What they don't tell you...

To celebrate the one year anniversary of my blog, I’ve come up with a list of the things that they just don’t tell you when you embark on a lifestyle shift from the city to the country…

1) You will start taking parenting tips from sheep. Summarised as follows: in the early days feed them as much as they will take and threaten to kill anyone who comes within 100 yards of them. Once they are big enough to frolic alone, keep a close eye on them as they start to explore the rocks and streams (then bleat like bloody hell when one of your offspring ends up in the water trough and has to be rescued – in this case by me). Finally, once they are at the adolescent stage, marauding around in large packs at dusk, secretly hiding bottles of vodka in the hedges and escaping under fences to eat sacred and long-awaited asparagus spears, turn a blind eye and deny all knowledge of their existence. Gina Ford had nothing on these woolly experts I tell you...

2) You will have a bizarre and unprecedented craving for culture. Despite the fact that the only time you have been to the theatre in the past ten years was to watch The Tempest in Russian in Southampton – that was enough cultural brownie points for a lifetime, or so we thought…… Now I find myself avidly reading theatre reviews for shows that I will never go to, ordering the latest novels online to add to my stack of unread books by my bed and seeking out local artist galleries to drag my reluctant husband along to. I blame overdosing on Radio 4 at this time of year whilst head down frantically planting on the veg plot…

3) You will start comparing the size of your husband's polytunnel with your girl friends in the pub. As happened recently out on a hen do. Whereas once we might have been comparing the width and length of something else, now our conversations revolve around the thickness of the plastic, the slidiness of the doors and how hot you can get it inside. With chat like that, who needs a pair of bobbing penii strapped to your head?!

So how big is yours...?

4) You will look forward to going to Sainsbury’s with the same zeal and eagerness that was once reserved for Friday night beers after work. Growing your own and picking up bits and pieces from the local convenience store (oh ok then, I confess, getting the same items delivered week after week in your online shop - *yawn*) cannot compare to the frisson of excitement you get walking down an aisle with over 100 different varieties of teas and coffee, endless bottles of wine extending as far as the eye can see, and every cheese you could possibly imagine. Of course you will be so paralysed by choice that you will leave with a pint of milk, some random reduced-price tropical fruit and a ridiculously overpriced magazine laden with pink plastic tat to pacify the kids (who are also both fit to burst after complete sensory overload).

5) You will take a week off work to shovel shit. Quite literally. No more beach holidays or city breaks for me. Oh no. I have just spent a child-free two days wheel-barrowing five tonnes of cow manure onto our raised beds. And do you know what? I totally loved it. The sun burn, the aching arms, the endless hours of Radio 4 and the vague scent of Clarins Eau de Jardins from the night before mingled with the lingering aroma of rotting cow shit. Just perfect. That is when you know that you are in exactly the right place…

Happy holidays!

Hedge fund

Hello strangers. It’s been a while. Turns out my baby-addled brain can’t quite cope with having to apply itself at work all week and then find the capacity to switch itself back into blog mode. That and the fact that I have been spending every spare moment squelching my way up muddy hills or dangling with legs and arms flailing about like a very mal-coordinated chimp on the monkey bars in our kids’ play area in an attempt to prepare for the X Runner race this weekend. I’m not sure I’m any fitter but my arms and shoulders have ached so much these past couple of months that non-essential typing duties have been somewhat put to one side.

Anyway, the good news is that I survived, despite waking up on the morning of the race to a complete white out. Snow everywhere and sub-zero temperatures. Just what you want to see when you are faced with the prospect of launching yourself into deep open water down a slide from a great height. I swear to god I have never been so cold in all my life. And as for the mud….. Well, I thought living here I was a pro when it came to all things mud. Turns out I had barely touched the surface with my slightly mucky ankles and spots of dirt on my running tights after my training runs at home. We were WAIST DEEP in thick, sticky mud, much like those documentaries you see of intrepid explorers braving the Amazon jungle. Except it was only 4c. And hailing. Oh and did I mention that we were completely soaked to the skin after an open water swim in our running kit? Bonkers. Utterly bonkers. But I haven’t had such good fun in a long time. And if nothing else, wandering around the place today after a week of rain, it seems positively pristine and desert-like in comparison.

Bit nippy after an open water swim (dodging icebergs)

So what have we been up to these past couple of months I hear you ask? Well, to quote a comic source far greater than myself, we have been mostly planting or chopping down hedges and trees. We spent Easter weekend in the driving rain planting 250 native species hedging plants (Hazel, Hawthorn, Blackthorn, Field Maple, Dog Rose and Bird Cherry in case you’re interested) down one side of the garden. We spent most of the rest of the month chopping down about 250 non-native conifers and hedging plants on the other side. The irony of one cancelling the other out has not been lost on us but alas you can’t easily transplant a hedge, more’s the pity. The result is that we have lovely open views out to the west now and have enjoyed some beautiful sunsets (and the odd cheeky sundowner beer – didn’t take the training that seriously as you can probably tell) albeit wrapped up in three blankets against the cold wind. We also have the world’s biggest supply of wood chip from endless evenings of chipping the branches. My dear husband was out there night after night, ramming the stuff into the jaws of the chipper until he finally lost his shit and started a ruddy great bonfire one night on the drive. We had to phone the neighbours to let them know that our house was not in fact on fire and to hold off calling the local fire brigade. Such are the neighbourly codes of practice around here!

Timberrrrrrr!

Baby hedge

One thing is now for sure though, we will not want for firewood next winter. Our wood stores are once again full to the gunnels after many days dedicated to chopping and OCD stacking. It seems that a man’s love for his chainsaw hath no end. It’s also nice to think that we have (hopefully) managed to stash our winter store without having to buy anything in, even if our haul does happen to be made up of non-native species. Is this the timber equivalent of an off-shore fund do you reckon? I’m sure Mr Cameron would turn a blind eye to our little seasoning nest egg of foreign winter warmth wouldn't he...

Wood stock

Speaking of hedging our bets (ahem), we also had a little flutter on the Grand National last weekend. Despite spreading the probabilities and betting each way on five horses we still somehow managed to lose about forty quid. Then again, allowing your one year old daughter to go crazy on the Racing Post with a felt tip pen and then having your dog place his paw on his favourite horse (a la Paul the octopus at the 2010 World Cup) are perhaps not the soundest ways to make an informed choice of steed. Perhaps we should stick to stockpiling wood as a safer form of investment from now on!

How the west was won

Black magic

This week’s blog comes to you with somewhat of a large health warning: if you are not a fan of pork or pig-based products (that excludes most of my Jewish friends then - you know who you are…) please look away now. In the aftermath of dear Peppa’s demise our house has been swept away on a tsumani of sausages and hams and salamis. Every available hook and freezer drawer has been filled to bursting with one body part or another and all of the kitchen shelves and table are strewn with dog-eared (or should that be pig-eared, fnar fnar) books of porcine wisdom, invariably hamming the process up (gerrit?) to be some bucolic, mother-earth experience where dismembered pig is somehow magically transformed into perfect-looking meals with not a jot of mess in sight.

Mind yer head!

Let me tell you that the scene in our kitchen these past couple of weeks would very much not have made it onto the pages of said tomes. Storyboard for ‘Psycho 6: The Return’ or ‘The North Wales Chainsaw Massacre’ maybe. Hugh Fearnley-Wassisface’s whimsical recipe books, not so much. But then I suppose it would be a bit tricky to make black pudding without the main ingredient: lashings and lashings of good, old-fashioned blood. That said, we could have given some of your hippy, self-sufficiency gurus a run for their money with our gluten and dairy free version. It just so happened that one of our dearest friends from Scotland was visiting during Peak Pig and as he hasn’t been able to eat shop-bought black pudding for years because of his dietary constraints we thought we would give him a little treat. He seemed chuffed to bits but not sure whether he was fully aware that he was actually signing up to eat black pudding in every single meal for the whole weekend (no kidding). Just as well that, being a nutritionist by trade, he assured us that it has now been classed as a ‘superfood’. Get in! As if my husband needed any more encouragement to eat as much of the stuff as possible.  

Black magic

I’m not sure whether the superfood classification extends to the sausages that we’ve made. All 96 of them. But they do taste super fine. Plus the kids thought it was a fabulous game trying to leap up and grab the strings of bangers that were hanging, somewhat precariously, from meat hooks on the curtain rail in their playroom (social services please note: this was only for one afternoon as the sausages were drying out and the children were fully supervised at all times. Ish). We’ve also seen in the Chinese year of the monkey with some amazing sticky pork ribs, slathered in maple syrup and ginger and spices and slow cooked until the bones simply fell away from the meat. Baby wipes all round after that one, hands off kids. And who needs to wait for Christmas for a roast ham, studded with cloves and dripping in honey? Not us. It was supposed to be for slicing and packaging to last us all year so we don’t have to buy the salty, nitrate and water filled crap from the supermarket. Except we can’t seem to control ourselves and ended up eating the whole lot in one sitting. Oh dear. At least we have five more where that came from. As for the bacon, that seems to be disappearing offy quick too, as they say in Scotland. A sneaky rasher here, the odd bacon butty there. There seems to be a permanent smell of fried breakfast lingering enticingly about the place.  Ah Peppa, our first little black pig. You are gone but not forgotten!

Bacon butty anyone?

A ham is not just for Christmas...

As a sign of respect we did endeavour to use every last bit of her, from snout to tail as they say in those trendy restaurants down Shoreditch way. We were doing offally well (groan, sorry) in making industrial size quantities of liver and heart paté which tastes as good as anything I’ve tasted from a shop. We’ve also been experimenting with pork scratchings by puffing up the skin in the oven with a bit of salt and pepper and pig fat. Surprisingly tasty and crispy but without the fear that you get with the ones you buy behind the bars of old men’s pubs that you are going to break a tooth and spend an expensive and painful few weeks getting things fixed again. I’d love to tell you that we heroically made brawn from the head but I have a phobia of the smell after some drunken antics after the hog roast at our wedding so drew the line there. And as for the trotters, it turns out we didn’t quite get all of the hair off so did contemplate nipping down the chemist for a tube of Immac but decided that might taste a bit funky so chucked them out. However my husband assures me that next time around absolutely nothing will go to waste. Chitterlings (whatever they are) for sausages, crispy pigs ears and jellied trotters. Mmm. Might become a vegetarian for that particular week…

Mr Porky eat your heart out...

On that note and before I sign off, a quick and very promising update from the vegetable growing department. Our first tomato seed has germinated! Hurrah! It never fails to amaze me how placing a seemingly inanimate seed less than a millimetre long into compost, then keeping it moist and warm can miraculously create new life. What magic lies within that black soil I ask you?! Fingers crossed that this will be the first of many and that we’ll have be eating our very own BLTs in a couple of months. If there is any bacon left that is…

Back to the Future

I’m writing this as I sit on the train pulling out of Euston station after a week working back in the City. As I click-clacked my way along the platform in my suit and trench coat, faithful wheelie bag at my heels I could almost have been mistaken for a Londoner. But anyone paying closer attention may have clocked the traces of mud on my boots from falling foul of the muddy puddles on our drive. They may have spied the callouses on my rough hands from dragging heavy branches across the lawn after cutting down an enormous Western Red Cedar on the land last week. They might also have detected the scars on my arms from battling vicious brambles whilst trying to tame out of control hedges as part of our vain attempts at a garden ‘spring clean’. Yes, underneath this cool, City exterior lies a crazed, country bumpkin going half mad in her craving for fresh air and daylight, like a smoker with a 40-a-day habit desperate for a fag.

So how was it, my first excursion back to the corporate HQ office since our Big Move? Well, to be honest I felt like a character in one of those films where they wake up to find they’ve been transported to some vaguely non-descript time in the near future. Not at first. At first I bowled in and it felt like absolutely nothing had changed. But then it turned out that someone had nicked the bloody photocopier and replaced it with some colossal indecipherable machine that does any number of things except copy (spent the whole week hand writing notes instead). And the new coffee machine requires a PhD in Engineering to just work it out (too embarrassed to ask anyone I’ve not had a hot drink all week). And don’t even get me started on the new video conferencing technology. I did not have a Scooby Doo what was going on (which was somewhat unfortunate given that I was supposed to be the one running the show.) And just when did they start employing children to work for the company? These new joiners are so fresh faced and enthusiastic reeling off the names of tools and apps and gadgets that are a complete foreign language to me. Ask me anything you like about the process for butchering a pig or cultivating your own asparagus but when it comes to the latest social media technology it turns out I am completely in the dark.

The view I would have had all week (had I not been in a room with no windows...)

Then you have the slightly more subtle changes like the fashion which all seems to have moved on in the last year or so. Ankle boots and dresses, all the rage apparently. Flat brogues for the ladies, very much the order of the day. And seems like long hair is quite the thing, which is just as well since I haven’t yet found the time to find a hairdresser in North Wales and I didn’t quite fancy taking up my husband on his offer to cut my hair with on his various cutting implements previously used in the dissection of a hog. Then you have the crazy, futuristic iWatches strapped to the arms of every bloke in the office, providing yet another source of distraction and instantaneous information overload.  And who had the genius idea of putting wifi on the tube? That would be utterly brilliant were it not for the fact that you are so tightly packed in that you literally can’t move your hand from your pocket to retrieve your phone to avail yourself of this service. Either I had forgotten the sheer horror of travelling across London at rush hour or they have made the trains smaller. Either way I have never been in such close, uncomfortable proximity to strangers. I felt like one of the cows that our farmer brings over to our place in the cattle truck, except in comparison his cows are travelling on the bovine equivalent of the Orient Express: room to move, swish their tails, a nice view and fresh air – talk about the lap of luxury!

As we leave the urban sprawl of London and the South behind (we’ve just left Milton Keynes) time to turn my attention to the tasks for the weekend. Apart from spending as much time as possible outside, getting dirty and having incomprehensible conversations with my children and chickens (not the fancy ones obviously, they still consider themselves too posh to deign to speak to me), it is about time that we dig out our propagator and sort out the seed box. It is one of my most favourite times of the year as you put together a plan (in my head, not in any Microsoft application, thank God) of what you want to grow and eat for the coming year. You can pretty much guarantee that roughly half of what you plan to produce won’t actually come to fruition but every year that we do this I think we get just a little bit better.  Well that’s the optimist in me speaking. And the best thing about growing vegetables is that it can’t be ‘digitized’, you can’t build an app for it and you certainly can’t replace it with some new-fangled technology. With all this focus on the future and always trying to do things faster and better, there is some wonderful consolation in working with the timeless rhythms of nature and surrendering the control that we seek to exert in other areas of our life to just ‘wait and see…’. And on that somewhat philosophical note (it's been a hard week), it’s time for me to switch gear, take off the heels and the make-up and slip back into quiet(ish) sanctuary of the Welsh hills for a while. Happy weekend!

24 hours later

Hatches, matches, dispatches

It feels like spring has sprung early here in our little corner of the world. The snow drops are out in full force, little white heads nodding in the wind like extras in a Daft Punk video. The primroses are holding their own too, nuzzling up against each other in their enviable spot overlooking the stream. And we have even seen daffodils bravely poking their heads out of the mud to see what 2016 is all about after a nice long snooze.  Pretty much the same as last year I’m guessing, give or take a few trees and a little less water sloshing about the place. At least I hope that’s what I’d be saying if I were a daffodil living here.

Get Lucky?

Life is just a bed of (prim) roses

And of course spring would not be spring without the arrival of some new chicks, freshly hatched from, in this case, Gloucestershire. I never, ever thought I would end up married to a chicken fancier but I fear, alas, that this may be now the case. It turns out that my darling husband, fully embracing this smallholding lark with both arms (and legs), has been doing a worrying about of homework into old breeds of hen and decided that life could not go on without the addition of some Cotswold Legbar and Burford Brown chickens to our brood. Now if you, like me, haven’t exactly got your chicken breeds down pat, these pretty birds are the poultry equivalent of an It girl on Ladies Day at Ascot. All flamboyant feathers and Farrow & Ball colours with a permanent look of disdain on their beaky faces. Perhaps rightly so as these (hugely expensive) birds were hatched in a heated, designer barn, I daresay made from the finest Cotswold stone, with oak beams and floor to ceiling windows that would put our house to shame. So imagine their disgust as they were wrenched from their plush living quarters to be ignominiously bundled into a cardboard box and hurled into the back of a beaten up Landrover Defender (that my husband now assures me is a collector’s item and worth a fortune since they stopped making them last week). Four hours later they arrive to find themselves in the middle of a muddy field in the pissing rain, not a silk cushion or a Waitrose corn meal in sight. No wonder they didn’t venture out of their little house for a week. I could see the look in their eyes which said, “WTF am I doing here? I’m a Cotswold Legbar don’t you know. Perhaps this is all some horrific nightmare and I’ll back in the balmy, affluent south of England in a few clucks”. At times I can totally empathise with that!

WTF am I doing here?!

Tough luck chucks. You’re Welsh now. And that means you get to support the best rugby team in the world. Yes spring wouldn’t be spring without the Six Nations and that of course means lots of matches. So don’t expect to get anything done on a Saturday or a Sunday for the next eight weeks. It seems that everyone and everything around here stops for the rugby. It's like a scene out of 28 Days Later when Wales are playing: no cars, no tractors, no people, even the sheep seem to fall silent until you hear an audible cheer or groan (or just an almighty sigh in the case of today's nail-biting draw) rolling around the valley when the final whistle blows. Even time itself seems to work differently while the tournament is on. Our builder came round this week to ummm and aaarrr at various wonky walls that we want removed and at the end we asked him when we could expect the quote.  In a momentary lapse to my City alter ego, I was fully expecting him to say something along the lines of COB Friday (Close of Business for those of you not subjected to BS corporate speak day in day out) but instead he simply responded, “before the match”. Fair enough. Given the score, it's just as well we didn't wait until afterwards as we might have borne the brunt of some of that red shirted frustration.

Come on Wales!

And finally to dispatches. What better way to herald the start of spring than to feast upon a lamb grown in ones’ own fields. What a charming idea, we thought. Let’s ask the farmer next door to bring us one, we thought, fully expecting our request to be met with the delivery of a neatly, vacuum packed lamb in all the requisite cuts, ready to cook. Little did we expect said beast to arrive at our front door on the back of a quad bike, bleating away to its heart’s content and still very much alive. Fortunately my husband has the wherewithal to quickly resolve such situations and before you could say, “are lambs allowed to ride on those things?”, it was fleeced, gutted and hanging up in our larder fridge. Meat doesn’t come fresher than that, as Greg Wallace might say.  And no sooner had we butchered little Larry, then it was time to say goodbye to dear old Peppa. Now you may have gathered from reading my blog that my husband has no compunction about knocking off the odd animal or two. But with Peppa I definitely detected for the first time a flicker of hesitation as he prepared for the big P-Day. He deliberated for ages about which rifle to use and then which ammunition to ensure it was all as quick and painless as possible. And then when the day finally arrived he kept putting it off and putting it off, sneaking up to the pen to feed her one last scoop of pig nuts and give her one last scratch behind the ears.  He also went to huge amounts of trouble preparing her bath, finding an enormous cast iron thing on eBay and then spent SEVEN HOURS filling it and heating the water to exactly the right temperature (which, incidentally, he has never done for me). It would all have been quite endearing if said bath was not to be used to scald dear Peppa to remove her hair once the deed was done. In the end, after one final scratch, she was happily munching away on a banana (her favourite) and knew nothing about it at all. All very peaceful and stress-free. Less so for my husband and his (sort of) willing helpers who were then tasked with defuzzing her and cleaning her up for the larder. I wandered in later on and poked my head into the fridge to see the end result and it was all a bit Lord of the Flies to be honest. The bacon butties will be worth it though.  Especially with a Burford Brown fried egg thrown in for good measure. And perhaps a win next time for Wales. I don’t ask for much…

The alternative January workout

At this time of year you can’t escape the bombardment of diet and exercise information, even supposedly living away from it all in the hills of North Wales. Everywhere you turn you are faced with pictures of trim, bronzed beauties promising us abs like theirs and 12lb weight loss in 3 days by signing up to their fool proof programme. Except you would have to be a fool to believe all that in the first place. Right? If you really do want to lose some of the lard and get a bit fitter and stronger, may I suggest the alternative, wannabe smallholder slash mother-of-two workout. It doesn’t guarantee you any particular results other than keeping various dependents alive, warm and vaguely entertained. Any benefits are solely derived as a bonus bi-product of stuff you needed to do anyway and by sheer virtue of the fact that you don’t have time to get your mitts anywhere near the biscuit tin. Exercises are typically performed according to necessity and can be repeated as often as you are physically able!

Exercise one: The bin pull

Works:  arms, legs, nose

Putting the bin out used to be a two minute job. Tie up the bin bag, dump it in the wheelie bin and move it to the front gate. Nowadays it involves lugging two super-sized wheelie bins (super-sized ones only arrived after much begging and pleading and submission of an actual business case to the county council stating that we needed large bins to accommodate 2 x baby bi-products) to the end of our drive, negotiating large pot holes and expansive puddles along the way. When you are not trying to keep the bins from capsizing down the ditch at the side of the drive, you are dashing back and forth trying to capture the really stinking items that invariably blow out of the top as you battle the gale force head winds. A good warm up if ever there was one.

Heave!

Exercise two: The jerry can yoke

Works: legs, arms, shoulders

You would be mightily surprised at how much one average-sized pig can drink. In the middle of winter. In the wet weather. We have to fill up two 25 litre jerry cans with water at the workshop and lug them back up the hill to Peppa’s field every day. They weigh an absolute ton and every time I do it I feel like Geoff Capes in the World’s Strongest man, with 25kg gripped in each hand and my legs trembling beneath me as I stagger one slow step at a time through the ankle deep mud. Not sure about strengthening the arms but I'm pretty sure that it has made mine longer.

Bring on the gorilla arms...

Exercise three: The bleep test

Works: cardio, legs, reserves of patience

Every morning we set out for the animals/veg patch/swings and every morning it takes me on average ten attempts to actually make any headway. I believe that the Swedish call it ‘Fartlek’ (snigger) which means ‘speed play’ and is a recognised technique for interspersing regular paced running or walking with sprints. I seem to remember doing something similar at school where we had to run increasingly fast in time with the bleeps. Now I find myself dashing back and forth up and down the hill to retrieve the three year old who insists on wandering off in the exact opposite direction to where we want to go, before charging back to keep the pram moving and stop the baby from whingeing. Now the bleeps are less about keeping the right pace and more about masking all of the cursing going on under my breath as I dig deep for the patience and fortitude to keep me calm and smiling. At times like this I can identify with Captain Scott on his expedition to the Antarctic, where he had to leave his food parcels and retrace his steps over and over just to ensure he had enough reserves to get him to the pole and back. Oh yeah, except…

Exercise four: The mud shuffle

Works: Thighs, thighs, thighs!

As the place increasingly starts to resemble the Somme, so getting about is becoming increasingly precarious. I have lost count of the number of times that I have now gone arse over tit and ended up skidding down the hill on my derriere (hence my waterproof trousers are now essential wear every time I leave the house). In a vain attempt to remain upright we have adopted a slightly bizarre shuffling gait where you barely lift your feet out of the mud and instead focus on retaining as much traction as possible to mitigate the risk of slips. Looks hilarious and is a killer workout for the thighs.

Exercise five: The swing push

Works: Triceps, biceps, schmiceps

“Higher mummy, push me higher” is a very popular refrain ringing out from our place at the moment. Having just mastered the ‘big girl swing’ our eldest is now obsessed with swinging as high as she can. And it seems that her boredom threshold is a lot higher than mine, not to mention the strength in my upper arms. We can literally spend an hour on the swing, me bargaining with her on the number of ‘big ones’ mummy has to push before she can rest her poor aching arms. Can be combined with a squat action for the perfect all-over body conditioning workout.

Exercise six: The log lift

Works: arms, shoulders, back

If you burn wood at the rate at which I burn wood you spend a lot of time traipsing backwards and forwards to the log store to fill the increasingly dilapidated log baskets with the fruits of our chain sawing labours from the summer. With the temperature finally down to somewhere near freezing and seasonal norms we’ve had both wood stoves raging away all day and night which requires some logs, let me tell you. I can see my husband getting increasingly twitchy as what we once thought were our vast and plentiful stocks are dwindling rapidly and it’s only January. I think he just wants an excuse to don his rather fetching chainsaw trousers and boots and go play with his mega powerful new toy. 

Work it!

Exercise seven: The rod thrust

Works: legs, shoulders, a filthy mind

This is not half as exciting as it sounds. You basically have to squat down, feed telescopic rods up a clay pipe and then shove them backwards and forwards as fast as you can to release any built up silt or leaves. It is invariably accompanied by my husband shouting at me for not using the right technique and if I’m really lucky I get a face full of crap as it comes shooting out of the end of the pipe. Ah, who needs a clean, air-conditioned gym when you could be working out in the great outdoors?!

Giving the drains a good rodding

So there you go. I can’t guarantee you any particular results other than feeling like you need a very long sit down every evening and a good night’s sleep (if you were ever to get the opportunity with two small kids in residence).  The beauty of it is that it is completely free and you don’t need any special equipment other than what you have anyway. I would however strongly advise that you wear something wind and waterproof to avoid getting soaked to the skin and freezing your bits off in the process. Of course you could just go for a nice, long walk instead...

PS. If you fancy a little workout for your mouse finger and haven't done so already, voting is still open for the UK Blog Awards 2016. All you have to do is click here and it takes less than a minute to complete. As I'm unlikely to win any real fitness competitions any time soon a blog award might be quite nice. 

New year, new normal

It was exactly a year ago today that we arrived here and embarked upon our crazy new adventure. I can hardly believe that we have been here for 12 months and have seen the full cycle of seasons (sometimes all in the same day). Through all the giggles and tears we’ve learned a lot about how to grow a few veggies, raise your own animals for meat and more than we would ever care to know about drains and ditches. There has been a fair amount of swearing, a lot of laughter and more mud than I thought physically possible. But more than that I feel like we have evolved as a family in ways that we haven’t even realised so that things we once took for granted now feel hard won and equally, things that once used to blight our daily lives are now not given a second thought. So here, in no particular order, are my top ten new norms that now seem to characterise our daily life.

1.       Parking

This used to be the bane of our lives, coming home every night and wondering whether some cheeky-arse commuter had nabbed the spot outside our house and disappeared off to London for a week, leaving us to park miles away from the house and struggle to the front door laden with baby, laptops and the weekly shop. Once a source of constant stress, we can now park wherever the hell we like and never, ever have to worry about it. Wonderful. Although I do sometimes miss the pleasure of blocking in some flash motor with our beaten up Landrover, then waiting for some po-faced grey suit to come knocking on the door, only to face the wrath of a 6'3'' hairy Scot and a brusque lesson in parking etiquette before finally being allowed to drive away. Never got bored of that bit.

2.       Food

Once upon a time I used to get a bit hungry of a morning, wander along to Pret a Manger, purchase a lovely cup of coffee and a croissant and eat it. Just like that. Now I can easily go three hours after waking before I finally get anything to eat such is the long list of mouths that need feeding before my own. Forget Maslow, this is the all new  Smallholders Hierarchy of Feeds – see figure 1.1 below (can you tell I am going back to work next week and needed to brush up on my PowerPoint skills?!)  There is a strict order of feeding that starts outside and finally works its way back to me. Once we do all sit down for a meal there is then is another hierarchy for who gets the scraps. I can honestly say that hardly anything gets wasted here at all. Forget the kilos of waste that each family is supposed to generate each year. I think we are single-handedly working to turn this statistic around.

Figure 1.1 Smallholders Hierarchy of Feeds - Order of feeding

Figure 1.2 Smallholders Hierarchy of Feeds - Prioritisation of leftovers

3.       The hot water lottery

We never, ever used to give hot water a second thought. Turn on tap, out pours lovely, steamy hot water, take a long shower, and take another one, and another one after that if you like. It never ran out. Now we are at the mercy of the elements and the wood stoves. If you somehow manage the perfect alignment of the appropriate hours of sunshine on the solar panels and/or the right type of wood on the fire (Ash I’m told is the hot one) for exactly the right length of time before you plan to perform your ablutions, then you might, just might, get a tepid shower. For one person. Woe betide us if we have any house guests or need to bathe the children more than once after unfortunate mud accidents (occurs almost daily). Our one saving grace is the electric ‘power’ (in the loosest sense of the word) shower which guarantees hot water, but at a dribble and costs more than our whole electricity bill for the rest of the month. Hence we are only allowed to use it at Christmas and on our birthdays.

4.       Phones

I wonder where he is. I’ll just give him a shout. Errr no. Actually that won’t work because he could be bloody anywhere. Now we use our mobile phones like walkie talkies to converse with each other. It saves charging about the place pointlessly wasting ones voice with two kids in tow. And it also means we don’t have to see/smell each other (see point about hot water above). We also both seem to have unwittingly adopted the characteristic Welsh sign off on all our phone calls, ending every conversation with a high-pitched “tarr-aarr”. If we carry on like this we may soon be mistaken for locals.

5.       Opening hours

If you had told me a year ago that I would not be able to buy anything in the local town between the hours of 12-1pm, on a Wednesday afternoon or at the weekend I would have laughed loudly in your face and told you not to be ridiculous. This is 2015 after all. But somehow, now this feels like the most normal thing in the world. Of course you wouldn’t want to go and buy a bag of pig nuts at lunch time. How very uncivilised. And unspeakably disorganised to find you have run out of food at the weekend. It’s taken us a few wasted trips into town and a few hungry and grumpy critters earlier in the year to learn our lesson but we’re now firmly in the groove with the Welsh rhythm of retail. Then again, if you need a pint of milk and a paper at 5am you will have absolutely no problem at all…

6.       Money

Just as I was leaving London the whole touchless payment revolution was in full swing. I thought moving to the backwaters of Wales we would be back to bartering eggs and potatoes for half a shilling and thr’pence. How wrong I was. Forget touchless. Here we have telepathic payment. You don’t even need to get your card out or even have it on your person. I actually have no idea where my purse is these days because down at the Farmers Mart (source of anything and everything you could ever possibly need) we just put everything on our account. They now know our faces so we don’t even have to tell them our names or address. Easy as. The only snag is when you get the stinger of a monthly bill. The “time of the month” has come to have a whole new meaning here as we each start to dissect the bill and start squabbling over who bought what and why.  Turns out the stuff isn’t actually free after all.

7.       Community

We used to live in a small commuter village in Hampshire so thought we knew a lot about rural communities and how they work. Moving here has been quite a shock to the system as we are just now starting to realise what a tight knit and deep rooted community we have moved into. There are farming families that go back generations and people who have lived and worked here all their lives. Everyone knows everyone and although we cannot actually see another house from where we live, our new neighbours are already becoming good friends. At least I hope they are. We received some delicious beetroot chutney and a couple of enormous swedes as an offering over Christmas which we are taking as a token sign of inclusion. It sometimes feels a bit like playing snakes and ladders: you have a great conversation with some folk in the pub or with the lovely ladies at the Farmers Mart and you feel like you have climbed the rungs of the acceptance ladder. Then you get spotted with your Landrover stuck in the mud or one of your pigs keels over and you come sliding all the way back down the slippery snake of credibility. I think this may take us some time…

8.       Outside

Back in the day going outside was a finite, structured activity to walk the dog on our predefined route or to take a trip over the road to the swings. It took roughly an hour, possibly more if the weather was nice and we met someone we knew for a natter. Nowadays we spend most of our time outside, regardless of the weather or the day of the week. So much so in fact that the baby will only sleep in the pram outside during the day. Most days I set out with some task in mind (planting seeds, pulling weeds, digging up stones for our new herb garden) and most days we don’t even start said activity and end up playing in the streams or building dens in the hedgerows. The only downside to all of this gallant element-braving is finding and donning the appropriate clothing. This can take anywhere up to an hour by the time you have located the right fleeces/socks/scarves/hats/gloves/coats/wellies and then wrestled with both children to get them on whilst simultaneously trying to find the rain cover for the pram and then negotiate with a three year old to wait while you pull on your own perpetually soggy waterproofs. By the time you have done all that you feel ready for a long sit down and a cup of tea. Only you know that it could be hours away by the time you have mucked about outside for a while and then finally managed to persuade child back into the house and then started the whole disrobing process all over again.  Cue a bit of gratuitous Excel to get the corporate juices flowing again.... I think I need all the practice I can get!

Figure 1.3 Reckon I am back in work mode yet?!

9.       Mud

Mud and shit (in every sense of the word) have become an omnipresent feature of our lives. We are either digging in it, clearing it out, or washing it off something or someone. Our back porch has become like a quarantine holding area where you have to remove every item of outdoor clothing before being allowed into the relatively clean area of the kitchen and the rest of the house. My children, although they apparently disregard a lot of everything else that utters forth from my mouth, would never, ever dare to wear their wellies past the sacred threshold. Ditto the dog (although he obviously doesn’t wear wellies. Yet).  They have worked out that the fear of me bellowing “WELLIES!!!” and the potential consequences are not worth the risk.

10.   Rains and drains

I couldn’t let a summary of the year go by without mention of the drains. A year ago, I barely knew what one was and have probably walked over thousands on the pavements of London without ever giving them a second thought. Now I have an acute mental map of every single pipe under the place and can almost calculate from lying in bed the number of centimetres of rain per hour that is falling on our already saturated land. A recent statistic revealed that over ONE METRE of rain had fallen during the month of December at the weather station just down the road. That is the most rainfall that has ever been recorded ever, anywhere. With news like that we are just thanking our lucky stars that the house and workshop have remained dry. Ok so the fields may resemble paddy fields and the streams are thundering like waterfalls but we've not resorted to the sandbags just yet. And on the up side it is a fantastic new training ground for the crazy Mud Run that I have entered in April (I was signed up in a moment of weakness – and I thought I might as well embrace my new mud-filled existence. Wish me luck!).

So there you have it. A year on.  A year older. A little wiser maybe but still a long way to go. I do still sometimes feel like I'm living someone else's life and I'll wake up to find that I've just nodded off on the 06:12 to Waterloo and it's all been some crazy dream. It’s back to work for me next week, my maternity leave/early retirement now having come sadly to an end (although it might mean I get to spend a little more time sitting down and drinking cups of tea whilst they are still vaguely warm). I will endeavour to keep posting my blog as and when I can but suspect that they may be a little less frequent than they have been this year. If you have enjoyed reading (*shameless plug alert*) I have entered the UK Blog Awards 2016 and voting is open from now until the 25^th January. If you would like to vote for me, all you have to do is click here, enter your name and email address and the category you think I deserve to win and voila you are done.  It only takes a couple of minutes and I will be eternally grateful.  Ok plug over. Happy New Year everyone. Here’s to a happy and healthy 2016!