An old friend

For no particular reason, I looked back a year, and two, and three and more, on this blog, to see what I was doing. I had forgotten how much I used to pour out and share, before I became afraid. Before I new I had enemies. Before ... I'm not sure. Before it all changed. I had clicked on a link in Reader and found myself reading my lovely friend Jo's blog and wondered why I'd missed it for so long.
Something has kind of gone astray.
So without further ado ... I worked, I seem always to work on this darn telephone. I had been up for a promotion, which I did not get. Which reminded me that this is not really My Job. I have better things to do and should be doing them.
Then we baked and cooked and cleaned because grandma and grandpa are coming tomorrow. We shopped and chored and cleaned and cooked.

After flood and frost and snow we had bitter, biting drying wind - it feels like only fire and pestilence is left, and to be honest we could do with a break.

We are ready to lamb and this year we are a daughter-led operation.

We made yoghurt but sadly we ate it all.

I am back. I hope. I missed you all.

Unfollow Saturday

Today, I unfollowed a blogger.

Not going to name any names but it inspired me to think this - if you have been following and reading someone forever, their views have changed, or yours have, and now they make you feel cross, or depressed or just fed up - do yourself a favour. They don't live in the same street as you, they don't know your mother, they won't drive through a big puddle next to you - they don't even know you.

This person started out being a chatty, happy person with mild mannered opinions and some good tips on this and that.

Of late, the opinions became more strident, and more self righteous. Readers were advised that simple pleasures were signs of laziness and stupidity.  Furthermore, those with a conscience, or an ethical stance were mocked and derided.

Enough is enough. I don't need to be ridiculed or insulted. 'if you don't like what you read,' such people will say 'then stop reading now'

So I thought, I will. If it's not nice and it makes you feel bad. Stop.

In Google Reader, select the blog you are fed up with. At the top, there is a dropdown called Feed Settings, you can just select unsubscribe, and that's it. They can rant to their heart's content. You won't be there.

Result.

Sunshine and Shadow

It's been a few days of bleak news and difficult situations. As a result, I allowed myself a rare day off the paying job, and committed to a day on the farm - and for once, the weather played ball, and it was just bliss.

First a trip down to Whiston's to see Linnie and Lacey. They are our 3 year old girls, best milkers and all round general loveys. They have yet to meet Billy the Boy so will be last in kid, but one of them may be the best choice for Julia when the time comes. We sell youngstock as part  of our goat enterprise, but a long time ago we got a start by being given two particularly gorgeous old things and then subsequently our first purebred, Scallywag (Linnie and Lacey's grandma).  We knew one day we would want to pay it forward, and one of our goats would move on to a new home free of charge, in kid and ready to go, to get someone else started. We also knew we'd 'just know' who that person was, and Julia is she. So either one of these, or possibly Lacey's mummy, Poppy - who is *in love* with Billy and is already *undoubtedly* in the family way - will be moving to Devon when paper work and transport is sorted.

Next, a bit of investigating. Our property developing ducks, Phil and Kirstie, have been widening their search area a little too much. They arranged a visit to our neighbour's house at the weekend, and they've been checking out the garden at the property over the road for a while. So it was a case of finding where they were getting out, and plugging the gap. Job done, they were allowed out of their temporary prison and are now happily snaffling slugs in the veg  beds.

Meanwhile the return of the sun meant the beagador was sunbathing on the stoop, welcoming back the rays.

I've loaded the seed trays for the propagator, and evicted the cat who was sleeping on it, and turned on the incubator in the hope that the bantams who are in with the cockerel continue to lay and we'll set some on the go. It feels like spring. It isn't of course, it's January and apparently about to snow, but like the dog on the stoop, you should never miss a chance to feel like it's spring. Even when it isn't.

Work tomorrow, is the price I pay - but it was worth it.

It's all about

to change?

Don't know.

I know we've been trying to achieve the homestead dream now for fifteen years, by roughly the same method, and we've hit a wall. We've done an amazing amount, lived the dream in so many ways ... but where does it go?

2013 could be the year for us to get real.

We both work part time, self employed, and now what we need is to get more control over our finances and have a real end in view - we may need to take a step or two back, in order to take a few steps forward.

We need a stake in our home, a way to save and manage our finances, and a plan to move on.

My design work in permaculture, as I study for my diploma, is also leading me down paths I really want to explore - transition, small space living, suburbia/village life - which may be a key part of our own transition.

I don't do change. I really struggle to even imagine clearing out the garage. But it may be time to move on.

Now to see if we can do what we have in mind ...

What would you do ...

I'm going to talk about a choice, or  a decision, or a fork in the road ... and I'm going to ask you what you would do.
I am so happy to hear what you would do, where ever you live - I have lots of American friends, but if you are one of them, please hear what I say about land and property in *this* country because our decisions have to be made in our conditions.

this way or that?

We have lived in this house for five and a half years. We have rented the land on a farm business tenancy for somewhat longer. In this country to get hold of an fbt is quite something, and not to be lightly discarded. If  I move ten miles or a hundred miles down the road, I am not likely to just pick up another. Access to land in this country is woeful - shameful even - we were once a nation of free peasants, and now only the richest can dream of having real access to any kind of land at all.

We have been unable to look at buying property for several reasons, most to do with our financial history. We are both self employed and still very  would find it difficult to raise a mortgage.  In the five and a half years we have rented *this house alone* (and we have actually been renting in this county for 15 years)  we have paid out in rent (with at times some government support) around about a quarter of the average UK house price. There is no way we could buy anything - and yet in rent, we have paid out one fourth of a house. It seems a bit mad.

HOW much?

There may be a possibility for us to buy into a house. We would - initially - own 50% of it, and pay rent on the other 50%. It is in a nice village, and it is really, a nice house. It's semi detached, and surrounded by people but it would be (at least half) ours. It is 15 minutes from where we have our land (which is currently, lets say 5 minutes, but still requires a car journey) and everything we do, farm wise, would have to be concentrated onto that land. We'd have to have two homes. Living home - for weekdays and winters, school work and laundry - and Farming home (we have a caravan on the field and could make better use of it) - for weekends and summer evenings for lambing and growing and letting the inner farmer run riot.

Not the house in question, I might add. 

My soul is torn in two. I'm afraid of giving up my dream. I'm not sure I *want* to live in a little house in a line of other little houses - and yet the possibility that it will lend us greater freedom and in the end, we might have some kind of equity in that house and be able to think about some other future move to land of our own (where I would truly love to live in a simple roundhouse on my own land, with my own animals and my own crops) - and the end to the paying out of truly *vast* quantities of cash for no gain at all ...

We mustn't delude ourselves. Land in this country is so expensive that even living in a half owned house for a decade, frugally and with great economy, even if property prices picked up, and we saved like little squirrels,  would not enable us *ever* to buy a house of our own with land. There is just the slim hope we might be able to buy just a plot of land somewhere.

The alternative is to trust in the Lord and the Greater Good, stay where we are, safe and well provided for, surrounded by our big garden, with my polytunnel and my veg garden beside it - the goats around the corner and the field a five minute drive or a 20 minute summer walk away. And calmly pay out perhaps the next quarter of the value of the average UK home over the next five and a half years. And still have nothing solid to show for it.

my much loved sunny kitchen window sill

So I'm carding jacob wool ready for spinning and I'm thinking and troubling - no one knows how long they will be here for. I am ten years younger now than my mother was when she died - and barely seven younger than my brother was when he went - so I'm very aware that scarring the present to provide for a future that may never be, is a bitter kind of foolishness. Equally to live long on the earth in penury of your own stupid making must also be sorrowful. I try and try to be still, and just know that He is God - but life is a decision. Not moving on is a decision as much as moving on would be.

I want to seize the day, be positive, take the dream by the scruff of its throat and march on laughing into the sunset - if it ever stops raining! - but ... I don't know which one is the big positive ... which of the days to seize!

It's a family decision, obviously, not down just to me - but out of interest - what would you do?

Days like these...

up early as I had unwisely perhaps booked to work early, from 8 - 11 to get hours in, and still have day left for farm and family.

Dragging unwell family from their beds and installing them in the plague ship sitting room, I was at my desk by 8. By 9.30 I had a problem. By ten I was with tech support and by then without internet at all on my work PC. 

Meanwhile gasping and coughing and croaking and suffering in the sitting room, my husband and daughters were just gearing themselves up to milk goats and feed horses.

I decided to do something useful and went out into the veg garden, where I dragged a three tine cultivator round the unoccupied beds, which have panned with the excessive rainfall, in the hope of opening them up and getting them to accept the next bout of excessive rainfall without just eroding away to nothing.

By this time I'm coughing and groaning as well.

The computer guy appears to be on holiday.

We had planned to go to the farm store to buy new wellies for H (late Christmas present) and think about her sixteenth birthday present, two days hence.

Everyone was too ill.

As we stoke up the wood burner and make hot tea, there is a phone call. Our sheep have escaped and are wandering around in Charlie's rape crop.

Our sheep, I might add, are currently on Wansdyke. Wait while I find you a picture.

This is the one. It's up high, and today is not a nice sunny day like that.  It's cold and wet and windy. And some jolly walkers have decided to kick a hole in the fence to let their dog through. Into my pregnant ewes, but that's neither here nor there. And they've got out and are wandering around about in failing light and four of us bundled up like Russian dolls and toting buckets of sugar beet nuts and hampered by hacking coughs and the inability to breathe and the fast encroaching darkness are trying to get them back in.

We get them back in, which is not far short of a miracle.

Then noticing that the grass has gone a lot quicker than we'd hoped, we tote back down to the village to fetch bales of hay.

By this time Boo has faded and I have to get her home and wrapped around a mug of hot tea. H, whose voice has now all but disappeared and is wheezing like an old cart horse goes back out with her dad, who has a fever and is not looking special - to cart the hay back up the Harepath out to the sheep. It is dark and icy rain is falling.

Finally I get everyone fed and warm and I am now the last one up, sitting in peace and quiet, by the woodburner, very slightly unable to breathe, but content.

Many, many times we consider what it would be like to just pack it in, just stop. Sell the livestock, give up the dream, forget the lot and opt for central heating, paid holiday and sick leave - but funnily enough, it's never on days like these. When the battle's won, and everyone's dosed up and tucked up in bed, and I'm by the fire with my eyes closing, wondering if I can just card a little wool before bed, or knit a row or two, or if I will just curl up for half an hour with my re-read - The Deliberate Agrarian by Herrick Kimball - or if in fact falling over is now, at 9.45, the only option - these are the days I know I wouldn't change a thing.

The turning of the year

Each year, I light candles in our lilac tree on the shortest day.

This year, as I lit them about 3.30pm, the hens were going to bed and the rain was beginning to fall, again.  The ground is waterlogged, the fields are lakes, the world is under water. We are on high ground, so we don't have to take to our upper rooms, or sandbag our doors, but our land ... lies useless and unapproachable.

We finally had to be out of our barn this week, and for the first time, poor Cormac is out 24/7 after a slight misunderstanding where it was absolutely a given that he would have a shelter - he has trees and is coping so far, but we need to fix that next week.

And our goats are also outdoors properly, fully, for the first time ever - or at least Linen and Lace are - and that's not going any too well either. They have a shed. They just haven't worked out how to use it.

We have fought bitter battles this year. I won't be sorry to see it end. But we're still standing. I said goodbye to my guide unit, kind of by accident.  We stood fast by the land and in God's grace, we won - and those who hoped to take it from us by maligning us failed to do so. They still attempt to take things off us - but by and large the things they have taken weren't worth having, and the things that matter they fail to win.

Powers and principalities.

2013 is going to be an amazing year for us. God willing, my beautiful, powerful, (soon to be) 16 year old daughter will go to agricultural college and begin to live her dream. My younger princess - who just had 2/3 of her uncut since baby days hair lopped off and looks amazing ! - will change schools and be out there in the big world. I will learn to work the paying job and leave room for the real work - of growing and nurturing, teaching, sharing and writing (no pressure then!) - and Neil will finally get a job which does not destroy us quite so much as this one.
As I type, the clock has ticked past midnight and it is Christmas Eve. We are about to celebrate the most amazing .... moment in history which changed everything.

I leave you with a friend of a friend, fresh from our carol service.