Pancakes, perfume and pizza

Sometimes it takes the visit of a friend and her young family to help us take stock and really appreciate the lifestyle we have created for ourselves. Rather than charging around trying to fit in as many jobs as possible whilst constantly risk assessing the situation as my kids get bored and start entertaining themselves with axes, chainsaws and the like, we have spent the past week showing our friends what our place and the surrounding area has to offer: a much-needed break from the sometimes seemingly monotonous daily routines.

For example, whereas it takes around an hour of cajoling, shouting and, invariably, some kind of bribery to get my kids to put on a pair of wellies and dawdle (whilst moaning very loudly) up the short hill to feed the pigs and the hens, with two other little girls on the scene they are literally falling over themselves to get there first and then squabble over who gets to put the pig nuts in the bucket. Ditto the dog who has been largely ignored for the past two years and all of a sudden there is never a moment when he has either a lead or a small child hanging round his neck.

It also gave me a well needed kick up the arse to get away from my computer and checking my phone for ‘critically important’ emails every three minutes and actually start focusing on being a good (or at least better) mum. So one day this week I surpassed myself by making pancakes for breakfast without once losing my cool or muttering anything about the sake of foxes under my breath as my kitchen disappeared under clouds of flour and puddles of milk. Almost. And I actually managed not to destroy a frying pan or any other piece of kitchen equipment. Get Me. 

The Great Welsh summer - 3 jumpers and a coat...

Of course I had forgotten that a breakfast consisting of largely white carbs dowsed in alarming amounts of maple syrup and topped with sugar is a recipe for total disaster. Especially when your Supermum ideals have led you to book tickets on a charming little steam train down the side of the lake. All was going well until said steam train broke down. “First time this has ever happened in 150 years”, said the overly cheerful guard. “We’ll be getting going in no time”, he said. “Wrong coal”, he chuckled as he continued to poke his smiley face in through the window of our carriage. Meanwhile, the temperature inside the carriage is by now approaching 30c and we are togged up in three jumpers, coats and scarves to guard against the -5c wind-chill on the lakeside only hours early (God love the Welsh summer weather and its four seasons in one day). To boot, our kids, confined to the carriage of a narrow-gauge train carriage of what can only be described as toy-like proportions got increasingly more hyper – launching themselves off the seats, trying to poke their fishing nets through the roof before finally launching an all-out war offensive with their various soft toys before one (of course, the most favourite) sailed merrily out of the open window and onto the tracks opposite, just like the dog in There’s Something About Mary. Fortunately, Mr Smiley Guard was on hand to save the day, just before the train shuddered back into action.

Toy train - not so much fun in 30c heat...

Undeterred from our steam adventure/trauma we spent the afternoon in a soft glow of floaty skirts and pretty flowers, selecting the nicest smelling petals from the garden from which to make perfume. In my new Zen Mom state I tried with all my might to ignore the trails of destruction being wreaked upon my garden and focus instead on the bucolic sight of creativity and engagement happening in front of me. And lo, not an hour later each little girl, beaming with pride and excitement, produced a vial of slightly brown liquid smelling a bit earthy and putrid, but from which they were not to be parted for the rest of the holidays (even insisting on taking it on the plane home).

Roses - before the mashing started...

To round off our day of full-on Enid Blyton parenting I handmade (YES HAND MADE, if a bread maker doesn’t count) wholemeal pizza dough and then had each child design their own face pizza topping using homegrown vegetables (and ok then, a fair few shop bought ingredients but who’s counting?). Wow, my creativity really knew no bounds by this point. Having dispatched the kids back to their stations in front of the TV (well, come on, you wouldn’t want this to be too nauseatingly wholesome would you?!) I then set about cooking their masterpieces. Only I slightly cocked it all up, somehow setting fire to the grease-proof paper and then wrecking their beautifully arranged pizza faces so the end results was less Mr Happy and more a charred Edvard Munch. Oh well, the kids seemed not to notice, and wolfed down the lot, before quickly falling fast asleep. No wait, that was the parents... And the summer holidays have not even begun! Heaven help us…

Pizza masterpiece - pre-conflagration

A day in the life

Sometimes the contrasts in my double life of country bumpkin slash corporate whore seem just a little bit surreal. Check out this one day this week for example….

5am. Up and out with the dog for quick blast up the hill, desperately pleading with him to try and squeeze one out as a matter of urgency, what with, you know, my somewhat pressing schedule an’ all. Throw some food to the pigs, taking care not to get mud all over my face as I perform the precarious task of filling the water trough up whilst balancing over a 12-volt electric fence. (I’ve got it wrong and had the mother of all kicks off this fence before – it’s not the kind of wake up call you need at 5am believe me).

Mind the fence!

6am. Hurriedly change into clothes newly purchased on the internet this week. Try not to think about how much I have spent and how I still don’t look at all ready to be seen in public. Fail to notice tags hanging down my back until much later in the day. Apply makeup very badly and sneak out of the house trying not to wake everyone and face the sorrowful questions from my girls asking me where I am going with a suitcase and an inordinately strong waft of perfume at this ungodly hour in the morning (well you have to mask the eau de piggy somehow…).

9am. Make the ferry to Ireland just in time. Make (what I hope to be) convincing small talk with truckies whilst standing in the queue for coffee about the state of the roads in Ireland and what a f*!king joke it is the time it takes the port staff at Holyhead to load and unload the artics (truckie speak for articulated lorries I later find out). To be honest I had completely no concept of time standing as I was with my eyes firmly glued to my phone desperately genning up on the latest thought leadership in digital management (see below).

2pm. Mad dash across Dublin for emergency hair cut at Toni and Guy in Dublin’s trendy Dundrum district. Attempt to sound down with kids as I point at various styles in the ‘look book’ describing them as 'rad', ‘sick’ etc. In reality, the only sick I am feeling is from the dreadful coffee from the massively inappropriately named Stena Superfast Ten ferry. Despite all the pumping music and strobe lighting (were hair salons always this intense?) hipster Steve takes nearly TWO HOURS to cut and dry my hair! WTF! I know the Irish are laid back but really?

Can you make me look like this so I really make
an impression with the senior leadership team?

4pm. Hour late for meeting with crackshot video crew flown in from Chicago especially for our event. Shake hands with the ex-news producer from Fox news and make terrible joke about Anchorman movie and immediately regret it. Spend an hour wandering around state-of-the-art all-glass  office in the so-called Silicon Docks during the only hour the fecking sun shines in Dublin all week and nearly pass out in the heat. Hope to God someone has opened the polytunnel so my tomatoes don't do the same. Nod intelligently as they run through a litany of complete gobbledygook terminology – B roll, booms, steadycams, sizzle reels (sounds well dodge) - and hope to Christ it doesn’t rain on my hair before it’s my turn in front of the camera (postscript: it does rain on my hair. A lot. I look like Diana Ross in the final shoot).

Lights, camera, action!

6pm. Check into 5-star Intercontinental hotel.  Phone home to check in and make sure the new hens are not being bullied by the old hens and have enough to eat. Remind husband the mega-strength slug pellets are on the beans and cucumbers so keep the dog and kids away. Don’t forget to water the tomatoes. Check the birds are not in the peas. Close the polytunnel. Check the geese. The list goes on.

 

8pm. Dinner with the Editor-in-Chief of one of the world’s leading business publications. Dig deep to try and regurgitate all the erudite political commentary and digital management thought leadership I have been trying to inwardly digest from my phone during taxi zig zags across Dublin. Judging from his polite nodding and wry smile I have badly muddled my concepts so he steers the conversation to his daughter’s driving test before we land on common ground discussing smoking various types of meat in a Green Egg (turns out he has the same model as us). Who’d have thought that I’d have been discussing our little self-sufficiency project with one of the world’s leading business journalists. Surreal.

The future for all smoked meat, apparently

11pm. Collapse into bed and watch re-reruns of Gardeners World on the 75’’ screen TV, scribbling down a list of all the jobs I need to do in the polytunnel when I am back on the hotel’s watermarked creamy-white notepaper, whilst adding the finishing touches to the CEO’s keynote speech on my laptop at the same time. Open the balcony doors of my suite to hear Phil Collins belting out ‘Another Day In Paradise’ at the Aviva Stadium next door and fall asleep hoping to enter a slightly less incongruous life in my dreams.

That screen is as wide as my polytunnel (I checked)

Postscript: You will be pleased to hear that the event passed off without incident and the CEO did not end up discussing the black fly on his broad beans nor did I do a Naomi Campbell and go arse over tit whilst being filmed walking around the office in my new, incredibly uncomfortable stilettos (note to self: never wear brand new 4 inch heels for a two-day summit which involves walking approximately 10 miles over five floors each day – my feet may never recover and my wellies have never felt so good). I also managed to survive without my daily dose of fresh, home-grown veg, swapping my greens for the black stuff, because as we all know, Guinness Is Good For You. I applied the same principle as fruit and veg guidelines, opting for 5-a-day, you know, just to be on the safe side. Slainte!

Strong and stable

What all vegetables need at this crucial point in their growing cycle is strong and stable support. Beans, peas, cucumbers, tomatoes, whatever your genus, you cannot truly thrive and make it on your own in this world without some kind of solid structure to show you where to grow and keep you on track. Or so say all the guidebooks and social media feeds. What is actually happening in reality is that everything is clamouring over each other to be the most dominant vegetable on the patch. Either that or they are failing to show up at all.

Strong investment in steel

The peas are looking spectacular. Even if I do say so myself. After years of watching them end up in a knotted and mice-munched heap after my hopelessly inadequate pea sticks have collapsed under their weight, this year we have invested heavily in the supporting infrastructure, buying galvanized steel mesh for them to grow up. Get me. The tommies and cucumbers are also looking pretty good, building up a head of steam in the polytunnel to launch themselves up their carefully constructed cane supports. And as for the asparagus – it’s just up there, proud and erect with absolutely no help from the audience. But just as my horticultural hubris was reaching its peak, I’ve had a few timely reminders that I am, in fact, no Percy Thrower.

Upstanding members

Take the climbing beans for instance. Usually the most fool proof of any vegetable that literally anyone can grow. They even wrote a children’s fairy tale about them for gods’ sake, they are that prolific and easy to produce. So I got cocky. I got clever. I thought I’d get ahead of the game, set myself up for the long growing season ahead. Planted a load of them in April and watched as my gamble failed spectacularly in early May with a completely un-forecasted hard frost of -4c. Who would have anticipated such a turn in the weather after getting sunburned the previous week? Anyway, brushed myself down, restored my confidence somewhat and then gambled on my beans again, this time planting them on black plastic and constructing elaborate structures from garden canes for what I fully thought would be the inevitable climbing bean landslide. Ha. Once again, how wrong I was. Turns out black plastic + lots of rain basically provides an 8-lane super-highway for slugs and snails who have munched every single last bean. Should I just roll over and resign myself to my bean-free future, leaving one vegetable patch empty and marooned next to all the others? Or do I have the grit and stamina to stick it out for another term……? Time will tell…

All the supports, not a bean in sight

Other plants are now starting to catch up from behind. My strawberries, wrenched from their former outside bed where they were running out of control, have been re-homed and reordered in the polytunnel and, after a few shaky months, are now starting to re-establish themselves, even producing some tasty red fruit. And the beetroot is proving to be an early leader this season. We’ve been munching tons of the stuff - raw, steamed, roasted and boiled. But I fear it’s turning us red from the outside in. My hands are now permanently stained red a la Lady Macbeth and I’ve just about overcome the horror of thinking there’s been some catastrophic hemorrhaging or prolapsing disaster every time I visit the loo. As for the kids’ nappies – well that’s a whole other story. We’ve had to put the nursery on alert to avoid any panicked phone calls half way through the day. I console myself with the thought that all this beta-carotene must be for the greater good. I hope.

Strawberries - back from the brink (maybe)

Getting back to our roots

So it would seem that roaming around the hills of Snowdonia can give you a warped perception of what you are actually capable of achieving.  When I am up there in the mountains I have all these great ideals of how my vegetable patch will look, with lovely neat rows of prolific, healthy crops and not a weed in sight. The reality of course is a barely controlled chaos, unpredictable conditions leading to some young crops steaming ahead and others just plain letting you down. It would seem that no matter how much planning and preparation you do, there’s always something to take you by surprise. And all that time spent trotting around admiring the views could have been better spent trying to get a handle on the weeds who seem hell bent on opposing my grand plans. I’m even considering joining the dark side, putting aside all my wholesome and organic principles, to start using chemical weed killers and slug pellets just to get ahead. Maybe it won’t come to that and I can start to love and nurture my chaos just the way it is, random assortments of weeds and all. 

I AM INVINCIBLE!!!
(until I get off this hill, the endorphins wear off and reality kicks back in)

Curiouser and curiouser

Regular readers among you will be well aware that Google and YouTube have played no small part in our great voyage of discovery into this rural living lark. This week however, I think we have even managed to bamboozle Google with questions that seem to get more random by the day. Here is just a small selection of this week’s highlights…

SEARCH: How do you stop geese from jumping on your trampoline?

[Honestly, it is like the bloody John Lewis advert out there every morning, with our three new feathered friends leaping around on the kids’ trampoline, when they could have the run of 20 acres of lush green fields and a beautiful infinity pond (complete with landscaped garden and relaxation space). Why, just why? Another shit shoveling duty to now add to my ever growing list….]

Our dismal attempt at a goose deterrent

SEARCH: How do you remove a wheel from a tedder?

[In a bid to raise some funds to finance our ever more elaborate projects we have started to auction off random bits of equipment which have been lying about the place since we moved in. One such item was the tedder – a piece of equipment used to get the cut grass into a line ready for baling (so I am told – and no, Google was none the wiser either.) After three days of scouring videos on the internet to find out how to remove the wheel underneath to fix it, my Dad rocked up and got it off in less than a minute. Perhaps proving the adage that digital is no match for good old fashioned hands-on experience.]

WTF is that?! 

SEARCH: Where can I find a matching pew from Salem chapel in Porthmadog?

[We have managed to lay our hands on some rather lovely old church pews from a Welsh chapel down the road. They will look bonzer in the new kitchen. Except they don’t quite fit. And you try getting your hands on a matching-opposite-corner-type one from this specific style used in North Wales circa 1870. Gold dust I tell you!]

Any ideas where we can find the rest of this?

SEARCH: Is there a Rightmove for bees?

[Nearly 7 years after receiving it as a wedding present, we have finally set up our bee hive. Not having a clue what we are doing and not willing to fork out to buy any bees, we’re hedging our bets on a passing swarm just passing by and taking up residence in it. We've gone all Farrow and Ball shades, lots of fresh flowers and location, location, location. Fingers crossed it does the trick...]

Deceptively spacious, characterful beehive, no chain

SEARCH: Can chicks smell?

[Every morning after I’ve been out for a blast of fresh air with the dog I go and say hello to the chicks who come peep-peeping towards me and then recoil in horror as they get close to me in my sweaty running kit. Either they have a super sense of smell or I pong a bit more than I think!]

SEARCH: What won’t a pig eat?

[0 of 0 results. We’ve all seen the Italian gangster movies. Nuff said. Let’s just say you don’t want to be slipping over and breaking anything while you’re in their pen.]

FEED ME! I'd have you! And anything else for that matter...

SEARCH: Do pigs have milk teeth?

[A bit disconcertingly, we keep finding teeth in the pig’s water trough. They are either subcontracting to the local Tafia (Welsh branch of the Mafia) – see above - or they are losing their own. Considering making a necklace, Crocodile Dundee style….]

So all in all a bit scary how reliant we have become on Google and how lost we feel when it turns out the internet is not always so up on random bits of old farm machinery and animal husbandry. This is the kind of information that is passed down generations by word-of-mouth and hands-on learning. And as good a reminder as any to sometimes put down your phone and the iPad, roll up your sleeves and work it out for yourself!

Quid pro quo

We are rapidly learning that bartering is the way the real rural economy works. Over the past few weeks we have managed to get our hands on all kinds of stuff as well as crack on with the big jobs around the place without having to spend a single penny. Check out these recent coups…

1.5 pigs = 2 haunches of venison + 1 hare

Some fellow smallholder friends had been helping a mate ‘sort’ his pigs out and they had one and a half pig carcasses left over. Having just butchered their own pigs they were already drowning in their own pork products so they gave the lot to us in exchange for some game from the freezer. We are now 100 sausages richer and have a bit more real estate in our freezers. Cher-ching.

Free pork - don't mind if I do...

1 discounted piece of farm machinery = 3 geese

Preparations for our new glamping site continue apace with the next step being to install running water in our top field. Apparently to lay the pipes you need a ‘mole plough’ (nothing to do with the little furry beasts apparently – just something that goes underground).  The hard-nosed farmer flogging this particular piece of equipment refused to budge on the price, but instead offered to throw three geese into the bargain, after our kids had spent an hour chasing them around the field while said deal was being negotiated. Enter stage left our new guard dogs (although so far they have done less guarding and more lounging about by the pond – starting to see why he might have wanted rid of them…)

Boo!

3 days hedge clearing = 5 Easter eggs + 20 bottles of beer

Nothing like inviting the family up for a ‘relaxing break’ over Easter and then, as soon as they walk in the door, handing them a pair of heavy duty gardening gloves, a pitchfork and a pair of firelighters and asking them to clear and burn great swathes of overgrown hedges and trees. All in exchange for copious amounts of chocolate and beer. Labour doesn’t come cheaper than that.

Nothing like a relaxing Easter break...

½ tonne rhubarb = 8 broad bean plants + 2 days free child care

The one and only thing growing in the veg patch at the moment is the rhubarb which is trifid-like in its prolificness this year. Unlike everything else which, after a late, sharp frost, has given up the ghost meaning we have to start sowing all over again. So I’ve been offloading great armfuls of it to my folks in exchange for bean seedlings (which they cleverly protected from the sub-zero temperatures) plus a hand with the kids so I can crack on and attempt to play catch up after Jack Frost has wreaked his trail of destruction.

Just add custard

1 foot across the threshold + a pulse = 3+ dozen eggs

We have finally reached 100% production with all 8 hens now laying religiously each morning, some even producing double yolkers (so by rights you could argue for a 120% return at the moment). Alas poor Boom Boom (our aged matriarch of the coop and the last hen we inherited when we bought the place) turned up her toes up this week, but then she hadn’t laid an egg for months and had been looking ‘peaky’ (hen speak for death’s door) for some time. The upshot is that we are now drowning in eggs and anyone who shows the faintest gesture of goodwill has multiple egg boxes thrust upon them before being allowed to leave the place.

364 days of hard labour = 1 day at a health spa

Not so much a barter so much as a negotiation to escape for 24 hours with my girlfriends for a day off the chores and the shit shovelling. After a wonderful day of pampering and relaxation, I did however try to offset the guilt of abandoning my dependents (not to mention the eye-wateringly expensive bill) by half-inching a few of the free apples from the health spa to bring back for the pigs. Given their enthusiastic oinking and chomping on the super posh fruit I think I may have been forgiven for my short absence…

So you see, regardless of what happens in the General Election and Brexit and our (apparently) shrinking economy, all you need is to master the art  of bartering and striking up a good deal and you will always come up smelling of roses. Or perhaps just a little bit of sausages. 

Spring/summer collection 2017

With the arrival of spring and the mercury heading back into double figures for the first time in months, my husband decided it was time to embark on the smallholders' equivalent of a new wardrobe or in our case, a new set of farm animals to furnish our freezer with in the coming months.. The first Friday of the month is pig market day around these parts. The monthly gathering of seasoned pig farmers and those gullible suckers who haven’t a clue but fancy themselves as the archetypal smallholder. You can almost see the former rubbing their hands in anticipation as they see the newbies rolling up in their unblemished stock trailers, freshly printed (and totally incomprehensible – to them) livestock papers in their hands. My husband had pretty much been counting down the days on his calendar to this momentous day and on the long-awaited morning assembled my father, somewhat seasoned auction-goer, and a good friend from the Bar (the law type, rather than the other, although fair to say they have spent a fair amount of time propping up the other type too) with, quite understandably, zero experience of pig shopping. So off they all went, only to come back a few hours later with three lovely looking pink piglets and much laughter and guffawing. Turns out in the heat of the moment, my husband had misunderstood the pricing system and ended up paying for each pig what he had intended to pay for all three. Doh. Rookie mistake. There is some farmer from down the road now sporting a rather expensive new pair of wellies and the very latest in farmer chic overalls this season thanks to us. We’ve named our new collection Prada, Chanel and Gucci, the most expensive piglets in Christendom. And as if that weren’t bad enough, in our recent mini heatwave my husband thought that his new pride and joys were getting a little sunburned so asked me to get out there with my ultra-expensive Vichy Factor 50, to stop their little pink ears from getting any pinker. Seriously?

Meet Prada, Chanel and Gucci...

Having settled our new gold-plated pigs into their new sty and checked them approximately every 20 minutes, the following morning brought yet more new additions to the family. After 21 days of massively irritating clicking every 9 seconds, our incubator appears to have done its job. We came downstairs on Saturday morning to find a small beak protruding from a shell and pecking its way out. It is little short of miraculous watching this tiny, bedraggled form wrestle its way out of its shell and into the world. The kids were captivated, (CBeebies did not get a look in all weekend, their noses pressed up tight against the incubator instead), but not quite as enraptured as the grown-ups who couldn’t quite believe this had actually worked (previous attempts having all ended as duds). And it turns out watching chicks hatch is a little bit like making popcorn. After the first kernel pops nothing seems to happen for ages and then all of a sudden it all kicks off and it’s like Armageddon in there. Same for our chicks. You turn your back for a few hours and come back and there’s loads more hatched, all clambering over each other like drunks at the finishing line of the Grand National. What has had us baffled though is the colour of the chicks in relation to the shell they emerged from. Where we had been expecting a nice little yellow ball of fluff from one of our Light Sussex hens, they were coming out black or stripy. Awkward! Something you’re not telling us you naughty hens?!

Hot chicks..... a grand total of 14 hatched into the world

As if all these new arrivals to the place weren’t enough, our daughters have taken to adopting the many tadpoles swimming in the ponds around the place to be their ‘pets’, catching as many as they can in jam jars and making ‘aquariums’ for them with an assortment of stones and leaves. The whole kitchen looks and sounds like a sodding menagerie. You can’t move for something hatching, tweeting or wiggling around. 

Does my tail look  big in this?

And finally my husband decided to treat himself to an egg this Easter, a Big Green Egg. For those of you less familiar with this season's fashions in big brand American barbecues, this thing looks like something from outer space, an alien pod or cocoon perhaps (why is it that that particular film seems to become all the more appealing to me the closer I get to forty!). And it is bloody huge. You could fit all of our aforementioned pets and ourselves in there and close the lid and live out the next nuclear winter no probs. And not content with just one supersize barbecue, he came home with TWO! After the whole pig debacle it was a bloody good job he got a significant discount on these – when I casually perused the prices on the internet I nearly fell off my chair. But despite my concerns that in buying this we may have jinxed summer 2017 forever, for once the weather gods have been smiling upon us and we have actually managed to use the thing for three consecutive nights – we’ve cooked (venison) burgers, steaks (of course, venison), even pizza (yup, you guessed it, venison pastrami) on it, although admittedly last night it was my husband out there on his tod, shivering into his tongs as the rain hissed off the grill. Turns out that just because you have the mother of all barbecues it doesn’t mean you live in the South of France. Enjoy the sun while it lasts folks - and Happy Easter!

This year's Easter egg

The whole truth

In these days of ‘alternative facts’ and ‘fake news’, I thought I’d set you all the challenge of wading through the below headlines from our past month to see if you can detect the truths from the lies. Answers are at the bottom – no peeking now!

1. Landrover For Sale – after many years of loyal service and an obsession bordering on a love affair, my husband has finally agreed that it is time for his beloved Landrover Defender to move on.

2. Leading Beauty Editor’s Hand Cream Found In Local Agricultural Farmers’ Merchants – I almost fell off my hay bale when I saw my heavy duty hand cream “for people who work with their hands” showcased in the Guardian Weekend magazine’s Beauty column by Sali Hughes.

3. Leeks A Triumph For St David’s Day – I’ve finally broken my allium duck and have produced some fine tasting leeks the size of your forearm to grace the table just in time for 1 March.

4.  Massive Snowfall Creates Sledging Mecca – finally we have had a good dump of snow off the back of Doris so the kids could get out there and exhaust themselves whizzing down our fields in their sledges.

5. Husband Becomes Master Baker – my husband has become obsessed with cultivating his yeast and perfecting the art of baking sourdough bread. This weekend he also cooked up an impressive 4 inch high chicken, ham and leek pie.

6.  North Wales Voted 4^th Best Place To Visit In The World – The Lonely Planet’s Best In Travel list named North Wales in the top four spots, and it was the only UK destination to be featured in the rankings.

7.  Rare Golden Eagle Spotted In Our Field – I thought my eyes were deceiving me when I happened across a Golden Eagle minding its own business as we froze, stock still, and watched it eating its prey for a good few minutes before it took off. 

8. Husband Sacks Off Bushcraft To Retrain As Brickie – having decided he’s had enough of the bushcraft mullarkey, my husband has signed himself up on a bricklaying course in a shock change of career direction.

9. Four Year Old Fells Tree – in a feat of strength and fabulously well organised preparation my daughter was delighted to take down her first tree on the land.

10. Both Children Sleep Till 8am – in a rare and fortuitous turn of fortune both my children slept until nearly 8am on a Sunday morning. We couldn’t believe our luck!

ANSWERS:

1. False – are you mad? My husband loves his Landrover more than me and would sell me before it any day of the week. I strongly suspect he may even be buried in it, lest it fall into someone else’s hands. Nup, never going to happen.

2. True – no word of a lie, the same stuff that your local farmers slap on their grime encrusted hands was there, in print, next to the royal bloody jelly moisturiser. Wonders never cease.

The wonder stuff

3. Total bollocks – yet again I have failed to produce anything remotely larger than a spring onion despite months of trying. I give up.

Dismal - (although did consider sticking some shop bought ones in the ground for this photo)

4.  Alas no – we have yet to have snow to speak of and certainly not enough for any decent sledging. In fact since my husband proclaimed cheerfully that this winter had been the driest for ages in his company newsletter, it has done nothing but piss down and blow a howling gale.

Meteorite strike in North Wales

5. Delighted to tell you that this is true, although I may not thank him in a few weeks’ time when none of my clothes fit me anymore.

Bread of Heaven

Pie man

6.  Perhaps unbelievably this is the gospel truth – ranked ahead of places like South Australia, French Polynesia and Malaysia, North Wales is apparently the place to be folks. Let’s just say I’d like the chance to compare and contrast…

7.  False – with the rate and volume that my kids tear around the land you would be lucky to spot your dog let alone some shy, secretive rare bird species. Of course it may well have been there, dancing the fandango, but I was so busy dealing with the latest meltdown about who had the dog’s lead first that I completely missed it.

8.  True! Well partially. This is all part of the master plan to actually be able to afford to undertake any of the (we now realise, astronomically expensive) renovation projects that we have planned, although the bushcraft business will still take first place. We just didn’t think the paying punters would take that kindly to sleeping in rudimentary, rustic shelters made of sticks when they could have a luxury barn expertly crafted from bricks (can anyone guess what I read the kids for their bedtime story tonight??!).

9. True - as part of our family bonding activities the other weekend we decided to fell the willow tree that was growing perilously close to our sacrosanct overhead broadband cable. And so my daughter was roped in (quite literally) to heaving the offending bough on a long rope so it fell in the right direction, rather than severing our lifeline to the outside world. Fear not, she was never in any danger and this photo was staged for the blog. Now who in the world would fudge a photo like that…?

Heave!

10. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Yeah right. 

So there you have it folks, the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Or is it…..?