a first time entry.

There has to be a reason why Grimsby had that unusual unprecedented first time success.

We had previously been warned of the fate of the last Grimsby in Bloom campaign, which disbanded in the late 1990's, a few years ago, when the Civic Society, the Rotary Club and the North East Lincs Lions  set up Grimsby in Bloom in 2007.

"That committee back in those days were almost solely funded and directed by council officers and members", we were told. "When public money became tight towards the end of the last century, the first thing that the Local Authority decided to cut back on was Grimsby in Bloom", they continued. " Without proper community funding and without an arms length approach to the local authority, the original GIB fell at the first hurdle. Keep your independence and retain your autonomy otherwise, if Rome falls, we all fall with it!"

"Anyway, pass me some more tissues will you please Jacquie....and would you heat up my hot water bottle, I don't think I'm quite feeling well enough to do it myself just yet".

The Lay of Havelok the Dane

"Now sailed for England, Denmark's King
And with a mighty following
They landed at Grimsby, on England's strand
To gain for Goldborough, her own dear land"

My overly loud and often excessively flamboyant rehearsals have meant that I've been banished to the far flung reaches of the kitchen this week and all because of a neighbours' request of me to read my favourite poem, out loud, to the townspeople of Caistor.

Caistors' 3rd 'Lyrical Affair' has been organised, once again by our neighbour Michael Galligan and is being held later on this evening at the local Sports and Social Club, so plenty of practice before the event is an essential prerequisite. I've really got into reading poetry over the last decade or so. It's just so easy to pick up a poetry book and dive straight in, whenever a spare moment arises in my busy schedule. With poetry, I'm not confronted by dozens of hard to believe characters or convoluted plot lines, nor do I run the risk of losing the thread of the story when I inevitably have to put the book down and get on with my work. But choosing a favourite poem from amongst the thousands available is not an easy task.

Poetry, for me, is a very personal adventure. Inward looking, quietly considered and often romantically inclined, it never really strikes me a being the theme for an evening of public performance art. If I'd wanted to entertain only myself, I would probably have chosen one of the 1st World War poets, maybe Siegfried Sassoon or Wilfred Owen, or I might have gone for the early 19C 'Peasant poet', John Clare, with his insightful, descriptive verses, bearing with them the transience of the English countryside, red sometimes in tooth and claw, right into the heart of my comfortable chair. But, would any of these great 'classics' really be suitable for a public performance in front of a hundred people on a Saturday night in Caistor?

I was also asked, last October, to participate in Caistors first ever 'Lyrical Affair', when this very same problem again raised its ugly head. As a little boy, going to Barcroft Street Junior School in Cleethorpes during the late 60's, early 70's, I clearly remember our year group being asked to write a poem to celebrate the installation of Sir John Betjeman as the nations Poet Laureate. It was one of the few times that I really enjoyed my junior school life. I'd been asked to use my imagination and play with words, what rebellious fun that was in those days.

My mother, really proud of my first steps into the world of poetry, bought me a copy of Edward Lear's' Complete Book Of Nonsense, by way of a reward for my bravery in reading out my poem to the whole school and that was when I discovered 'The Jumblies'.

Far and few, far and few are the lands where the Jumblies live
Their heads are green and their hands are blue
And they went to sea in a sieve.

The daftness of the poem just enthralled me.The words made absolutely no sense at all, yet the musical rhythm of the stanza's were absolutely compelling to me as a child. As an adult, I recalled that childhood thrill of reading The Jumblies out loud when I began to read it with my own children. Even today, as our youngest child begins his departure from being a teenager to a young adult, it still manages to strike a chord with them all. I only have to enlarge my voice and release the first line and they all join in with the rest, automatically, from the heart, because they too, in their youth, experienced the joy that dwells within the heart of this poem. It has become part of their being, part of what they have become as adults.

It was the perfect poem to read out to the 100 people who packed their way into the Caistor Sports and Social Club late last year. First I read out the chorus... " Far and few, far and few......" then after asking my audience to join in after every verse, I began my recital.

" No, no, no" I said, as I stopped midway through the first line of the chorus. "You all need to join in, not just those of you over there at the back. Right, let's try again." This time about half the room joined in and by the end of my recital, everyone was taking part, enjoying themselves and feeling as though they too had played a part in this unusual, but well attended, community event. So, when Michael Galligan came to see if I would read out another poem at Caistor's 3rd Lyrical Affair event, I immediately said yes, but I didn't quite know at that moment, which poem I'd be reading.

It had been really heartening to see so many people enjoying the 'thrill' of public poetry reading and I didn't want to dampen anybody's fun night out with poems of bright yellow buttercups, unrequited love or moribund grief. I wanted them to be involved, excited and enthused by the event, not lulled into a somnolent torpor or worse still, get bored to tears and begin chattering amongst themselves.

I remember standing in the centre of the room during that last poetry reading 4 months ago. I couldn't move about very much as there were children sat all around my feet, their parents and older relatives behind them and the rest of the community fanned out, encircling me almost as though in a scene from the days of old when all the villagers would have sat around the communal fire, keeping warm during the long dark winters nights when tales of romance, death, greed and lust where told to entertain and educate.

During the Dark Ages, before history was written down to preserve its accuracy, communities told these campfire tales to preserve traditions and to pass on items of community history. A famous warrior would have had his tale retold around many a village fire, the story changing and adapting itself to the morals of the day, characters added and taken away and battle scenes reallocated to new venues until the early medieval age brought with it the gift of the written word.

One of these tales, first written down in the 13th Century during the time of King John, is 'The lay of Havelok the Dane'. It tells the tale of Grim the Fisherman and his flight from Denmark with the infant Havelok, heir to the Danish throne and their founding of the town of Great Grimsby on Lincolnshires' North Sea coast.

The 'Lay' is an early middle English version of the original spoken tale, written in rhyming couplets. In 1980 it was translated into modern English by Bill Baines, who was then Head of Whitgift School in Grimsby. It takes about 3 hours to read in full, a gargantuan event which would take up a whole evening.

But yes, the more I thought about it, the more it made sense and I resolved to read the final battle scene from the 'Lay', as abridged by Dr Alan Dowling in 2010. I'll begin my recital from the point where Havelok has been crowned as the King of Denmark and sails with his army, back across the North Sea to Grimsby to fight the evil Earl Godrich for the throne of England. It's a fierce and bloody battle scene and I'll tell it as though I'm recounting recent history to a community sat around the campfire on a long winters evening.

Anyway, back to the kitchen to rehearse my lines, Jacquie's getting fed up with my ferocious bellowing, I can see it in her face.

Now you've heard the tale right through
of Havelok and Goldborough too
how they were born and how they were taken
from their parents and forsaken

Plagued in youth with treachery
with treason and with felony
and how villains robbed them quite
of all truly theirs by right

And in the story I did tell
how Grim the fisherman served them well
and how they were avenged at last
as I've explained in hours past.