For more than twenty years we have been growing olives and leaving them for the birds. Janene has had a couple of goes at pickling olives but both times they ended up fizzing sinisterly and we weren’t game to try them. Then last month we heard through a friend of an olive press going begging. It had been mouldering in a shed for twenty years. Took Grant and me the best part of a week to clean it up, but now The Beast is in full working order. The lights all flash, the centrifuge spins at 5,000 revs, sounds like an F35 warming up for take-off. All we need now is next year’s olives.