Gun power, diesel and plonk

Some people look forward to this time of year as a great opportunity to set off a few fireworks and burn an effigy as we commemorate someone who once tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament (I tried explaining this particular tradition to my non-British colleagues and they all thought we were stark raving mad!). But around here it’s the time of year when we eagerly await the delivery or our annual lamb as part payment from the farmer for the grazing in our fields. Last year, you may remember, said lamb rocked up bleating loudly on the back of a quad bike, all a bit Mad Max, what with the ensuing dispatch on the drive and all. This year’s offering arrived more like one of the mob, reclining imperiously in the back seat of a Landrover Discovery, all blacked out windows and leather seats, like North Wales’ woolly answer to Don Corleone. Alas this poor lambster did not come tooled up and before he could make us any kind of offer we couldn’t refuse he was swimming with the fishfingers in the bottom of the chest freezer.

Lamb safely dispatched it was time to turn our attention to our bonfire. Nothing like an ongoing renovation project and several years’ worth of crap in the crumbling barns to give you enough fuel for a ruddy great burn up. Having invited some friends around to join us we endeavoured to make it look (at least on the outside) less like a pikey fire and something more akin to the beautifully constructed pyramid shapes you see in parks up and down the land in the first week of November. We were doing pretty well disguising the mountains of cardboard and chipboard and old curtains with tasteful, well-seasoned hazel poles and branches.  But then in the absence of a guy (or an effigy of Donald Trump which we were sorely tempted to create) I opted to burn all vestiges of my previous life as a commuter, symbolically crowning the fire with my two old lap top bags. There was also no disguising the unmistakable whiff of diesel fumes that my husband assured me was “just to get the thing going”. A classic bushcrafter's technique, I don't think.  Anyhow go it went. Whoosh. No toasting marshmallows on this baby. No way Jose.

Symbolic end of an era? Or just a massive pikey fire?

Dressed and ready to burn

Our beautiful fire alight
(Note the traffic cone and other miscellaneous items to be burned later to the right of the shot) 

Recoiling from the intense heat (that could quite possibly have melted a car), we wandered round to where we had set up a series of fireworks. Now this being our first attempt at pyrotechnics and in the interest of not giving our new nervy cockerel, sheep, dog, cat, young children, or heavily pregnant friend coronaries or the onset of early labour I had gone through the proffered box of fireworks with my husband in advance and carefully vetoed anything with a name like ‘Earth Shaker’, ‘Deep Impact’ and ‘Jet Screamers’ and opted instead for the lovely, gentle sounding names like 'Diamond Burst', ‘Silver Shower’ and ‘Golden Sprinkles’ (why is it that the names of fireworks all sound like some dreadful double entendre or 1970s soft porn film titles?!). Anyway off my husband went, religiously sticking to the Rules of Fireworks, (25m away, never return to a firework, yadda yadda) setting off our nice, tame fireworks to the reception of many squeals of delight. Right up until the last lot when it soon transpired that he had sneaked in a few noisy big boys to get the party started. And with that the sheep all high tailed it over the hill and far away, the cock and hens retreated hastily inside their hut and the dog pretended he no longer existed with his paws over his ears under a camping chair. 

Standing well  back!

After all the excitement it was then back to the house for some light refreshments. Nothing like some homemade sloe gin to warm the cockles and defrost the toes. And good to clear out last year’s supplies before we embark on the 2016 vintage. I do believe very strongly in a strict clear shelf policy when it comes to homemade tipples. At least that’s what I told myself as I swigged the last drops in the bottle and lolled slowly to sleep in the rocking chair by the fire, children safely in bed and the dog finally back on speaking terms with me. And he calls himself a gun dog. Really.

The mighty Dot

I wanted to call this blog post ‘My big cock’ but feared that my whole blog might get taken down and/or I would start to attract the wrong kind of attention, even though my intent on this one is purely innocent, you understand.

Our massive new cockerel

So let me introduce you to ‘Dot’, the latest member of our extended animal family – a Silver Laced Wyandotte cockerel, who is close in size to your average African ostrich (well Emu maybe). This is the culmination of my husband spending the last few months on the phone, whispering in hushed tones when he thought I was out of earshot, “I’m looking for a really big cock……”. Then just as I was getting increasingly concerned that perhaps this remote, country living had sent him over the edge and he was about to run off with Bruce the town show-off, he rocked up home with my grand surprise. This handsome fella. The plan is we now let nature take its course and with luck by the spring we will have our own little family of chicks, the girls going on to lay us lots of eggs, boys destined for the pot. Time will tell whether our little experiment proves more successful than our last foray into poultry matchmaking. Ah Chauntecleer – God rest his soul. Still the randiest, largest chicken we have ever eaten, bar none.

Sex pest - moi?

I’m not sure what it is about hens and feathered farmyard creatures that sends my husband into a frenzied flurry of activity, clucking about to prepare the hen house, water troughs filled with all sorts of potions and tonics to welcome in our new visitor with the cockerel equivalent of a nice G&T. He even dragged the whole family out after dark, with head torches and wellies on to check on his prized bird and to give him a good dose of louse powder. Unfortunately he did not warn me of his intention as we left the house and so it was that I found myself an hour later, back in front of my computer on a video conference call with Seattle, covered in feathers (albeit pretty little silver-laced ones), my hair white with louse powder and with mud all over my face. Good job it was Hallowe’en or I’m not quite sure I would have got away with it!

So with all dependents, both the toddling and feathered variety, all safely tucked up in bed, we were feeling quite contented with our purchase. Right up until the point where the mouthy bugger starting crowing. At 4.30am. Made all the worse by the fact that we had smugly thought that we had nailed the clock changes with the kids at the weekend and put our 4am starts behind us for a while. Ach well, who needs sleep anyway…? 

And so finally to the name. Slightly less Chaucer, more first words type territory this time. The girls only managed to grasp the last part of his breed and so ‘Dot’ was born. Also fittingly, when my youngest was born it seemingly was a North Wales-ism to refer to small babies as ‘dots’ – as in, “Ah, what a little dot she is”.  So, with a good helping of irony, our massive cock will now forever more be known as ‘Dot’, or ‘Dotty’ to his friends. And let’s hope things do remain friendly, or we all know what will happen…

Life (in between)

I think it would be fair to say that my trips to London are becoming fewer and further between and each time I go back for work I feel just a little bit further removed from what I used to find the most banal and mundane of routines. So much so in fact I’ve begun to wonder whether I am actually physically changing as a result of living out in the sticks most of the time. As I wandered about the City, desperately trying to look nonchalant and bored but inwardly feeling fascinated and not a little overwhelmed by the noise and the smells and the people (people, people everywhere!!!) I could hear a little David Attenborough voice perched somewhere above my right shoulder, narrating my life as a migratory animal that’s not quite made it back to the right place….. It went something like this…

[Scene 1: City street, 8.21am]

"So here…, in the sprawling metropolis on the plains of the South East, we see the lesser spotted country girl, tentatively making her way into the urban jungle, part of the monthly migration to reconnect with the herd and engage in the meeting and drinking rituals of her juvenile years. But if we look closely we can detect a certain evolution of her species, detectable only to the very keen observer, that set her apart from the pack. Her progress in the morning stampede of citybeests down Fenchurch Street is perceptibly slower than her counterparts. Her pace lacks the urgency and direction that was once there as she finds herself distracted by the latest winter dresses in the window of Marks & Spencer’s and the lovely shiny things in the Molton Brown shop. Other signs of her evolution are more obvious by the fact that she is wearing short sleeves and is still sweating profusely under her prolific mane of hair, thickened from months in the cold North West, whilst everyone around her is bundled up in winter coats and scarves, fully acclimatised to the shift in the seasons down here.

Urban jungle - hot hot hot!

[Scene 2: cut to office environment, 11.54am]

Now…, in the throes of going about her daily routines, evidence of the changes in this internal thermostat become even more apparent. Accustomed to the chilly winds and rains of Wales, the lesser spotted country girl struggles to cope with the heat and the recycled air of the office. As feeding time approaches her instinct to hunt and forage is frustrated by a short trip to the canteen where after a period of confusion she manages to secure some distinctly exotic foodstuffs in a plastic box. And so…… as our lesser spotted country girl starts to feast on her meal, her reactions show signs that her taste buds have too now changed. Processing the high quantities of salt and fat and MSG, she pauses, reflects and has a momentary panic that everything she has been serving her house guests for the past few months has been utterly bland and desperately under-seasoned, (her usual diet consisting of misshapen vegetables and random cuts of meat plus copious amounts of ketchup). But she perseveres, finishing up her lunch with what she believes to be a decaffeinated cappuccino from the machine. But watch now….. as she stands, paralysed with confusion over which buttons to press. Yes. She’s acted. But has she selected correctly? Let’s watch as she sips at her drink……… oh no, we can detect the increase in her heart rate, the shaking hands, the cold beads of sweat appearing on her forehead. It appears that our lesser spotter country girl has lost her genetic ability to process urban-strength caffeine. Watch as she now races her way through her afternoon, talking so fast she becomes completely incomprehensible to her colleagues and just downright annoying to everyone else around her.

[Scene 3: local pub garden, 7.43pm]

And so... with the onset of nightfall, we follow our lesser spotted country girl to the watering hole..., where she meets up with another member of her pack and insists that they sit outside, her recalibrated internal thermostat once again setting her apart from others around her, who sit shivering into their pints. She engages in the conversation but gets easily distracted by the sights and sounds and smells around her. Her attention span has become so used to the relative low stimulation of a rural environment that she suffers a temporary sensory overload and has to retreat to the little girl’s room to recover her composure.  But even in here she finds herself slightly bewildered as she almost wrenches the door off its hinges, forgetting that it is not, in fact, an ill-fitting five-bar gate that has strengthened her arms to Welsh farmer proportions, rather than perhaps the more feminine results of the Virgin Active gym in the other females reapplying their war paint around her. She watches, bemused, for a few seconds, wondering whether she should emulate their behaviours, then plumps instead to empty most of the contents of the free hand lotion into her palms before anyone can detect how battered and rough her hands have become and blow her cover as a City imposter.

[Scene 4: Waterloo station, 10.33pm – camera pans in to single female standing stock still with a scene of chaos swirling all around her]

Finally…….we track our lesser spotted country girl as she joins the reverse mass migration from the City and finds herself caught up in the catastrophic maelstrom that is a signal failure at Wimbledon. Packs and packs of people congregate on the concourse, all staring fixedly at the notice boards or flicking blankly through their smart phones. But not our country girl. She stands stock still, eyes focusing on nothing in particular, but intently people watching, taking in the details of their dress and all of the accoutrements, imaging the life behind each one of them as they scuttle hurriedly around the station. She does this for more than an hour but her sense of time also seems to have changed, as she is barely aware of the time passing but enjoys the opportunity to just….. do…… nothing….. For she knows that in 24 hours she will be back in her other environment, swept up in the day to day routines of watering, weeding, preserving and persevering with her squabbling offspring, reunited with her long-suffering mate. And she will, in the space of just a few hours, once again transform from the tough country bumpkin in the city to the soft, southern townie in the country."

Country bumpkin or southern townie???

Ok so I doubt this is going to win any BAFTAs and I’m sure Sir David would sue the ass of me if he read this but maybe this serves as a sign that I need to spend more time with people than just hanging out with my plants and animals all week long!

Let's call this meeting to order!

A cut above

So back to school season is upon us yet again. You can’t move on Facebook for pictures of offspring all resplendent in their new school uniforms and shiny new shoes, which we all know will last but a fortnight, if that. Up here we are not immune to the rituals of a new school year: smart (ish) new haircuts, last minute panicked trips to the nearest major supermarket to rifle through the slim pickings of schools skirts and a whole new set of autumnal resolutions (largely relating to trying to preserve as much of the glut as possible but without completely destroying our new, massively expensive new cooker – I am actually typing this standing at the kitchen worktop directly next to said cooker to try and avoid the inevitable magic porridge pot over-spill of a batch of plum jam – and have already failed. Must Try Harder.)

But before all the chaos of the new term started, we were paid a visit by a good bushcraft friend of my husband’s. A teacher by trade and a countryman by heart. Keen to put off the inevitable new term lesson planning and preparation he escaped to our place for a couple of days, bringing his trusty scythe to help us tackle our ever-present grass problem for only a good feed and a few glasses of wine in return. Of course we all thought he was completely stark raving mad. Who in this day and age would choose to cut the grass by hand when you have all the machinery and equipment you could ever possibly need on hand? (if only you had the time to use it, in our case). But as he set out (sans cloak) after breakfast and got into his rhythm it soon became apparent that he was onto something. Not only was the grass cut beautifully and piled up onto neat, natural looking piles (rather than the harsh, ripped-up aftermath of the tractor and mower) he was also dripping in sweat and looking like he had had a rather demanding core workout. Turns out there’s perhaps some factual basis as to why Poldark does not wear a shirt…

The trim reaper

And in the spirit of tidying the place up a bit before the winter, my husband decided the time was ripe to tackle the branches which have been tickling the broadband cable (and my lifeline to the rest of the world) bringing all connectivity to a shuddering halt with the first breath of wind. Believe me, when you work from home there is nothing more stressful than the white bars going dead on the bottom right hand side of your screen. And so off we went in the driving rain and a howling gale, with his two chainsaws, one precariously fixed to the end of a long pole ready to balance on the roof of his Landrover to reach the highest branches. What could possibly go wrong? I’m not sure insurance companies even have a category for this kind of carry on. But to be fair to him he delicately and meticulously trimmed through all of the trees along the cable. All that is until the last one, when he “just nicked” the line (if there are any BT Engineers reading this please turn a blind eye. And don’t sack Tom – see below). So in our valiant attempts to resolve the broadband issues we ended up breaking it once and for all. And so I was plunged into a week of resorting to my mobile phone (I know, an actual telephone) to dial in to meetings where everyone else was gaily pulling faces at each other over videoconference and live sharing documents to their heart’s content. You try telling a team of hip, young and trendy creative designers in New York City that you can’t connect right now because your husband has severed the phone line with a chainsaw. They all thought it was some form of bizarre British joke and guffawed uproariously down the phone at me. Or at least I think that was what they were doing, it was hard to tell through the dodgy reception. Anyway a lovely man called Tom came on Monday morning and fixed it all for us and even promised not to tell BT that it was our fault. And breathe.

Dodging the falling boughs

Last week also saw our eldest daughter turning four. Given that we suspect this might be one of the first birthdays that she might actually remember (and also owing to the fact that for all of her previous birthdays she has had hand-me-downs repurposed and wrapped up for her) we thought we had better pull it out of the bag. So we thought a trampoline would be the perfect present: great fun for us all, good source of exercise (read: wear her out so she goes to sleep at 7pm on the dot every night) large enough to etch on her memory and effectively an oversized play pen where she can be contained whilst I get on and deal with the myriad of other pressing outside jobs. I had mentioned to my husband ‘once or twice’ that we had better get this thing ordered so we could get it all set up for her Big Day. "Yeah, yeah", he replied and didn’t actually get around to ordering it until the week before the Bank Holiday weekend. Long story short there ensued a series of panicked phone calls to stockists up and down the country and manufacturers in the Netherlands with much pleading and pulling on heart strings and appealing to people’s inner parent, all of which culminated in the trampoline arriving the day before her birthday. In our wisdom we decided on an in-ground version which basically means you have to excavate roughly the size of the meteor crater in the North Arizona desert before you set the bloody thing up. No problem we though, we can use the back actor (diggery bit for the uninitiated) on the back of the tractor and the hydraulic trailer. It will be done in no time. What we had overlooked was the fact that the trailer only tips if attached to the tractor and if we have the digger on the back then…..well you get the picture. So followed the slow realisation that my husband would have to shovel ten tons of earth BY HAND. Before the end of the day. And so he did, and the trampoline was erected with head torches in the dark. And it was worth every ounce of hard graft to see her face on the morning of her birthday, overcome with excitement and disbelief that this was all for her. She has not been off it since.

Below: meteor crater?

Above: one happy little girl

In other news, I’ve been plagued by toothache this week, I’d like to think from the natural sweetness of all the beautifully ripe plums and raspberries that are now in full swing but nah, who am I trying to kid, much more likely to be the mountains of marzipan on my daughter’s birthday cake or the essential tasting of chutney and jam (the amount of sugar you have to put into these preserves never fails to astound me). So a fair amount of drilling and filling for me followed by a sizable bill. I am not sure which hurt me the most.

We were also beside ourselves with excitement to see the world’s leading cyclists pass by our very gate as part of the Tour of Britain. It’s not every day you get to see the likes of Bradley Wiggins and Mark Cavendish zooming past your fields followed by a peloton of seemingly hundreds of motorbikes and support vehicles. We were delighted to have also been recipients of two water bottles thrown at us at speed (but I like to think of as intended souvenirs) which the girls have now adopted as their own. In fact they now refuse to drink out of anything else. Why have Tommee Tippee when you can have an Olympic gold medalist's cast off to take your water drinking to a whole other level?!

Missiles or souvenirs?

Postscript: During the course of writing this post I have successfully* managed to make 12 jars of plum jam. If feels good to be back in the jam saddle after a particularly traumatic incident earlier in the week where I managed to burn the rowan jelly. We buggered it up last year too. Maybe it was just not meant to be…

*I say successfully but you can only ever tell whether it has set once you open it and eat it. But on the upside the cooker will live to see another day. The pan, not so much. 

Post holiday greens

Howdy folks. It’s been a wee while. Holiday season and all that. I’m afraid to say that our summer holidays, such as they were this year, were spent being very much NOT self-sufficient. Owing to some monumentally fortuitous cock up on the part of eBookers, instead of the very cheap and cheerful guest house on the side of a minor, not-very-exciting loch in the middle of Scotland, we found ourselves living it up with the rich and famous at a very exclusive five star resort on the banks of bonny Loch Lomond. I can’t quite articulate the contrast between the life we have been leading for the past eighteen months and the 48 hour experience of being waited on hand and foot, having everything and anything at your beck and call and actually being clean and getting to wear ‘your best stuff’ all day long without having to lift a finger. No watering, no weeding, no scrubbing of misshapen vegetables followed by an artful disguise into something that will detract from the fact that we are eating the same thing for the fourteenth day in a row. No, just pure, unbridled hedonism.  By the time we left my hands had even begun to lose the ground-in grime and callouses from a good couple of hours in the health spa. I know our chosen lifestyle purports to great health and happiness but let’s be honest here, there’s a hell of a lot to be said for putting your feet up and being pampered once in a while.

A critical part of the self-sufficiency experiment...?

And so it was a bit of a shock to the system (and to my new found delusions of grandeur – I confess to spending a significant proportion of our trip seriously working through how I could legitimately factor a sea plane into our project) that we returned home, only four nights later, to a scene akin to something out of the Day of the Triffids. Now I know that August is peak growing time and that a combination of warm, sunny days and our lovely Welsh showers make the perfect growing conditions but I really wasn’t expecting to find my neat, uniform little courgettes morphed into monstrous marrows the size of Usain Bolt’s thighs…. You know you must be doing something right when you have to harvest a crop in a wheelbarrow. You’d need a friendly Olympian on hand to lift these buggers. They are enormous! And so to the question: what the hell do you do with nearly 100kg of cucurbita.  Easy I thought. I’ll turn the whole lot into delicious summer chutney to see us through the winter. But after an hour of chopping, five hours of simmering, sterilising of bottles, decorating labels and stinking the whole house out I had use the sum total of ONE marrow. And the end result was barely edible given that I had underestimated the toughness of the skins. It turns out that you could pave the roads with the skins on the outsides of these. Hence my first batch was definitely labelled ‘For Personal Use Only’ for fear it get into the mouths of any visiting dignitaries and cause  them to lose a denture or choke to death. Round two was slightly more acceptable, with the pain staking removal of the skins and this did mean that you could get through more actual fruits to make up the required weights. By round three I was getting thoroughly sick and tired of this process (not to mention having blister upon blister on my fingers from incessant chopping) so decided to get experimental. A cocked up order from Asda and lots of leftovers from a weekend course left us with tons of bananas so I thought what the hell. I’ll bet my bottom dollar that you will never be able to find marrow and banana chutney anywhere in the shops. In my opinion a crying shame. Don’t knock it until you have tried it. The Caribbean-Cymru mash-up to take your taste buds places you never knew possible (and not just to the nearest porcelain telephone to God before you ask).

You turn your back for five days...

Five down, sixteen to go. Soup then? So I managed to get rid of another two in my self-styled curried marrow soup. But I think that there is a reason that Mr Heinz and Mr Baxter don’t have this billed as one of their range. It has a taste and consistency that only your family could love. Or at least tolerate. So I decided to start thinking ‘outside the (veg) box’ to other styles of cooking and presentation. In Scotland they have a sure fire way of making anything taste better. Batter it then deep fry the crap out of it. And so our marrow chips were born. In the high falutin’ Michelin starred circles we were mixing in during our recent mini-break, these might have been sold as ‘fresh summer vegetable tempura’. Round here, they are known simply as ‘deep fried marrer’. And they are bloody delicious. In small doses of course.

If all else fails...

So that saw off another couple. And as for the rest I have parked up the wheelmarrow (tee hee) strategically next to the back door so that anyone, and I really do mean anyone, who crosses the threshold is not allowed to leave the premises without one: postman, Yodel delivery drivers, Jehovah’s witnesses… I could have kissed my neighbours when they popped round for a cup of tea and left with four, yes FOUR, for their grandchildren to carve up and enter in the ‘animal made from vegetables’ class in the local show. Now that is the true definition of neighbourly love.

And the marrows were not the only green veg to explode into abundance while we were away. The chard and climbing beans have all found top gear, fuelled by a winning cocktail of cow manure and nitrogen from last year’s runner beans. And as for the peas, they are so prolific that their birch twig supports have collapsed under the sheer weight of pods. We can pick carrier bags full of the things every day and still they seem to keep coming, despite my daughters’ best efforts to scoff the lot before they get back to the house. And our beautiful new kitchen now resembles a scene from a spaghetti western shoot out with peas pinging off every surface sending me ducking for cover now that my daughter has discovered a new technique of podding which involves creating a huge “pop!” followed by high-speed peas issuing from the pod which you have zero chance of finding (until of course you come to sweep under the table and the stairs and it’s like Birds Eye’s stockpile for a nuclear winter).

It also transpires that whilst we were away hundreds of caterpillars decided to take up residence in my brassica bed. This came as a bit of a shock as last year I didn’t see a single caterpillar and just assumed that our garden birds and frogs were doing their bit. Turns out they must have gone on holidays this year as well since in the space of less than a week these hairy little bastards have massacred my sprouts and my kale which hitherto had been my prize crop of the patch. I now have a much deeper understanding of the underlying meaning in The Very Hungry Caterpillar and can only assume that Eric Carle  must have been a neglectful vegetable gardener like me, taking his inspiration from the destruction that can be wrought in the space of six days. I was livid. Anyone who messes with my brassicas messes with me. So together with my two trusty sidekicks we openly declared war on these guzzling beasties picking each one painstakingly off the leaves before dispatching them in any number of creative and gory ways. I now find myself up there at all hours, obsessively picking them off and muttering darkly under my breath, "out, out damn bug" like some crazed Lady McBeth, hands stained permanently green from the the death throes of caterpillars. But at least, with luck, I’ll be eating my own sprouts at Christmas so I can live with that. Ha.

Caterpillar heaven

And it’s not all been about eating and killing. Now apparently is the time to start thinking about winter greens that you can grow in the polytunnel. After the huge investment of time, money and energy into erecting our plastic palace, the least I can do is buy a few seeds and chuck them in and see what happens. You’d think. Except even the owner at the local garden centre dismissed my polytunnelled ambition, laughing incredulously at my intention to grow cabbages and pak choi at this time of year. I lied and said they were for next year (which he blatantly didn’t believe) and went right ahead and planted them anyway. I’ll show them. And if nothing happens, there’ll always be the marrow and banana chutney to fall back on…

Chutney mountain

Grand Designs

It’s amazing how so many aspirations about your life centre around your kitchen. Ever since we started the renovation work I have had dreams and ideals floating around in my head about how life will be “once we have the new kitchen”. For example in my new kitchen…

….I will wake up each morning, sweep into the kitchen in a silk kimono dressing gown, make myself a double espresso from the De Longhi coffee machine, fling open the French windows and welcome the day in on the patio with a Marlboro red and a serious caffeine hit (reality: don’t drink coffee, don’t smoke, certainly don’t own a kimono – my dressing gowns have in the past been confused with dog blankets, by humans and, alas, dogs, and the chances of it being warm enough to sit outside at any time of the day around here, let alone first thing in the morning, slim to FA).

...I will arrive home from work, casually throw my Mulberry handbag across the new island next to the freshly cut and artfully arranged flowers, pour myself a glass of crisp, white wine and perch myself gracefully on a stool still in my stilettos to discuss the day’s events (I do genuinely believe this will happen despite the fact that a) I don’t actually ever leave the house to go to work these days, b) I have no idea where my handbag is and the only mulberries I am ever likely to have in my life are the ones from the slightly diseased tree in the orchard, and that is only if I can get there before the birds, c) the only flowers we have in the house are dead dandelions that the girls are so fond of bringing in, d) I only drink at the weekend, once the kids are safely asleep and then only half a mug of wine before I fall asleep, e) I, probably unsurprisingly, no longer own any stilettos and f) probably the most unlikely of all, sitting still for longer than a minute would be a complete bloody miracle around here. Ah well, I can but dream).

…..My kids will sit quietly for hours at the new kitchen table, contentedly drawing Dali-esque obscurities which we will coo over endlessly and pin artfully to the new fridge for visitors to marvel over, whilst I can devote  my full attention to a lavish, five course meal with herbs and complicated sauces and everything. (The chances of this ever happening, any of it, are about as likely as the England football team winning the world cup. Ouch sorry).

…. I will bake cakes that will rise and be as light as a feather, not burned and uneven and impossible to stack together because you used the wrong shaped tin, your toddler ran off upstairs at the critical moment leaving said cake to overcook and your iPad has run out of battery and you have no idea where the charger is to bring it back to life and reveal the critical parts of the recipe.

…..Friends will just drop in and wander into our new kitchen whereupon bottles of fine wine and expensive nibbles will magically appear on the immaculate, clutter-free worktops and we will while away a few hours laughing uproariously and smiling till our faces hurt, just like models in a  page from a Howden’s catalogue. What I am overlooking of course is that we live in the arse end of nowhere so any visits have to be planned months, if not years in advance. And the chances of losing an afternoon to an impromptu boozing session are non-existent given that any hint of spontaneity in your life, of course, disappears as soon as kids arrive on the scene.

…..I will make at least one Kilner jar of something wonderfully wild and colourful and delicious a week to display proudly (smugly) on our new shelves and I will not (absolutely will not) put off doing this because I can’t face the hideous task of trying to get welded-on sugar off the pans or the even worse job of forcing myself to eat yet another failed attempt at some ambitious wild elixir.

….I will sit in the rocking chair next to the fire of an evening, glass of full-bodied red in my hand and read (and properly inwardly digest) the intellectual bits of the weekend papers and be ready to make insightful political commentary with others, not just skim through the fashion and food pages before throwing the whole lot in the recycling largely unread and settling down in front of Gavin and Stacey (again).

Ok so my aspirations and the reality of my life might be gulfs apart but quite frankly the sheer joy at having access to a dishwasher, a full sized sink and a cooker again far outweigh any vague feelings of disappointment I might feel when I slowly come to realise that life will probably go on much as before, albeit in a much larger, shinier kitchen.  It is still very much, to quote my husband, “a work in progress”, (and I daresay always will be – we already find ourselves suggesting that bare plaster walls have a certain industrial chic that is quite appealing, just because neither of us can quite face opening yet another tin of paint right now). But it feels great to be making our mark on the place and who cares if it takes us a few more years to get it just right. I am now beginning to have a much fuller appreciation of why Kevin McCloud decided to run a Revisited series...

Before...

After (still WIP)

Carry On Camping

Phase one of our Grand Business Plan is underway! Now, in my other weekday incarnation as a management consultant the mere whisper of the words ‘business plan’ fill me with horror and bring to mind late nights poring over multiple, scary spreadsheets followed by the unenviable task of ‘socialising’ a strategy and key milestones (a misnomer if ever there was one to describe standing in front of a lot of sceptical, angry-looking clients, trying to persuade them of something you have no idea will work or not – rather than out with your mates in the pub). Not this business plan. This plan is a very different beast indeed. It basically involved investing in seven bell tents and the ubiquitous colourful bunting, developing some alfresco ablution facilities (read: a crapper in the woods consisting of a very deep hole covered by an old milking stool and an antique toilet seat, surrounded on three sides by old doors), building a stone fire circle and magically transforming the old Western Red Cedar we cut down in the spring into some tasteful, wooden benches upon which to relax and take in the views.  In the space of a week, we somehow managed to turn our top field from a run of the mill enclosure for sheep into a rather captivating little camp site.

Throne with a view

And when I say ‘we’, on this occasion it genuinely was a family affair. There is nothing like the prospect of 17 paying guests arriving on a Friday night to get the wind up your sails and your arse into gear. Parents-in-law were roped into erecting tents, the kids were on bunting duty and in charge of finding all of the potential death traps posed by camouflaged guy ropes, solid bits of steel holding up shelters and open fires (our rationale being that a one and three year old running amok in a field are probably about the same level on a risk matrix – see, there’s that other pesky business plan creeping in again – as a group of 17 pissed up lads on a stag do weekend.) Profits in Amazon and UPS once again skyrocketed as delivery after delivery of ‘essential’ camping items arrived in the yard: solar lights, trestle tables, tarps, folding chairs, enamel tableware – you name it, we now probably own it. But among all of the chaos of setting up, we did find a moment to pause and reflect on the significance of probably being the first people to build and light a fire on our Iron Age hill fort (using traditional fire-lighting methods anyway – I daresay the previous residents of our house may have had the odd instant barbecue up here – but bear with me as I get to the poignant bit…) for over 3,000 years. I think I can safely say that the significance of this moment was pretty much lost on my kids but for my husband and I we wanted to make sure we paid our respects to our ancestors and asked for their blessing in making our business plan a success. Now you sure as hell don’t get to do that bit in your shiny, grey office in the City.

Dear Gods of Fire...

So all set up and ready to go, we now had the nervous bit of waiting anxiously for the group to arrive, pink balloons fluttering in the wind to show them where to park (that’s what happens when you involve a three year old in vital logistics planning). Hoping to God that they don’t turn out to be nutters, or worse still, really boring and hard work. As it happened all our fears were completely unfounded. You know you’ve slightly misjudged your audience when you fill a cool box with cheap lager as a welcoming gesture, and they arrive with magnums of port and whole Stiltons. The whole weekend they were charming, respectful but very much ON IT. I kind of gathered that they must have been alright when on the first night my husband’s suggestion that he would be back at the house by ‘about 8pm’ ended up with him rolling in closer to midnight, having joined his ‘new mates’ for a few beers. Not that I was bothered. Happy (paying) campers and a night with full custody of the TV will put a smile on my face any day of the week.

Camping (in every sense of the word)

So what exactly, I hear you ask, do you do with a group blokes in field for a whole weekend, all intent on giving their best mate the best possible send off before he heads off into a life of matrimonial bliss with his ball and chain? (I am not being disrespectful to women or the sanctity of marriage here, the stag had an ACTUAL 20lb ball and chain strapped to his ankle for the whole weekend – a tradition among this group of civil engineers apparently – that and the pink unicorn costume. Nice touch). Well, my husband’s USP for running stag dos is, of course, being a deer stalker, making an actual stag up front and central in the proceedings. There was an impressive set of fallow antlers overseeing the whole shebang from the top of one of the shelters and a whole deer brought in half way through for the stag and his party to skin, butcher and eat. And when I say eat, I mean all of it: eyeballs, testicles, heart, the lot. And as if that wasn’t enough to test the most adventurous of palates this was followed by a smorgasbord of  enormous, insects arranged, ‘temptingly’ on a wooden platter like a terrible mash-up of Masterchef and David Attenborough does the Amazon. We had brined tarantulas (mmmm – apparently like “eating a cyst”), dune bugs and scorpions to really get the juices flowing.  That was all coupled with the largest array of big boy’s toys you could possible imagine: double-headed throwing axes, flick knives, air rifles and bows and arrows. Pretty much the full gamut of things that can kill you.  And very much not the field to be wandering through if you have recently read We Need To Talk About Kevin.

Bon appetit!

So, understandably, the children and I were banished from the top field for the weekend, just getting tantalising reports of how it was all going every time my husband popped back to the house for something he had forgotten. That is the great thing about running courses at our own place. Instead of having to try and fit everything into the back of the Landrover like some super-advanced level game of Tetrus, you can simply wander up and down from the field to the workshop and the house at your leisure to pick up bits and pieces. And of course fill your wife in on all the juicy snippets of stag do bravado and derring do. Which included attempting to better a random selection of feats from the Guinness Book of Records such as drinking a litre of lemon juice (very ill-advised if it is taken with an amuse bouche of brined tarantula or crispy scorpion apparently). During the clean-up operation the following week I was slightly baffled by the number of lemon skins strewn about in the grass until this bit was explained to me. But in fairness that was about all that they left behind. By the day after they had left it was almost as if they had never been.  Now we’re gearing up for our next course this weekend where we will be actually making primitive bows and arrows in the hill fort. My husband went all misty-eyed again when he started telling me that people would have actually made the exact same type of bows that he will be making in the exact same spot. I’m just hoping he doesn’t go the whole hog and dress himself in a loin cloth and furs for the full effect. Nothing less attractive than a grown Scotsman shivering into his shave horse…

And so back to that business plan. I’m not sure we’ll be over-wintering in Barbados quite yet but it feels good to be generating something from our land finally. In some ways it feels like we’ve already had our money’s worth out of the tents. Nothing to do with the stag do. No. More for the sheer entertainment and novelty value for the kids who can spend literally HOURS in a bell tent with nothing but a few old toys, a manky old sleeping bag and some balloons to keep them busy. Talk about easy parenting, I can literally just stretch out, arms behind my head and relax, safe in the knowledge that there are no corners/objects/drops they can injure themselves on and they haven’t yet worked out how to unzip the flaps and escape. Easy as. Although I have had a slight flicker of maternal guilt that I am possibly setting my children up for a life of disrepute by letting them dance round the upright poles in the middle of the bell tents for hours on end. I console myself that getting them acclimatised to all things camping can only be a good thing and will hopefully sow the seeds for an even greater love of the outdoors. Either that or they’ll refuse to go anywhere near a tent by the time they are teenagers! Let’s wait and see… 

The ultimate children's play area (but will they still want to carry on camping when they're 15...?)

Rural rollercoaster

It’s been nearly 18 months now since we moved to Wales and with that milestone has come the slow, dawning realisation that this is not just a long holiday, a sabbatical or half way through anything. This is it. This is for real. This is actually our life now. And with that realisation comes a whole host of ups and downs that can send you from euphoric, “couldn’t-ever-imagine-living-anywhere-else” highs to “holy f***, what the hell have we done, send me back to the city quick” panics, sometimes all within the space of the same hour.

For someone who has effectively made a complete lifestyle change geared around food, you’d think we inhabit a world of complete foodie heaven, savouring the fruits of our labours and convincing ourselves that nothing comes close to the taste of your own pork or carrots or eggs. And for the most part you’d be right. Sweeping into the kitchen (when we had one) in floaty skirt and oversized straw hat (in my imagination - in reality an old pair of dirty jeans and oversized fleece) with a basket of freshly picked fruit and veg over my arm like a Country Living pin-up, I genuinely couldn’t be happier. But then sometimes, just sometimes, you fancy spending a carefree Sunday afternoon in the pub with the papers, like the ‘good old days’, rambling on about nothing in particular (although who am I kidding, the chances of a lunch lasting much more than about 15 minutes with two kids under four is a minor miracle – but bless us, we seem to suffer temporary amnesia every time a pub foray is suggested and head out all enthusiastic). I also seem to forget that you can’t just haphazardly rock up at any old pub and expect good gastro-pub style food around here. In fact, seeking out the gems has become a new hobby of mine, tapping people for their local knowledge of foodie hideaways. But whenever my nostalgic Sundays get written off for not being anything like they used to be and I cuss the countryside for having a limited range of eateries I ask myself – what does it matter, you’re attempting (badly) to become self-sufficient, you hypocritical foodie cretin!

And that attempt invariably involves dragging the children along on our ‘grow your own’ odyssey. Ok, so they know where their food comes from but it doesn’t stop me having moments where I agonise about whether I am giving my kids the best start in life by having them trailing around behind me in the muck day in day out, bribing them with slug and snail quotas whilst I endeavour to put some kind of order on the vegetable patch. Should I not be out there taking them to self-improving galleries and culture-rich museums? Expanding their minds with trips to foreign shores and strange cities? My rational brain says of course it is all about the balance – as long as they are getting a bit of both what does it matter if they are happy.  But that still doesn’t stop me having a bit of a wobble when we get stuck into planting our 24^th packet of seeds of the season.

Then you have the emotive subject of schooling. Our eldest is now successfully enrolled in our local village school with a total pupil roll of 33 kids, two teachers, two classrooms. Whilst my friends in London and elsewhere in the country spend months of sleepless nights, gnawing their fingernails to the bone awaiting the dreaded school places decision, here there was never any doubt that we would get a place. They welcome newcomers with open arms, keen to bump up the number of pupils and keep the school open. The playground is surrounded on all sides by grazing sheep and the classroom windows look out onto the River Dee and the mountains beyond. It really couldn’t be more idyllic. So why do I still have sliding doors moments when I wonder what it would be like for our kids to be in a larger, urban school, exposed to different experiences and more variety of languages and musical instruments for instance (here we have piano, guitar and, of course it goes without saying, the harp – although I hope to God that one of mine doesn’t decide to take it up as it would be a right ball ache to schlep one of those buggers to and from school each day. Given the size of the case but we’d need to invest in a bloody van to transport it anywhere. Give me a flute any day of the week).  People keep telling me what a boon it is to be able to school your kids bilingually and how it supercharges their little brains ready for whatever languages and challenges life throws at them further down the track. I hope so.

For one thing around here bilingualism is just the most normal thing in the world. Farmers, tradesmen, teachers, doctors. Pretty much everyone around here is fluent in English and Welsh and switches between them without a second thought. Whereas where we lived before bilingualism was seen as an aspiration and something to invest time and energy in, around here it just the run of the mill. Everyone can happily converse, banter and swear prolifically in both languages, seemingly relishing the chance to flick between them just to whet the appetite of the eavesdropping “saesons”. I have moments where I get ridiculously excited and enthusiastic about the opportunity to immerse myself in a second language and become truly fluent and at other times I imagine that people are being deliberately obtuse and make me feel like an ignorant outsider and I really can’t be arsed with it at all. Fickle, moi?

And so to the biggest corkscrew of all. Since I started writing this post we have had the tumultuous decision for the UK to leave the EU. You’d think that living up here in the hills, far away from the nexus of power, the shock waves would be felt less. You’d be wrong. When I woke up this morning to hear the news I felt stunned and like things would never really be the same again. I headed out up the hill with the dog for our usual morning pipe-opener and the fields and hills and mountains that I have come to call home all looked the same, but different. There was something palpably different in the air today. Uncertainty, excitement, relief, horror. As the reactions and data points flowed into our lives from the radio and TV we tried to make sense (as I expect everyone was) of what this means for us. At times like this we all have an innate flight response to head for the hills but what happens if you are already there? Trying to make a business and potentially depending upon former EU subsidies and support? Raising two little children in a rural village in a small, potentially soon-to-be-fragmented country? Then I went out to feed the hens and to say hello to the cows with their huge trusting eyes and squishy noses and realised that life is what you make of it. The hens and the cows don’t give a shit who is in power and how our country is governed in relation to others. They just care about where their food is coming from, making sure their calves are ok and that they are in a herd, altogether. I’m guessing we’re going to be stuck on this rollercoaster for a fair few loops again yet but fundamentally we’re all still the same people, with the same resources and same values, regardless of what happened yesterday. Maybe it’s spending all this time around plants and animals and the cycles of life and death (not to get all Lion King on you) that make you more aware of your own mortality and give you a more grounded perspective in what really matters.  For all my ups and downs I’d rather be here with my nearest and dearest than anywhere else right now. Sure there are things which are hard and that piss me off but I don’t think any of us would reach the point of complete happiness without the odd niggle and wobble. Apart from perhaps the Dalai Lama. Oh and my dog Bru. He seems pretty happy with his lot. Although he is now slightly concerned about whether his dog passport to France will still be valid…. On verra.

To be or not to be... 

Tunnel vision

This post has been a long time in the making. We started clearing and levelling for our polytunnel back in March and only this week can we be so bold to suggest that it is now ‘finished’ (give or take a few minor fixtures and fitting details...). For the uninitiated amongst you, officially a polytunnel is the next level up from a greenhouse, a tube of plastic fixed over metal bars for (allegedly) growing veggies all year round. Unofficially it’s basically like trying to erect the world’s largest condom in your back yard and about as bloody difficult. And I’ll tell you for why…

For starters, you’ve got to measure up to ensure that all of the poles are in EXACTLY the right position to make sure that the thing is square, peddling out all your schoolboy mathematics, soh cah toa and all that, to get those corners just right. It would take the average person about say, oh I don’t know, an hour tops to get this to a point you are happy with. For my husband this took the best part of a day, getting the measurements to the finest millimetre, not helped by our three year old’s best attempts to use the tape measure as a lead on which to take her imaginary dog for a walk throughout the proceedings. Finally, FINALLY, we were able to set the scary looking ground anchors into concrete and then spent the next 24 hours attempting to banish children and animals from leaving their indelible mementos on the surface.

Digging out... it's a family affair

Then you have to assemble the startling array of poles and metal with an even more baffling set of nuts and bolts and washers. For anyone who has ever had the pleasure of assembling any flat pack furniture from Ikea, this was like that, on speed, times ten. The instruction manual rivalled a tome from Dostoevsky to give you a clue as to the complexity of this task. And as if that wasn’t hard enough, we gradually realised over the course of a number of weeks and much head scratching and swearing that some of the critical bits were missing. You know that feeling you get when you have finally managed to get a child engaged in a jigsaw puzzle only to realise that the vital pieces have been lost behind the sofa long ago…? So it was back to the supplier, let’s call them Acme Polytunnels to protect their sheer ineptitude, for the missing parts, not once, not twice but an unbelievable SEVEN times before we finally managed to get the full complement of parts. And apparently they are still using the Pony Post wherever they are based as each delivery took on average two weeks to arrive only to find it was the wrong bit. Unreal. This goes some way to justify why it has taken us longer to build this sodding tunnel than it took them to build the entire Walkie Talkie building in the City (that I watched going up with great interest from my desk overlooking the whole thing in the building next door). Although, even though it is bloody hot with the plastic on, we have fortunately so far managed to avoid setting fire to any Jaguar cars from the reflection on its roof. (Google it).

Erected in less time (feels like)

Structure complete it was time for the plastic. There is a snobbery among polytunnel aficionados (we have since discovered) around how tight you can get your polythene. It wants to be, and I quote, “as tight as a drum” but you then have to play Russian roulette with the stuff, stretching it to the limit without letting it rip and then having to go back and replace the whole bloody lot at huge expense. You will be pleased to learn that we did indeed manage to get it pretty tight and we now can’t go anywhere without comparing the tautness of our tunnel with everyone else’s. Ah, what it takes to keep up with the Joneses' around here...

How toight is your tunnel...?

And then, just like that, we had this whole new wonderful space, casting a lovely light and warmth over everything and protecting us from the rain and the wind. We set about creating raised beds from some galvanised steel panels which we picked up for nothing somewhere along the way and which we fixed to the ground using solid steel pegs courtesy of my dad’s trusty welding set. I tell you what, when the house and all of the barns are long gone, those raised beds will still be standing, nuclear war, next ice age, you name it. They are completely indestructible. Then all that was left to do was to fill the beds with manure and compost et voila. A whole new area for veggies and a whole other level of watering commitments to add to my growing list of dependents and to dos.

You're indestructible. (Always believe in)

Not that I really mind though. Working up there in the evenings when the heat of the day is still lingering in the tunnel, it’s like being in a cocoon, far away from the stresses and strains of it all. Some women plump for these crazy flotation tanks for their ultimate relaxation therapy. For me it’s some obscure evening programme on Radio 4 to give the brain a bit of an intellectual workout whilst physically beasting the body barrowing shit and digging holes. All accompanied by the calming pitter patter of raindrops on the roof and the symphony of evening bird song. And if I’m really working the relaxation vibe, possibly an ice cold can of Kronenbourg 1664 to top it all off. And that, my friends, is just the kind of classy bird that I am.  

Best place for a well-earned sundowner

Demolition Man

Question: how many men does it take to demolish a solid stone wall which has been standing since the 1760s? Answer: about half a day.  Oh yes, our long-awaited renovation project is now well under way with our amazing farmer-cum-builders working like Trojans to construct our fabulous new kitchen.  We are still very much at the “bashing it all up” stage, as my three year old likes to call it (“Daddy, why are those men bashing up the house?”) and for most of this week the whole house has been precariously balanced on what to all intents and purposes looks like a rusty old bit of pipe. Also, it’s amazing what you can learn about a house from ripping it apart with a 20lb sledgehammer and a pneumatic jack hammer. Turns out our predecessors were forerunners of the upcycling movement, using old fertiliser bags directly on the bare earth in place of damp course (I kid you not) or perhaps (much more likely) didn’t care so much for conventional building rules, given that there are absolutely no foundations to speak of in the old part of the house. But given that it’s been standing now for over 250 years facing a beating from the toughest of winters, we’re not overly concerned. These Welsh farmers knew a thing or two about building a house I reckon.

They don't make houses like they used to

Whole house balanced on a rusty pipe

My husband has got stuck right in to all of this demolition work too, shovelling debris, barrowing stones and enthusiastically engaging in all of the general head scratching and chin rubbing that is all part and parcel of the building experience, his work trousers at half-mast and his arse crack proudly hanging out.  And after only a couple of weeks of heavy lifting, manly grunting, exaggerated belching and crude jokes he was pronounced to have been accepted as ‘one of the boys’, much to his amusement and delight. These builders are fuelled on a pure diet of instant coffee, chips and Hobnobs and each lunchtime my husband is duly dispatched to the local chippy to collect supplies. They now know him by name down there and I think we have tripled their profits in the past fortnight. It’s one of the things that they never tell you about embarking on a renovation project: your healthy, ‘self-sufficient’ diet will go to rat shit.

One of the boys...

Not least because we don’t have a kitchen. Now you would think that being married to a survival expert and having delusions of self-sufficient grandeur, the small matter of not having a kitchen wouldn’t make us bat an eyelid. You’d think we’d be purifying stream water through old socks and burying a home-grown beast in an underground pit oven every night to feast upon wouldn’t you? The reality I’m afraid is rather more mundane. We’ve set up our living quarters in three rooms downstairs and have a microwave, a toaster, a kettle and a camping stove at our disposal. We planned the work to happen in early summer fully imagining being able to spend all of our time and meals outside, just coming in to sleep. Of course it was blisteringly hot (for Wales) on the first day and since then has pissed down relentlessly. And so I find myself holed up with two kids, a hobbling dog (who has fractured his little toe not, as you might expect, on some valiant ascent of a remote Welsh hill, but rather catching a ball in a manicured London park) living, working, eating and sleeping in the same room.

Sounds hellish doesn’t it. But actually, we are really rather enjoying it. It feels a bit like we are on holiday, and therefore all holiday rules apply right? Ice cream mid-week, red wine with evening emails, the odd cheeky takeaway and trips to the local farm shop for ‘no-cook-eat–with-your-hands' deli delights, watching telly in bed (well it’s right there, rude not to). It also makes locating ones’ children a hell of a lot easier because they are right there. Not careering about upstairs getting up to Christ knows what or sneaking off into the office to muck about on our swirly chairs and graffiti all over the whiteboards. No, they are right under your nose. And amazingly, we are surviving on a skeleton toy box. It’s remarkable what you can do with a few dried up felt tip pens, some old bog rolls and a bit of tuppaware. It just goes to show that you don’t need boxes and boxes of toys and games, just a little creativity and a bit of the good old Blitzkrieg spirit goes a long way. That said, I think I might poke my right eye out before this is done if I have to read the same story book every night for the next three months (especially as that one book happens to be a slightly strange Dr Seuss, which I now feel is giving me subliminal messages I have read it so often). On that note, for any of you familiar with the oeuvre of Julia Donaldson (of Gruffalo fame), after the past couple of weeks we feel like the living incarnation of A Squash and a Squeeze … Our house is going to feel pretty big once we get the full run of it again.

Our house is beginning to feel pretty big

I can see the novelty soon wearing off however. The charm of having your kids share a room for the first time and chatter and giggle each other to sleep each night soon becomes a right  pain in the arse when, faced with a lack of blackout curtains and a west facing room, bedtime becomes closer to 9pm than 7pm. There is also the small issue of washing up the aftermath of an entire family’s three meals in a tiny hand basin, not to mention the lack of a shower or a bath. We have resorted to baby wipes in place of showers and strategically timed trips to the local swimming baths. Not ideal when one of us is labouring all day, one of us is shovelling shit out of the never-ending heap of manure, Sisyphus-like, at every available opportunity and the other two delight in daubing each other in food and/or mud all day long.  We’ve also been cadging meals and baths with our wonderfully understanding and tolerant friends on the promise that they can come and help us toast our new kitchen once it’s finished.  One small mercy is that the builders have taken pity on me and plumbed my washing machine in under piles of old insulation and kitchen units in the barn. A last bastion of civilisation and cleanliness before we descend completely into feraldom. If I can actually find it that is.

My washing machine is in here somewhere...

What this whole experience is fast giving me is a new found respect for my parents who lived in a static caravan for nine months when we were growing up and they were renovating their house (yeah, yeah cue the trailer trash jokes). I’ve been doing this for less than two weeks and feel like a complete hero. They were at this for the best part of a year and through the winter. I look back on those days fondly and as part of one big adventure. I hope we will do the same. It has been a lot of fun so far but maybe ask me again in a month!