We, Who Have Compromised?

I wanted to attend a screening of We The Uncivilised - A Life Story, before it was released as a download, but never quite got the opportunity.
We live in social economy black spot. No one believes us until they look at the map of just about any membership organisation and go 'oh there's a big hole, right there'. From beekeepers to WWOOF hosts, goat societies to smallholder co-ops,  calculate the biggest gap between willing participants, and we'll be smack bang in the centre.
Anyway tonight we downloaded and watched the film.
Motivating myself with this as the payoff, I closed out April's budget with a will of iron. Then started May's. I am, in one sense, happy to report that all our corporate and entreprenuerial diligance is making a difference. We will soon be closing the gap.

On another level, how hopelessly sold out and useless do I feel?

If you haven't seen the film (- do -) it's made by a  young couple desperately seeking place, community, sustainability, responsibility ... and they talk to many of our friends and heroes : Sarah Pugh, friend, hero, innovator, people lover, trainer, teacher, inspiration. Mike Feingold, the Royate Hill pixie, such a genius of a man, and so kind. Neil's guiding light, Simon Fairlie ... and above all, they talked to Patrick. Not long before he died, they captured his closing remarks, his legacy, his extraordinary funeral, his wife, Cathy's, poems, I will not lie, there were tears in our sitting room, and they weren't all mine.

On an unbelievably cold day, in February 2002, Patrick came to see our land. He walked it with us, talked to us about it, drew up some plans, and gave us some advice. Thereafter he never failed to support us, love us, have faith in us, and help us. He often gave us things because, he said, 'he believed in what we were doing'.

Tonight, I wailed, 'But we're not now, are we? We've let him down.'

'Not yet, we haven't' Neil replied grimly. I think that's  the man version of my response.

Patrick Whitefield 1949 - 2015

A True Good Lifer

One of our new year resolutions * was to join the garden club.  More broadly, to get out and enjoy our community, but specifically, to join the garden club.
Tonight was the first regular meeting of the year, and we duly togged up and set off out to the village hall.

Our village hall. No really. I know.

The village hall holds very mixed emotions for me ** but mainly this evening I was feeling a little apprehensive. Although we've judged at the last two annual shows, I wasn't quite sure what to expect of a meeting - howbeit one featuring a talk by a popular local speaker on a non gardening topic.
When we arrived well in advance of the 7.30 kick off, Jill was with the speaker,  by the door trying to operate a key safe. She'd forgotten the key - dozens of people have keys to that hall! - and was trying to liberate the 'spare' from the most complicated key safe I have ever met.
"It's always been Tony's waist measurement plus 5 and 6" she said, bemusedly outing her husband as a 38" round the middle and heaven knows where the 5 and 6 come from. "But I expect one of the committee has changed it and not told me."
Eric, the chairman was due to arrive around about when he felt like it and might or might not have a key or Tony's alternative waist measurement with him, but we volunteered to go back to Jills house in the next village along, ringing the unfortuantely unwaisted Tony (A) enroute - he being home with a chest infection - and asking hm to liberate from the bowl the village hall key.
As expected, when we got back, Eric had arrived, the door had been opened, and everyone was inside.
It was a strange thing, being newcomers and yet not. Neil in fact was a founder member 16 years ago. We were the newcomers with people who by and large we'd known for close on two decades. Seeing in the parish newsletter that the garden club was 16 years old was one of the things that prompted us to rejoin.
I was discussing this with Eric while we waited to pay our dues (£5 each for the year. Find me better value)
"And most of us are still here" he beamed "Well except poor old Tony L who died a few years back now"
"True " I replied "But his polytunnel is still going strong - in our garden! His widow sought us out and gave us that and his wine making kit!"
"Ah yes," Eric mused "Tony L was a true Good Lifer. Really self sufficient."

The talk was excellent - about the Outer Hebrides since you ask and very informative too - and it was good to be out. We had a long chat with John Parsons, a beloved shepherd of an older vintage, who also produces exquisite primitive tapestries of local scenes.

We came home to a glass of wine by the fire and it struck me, that Tony L's epitaph, courtesy of Eric would do for me:

A True Good Lifer.

Not too much carving, eh?


* I will say, those of you who know me know I don't usually make new years resolutions in January, but after Easter brings Resurrection and a new beginning. This year, however, it felt right to do so.

** I spent ten years opening and running first a  Brownie Unit, then a Guide one, and sometimes both in that hall. The jumped up little madam I was foolish enough to put forward for District Commisioner, pushed me out as fast as she could, as if I were 85 and over the hill. I was ill for two years over it. Sisterhood? Yeh, right.

Advent Eve

Today was a total whirlwind, in all senses of the word.
It was the day of our local town's Christmas Light Switch On. We are happy because what has for a few years been the 'Winter Festival' has been reclaimed and is now the 'Christmas Festival' - complete with camels and donkeys and nativity and carols. I don't expect anyone of any other faith or none feels any the less welcome. But it's our own heritage at play, and it all looks lovely.
Or as lovely as you can look in a gale force wind with horizontal rain.
Our church had two main events - I was involved in the second and less glamourous, whereby a  lot of people sang carols and my friend Jo and I organised the giving out of an awful lot of hot chocolate and cake to passers by.
We did this last year and are now getting it down to a fine art. We gave out nearly 100 cups of hot choc (Lidl's instant hot choc and an awful lot of compliments we got for it too) with marshmallow - and handed out gazillions of small, delicious squares of cake - mars bar cake, malteser cake, Emma's legendary brownies, jam tarts, coconut cake ... if there's one thing our lot do really well, it's make cake.)

Earlier in the day though, the church was transformed as the little people of the town were invited to come and have their picture taken with a princess or a super hero!  In they all came, free to take as many pictures as they liked - and although one daughter was working so unable to attend, I do have a 'Tangled' Rapunzel in there!

These guys did the most amazing job. They bought their costumes, decorated (and cleared up) the hall, looked absolutely amazing, (I do think Rachel actually *is* Snow White) and made the day of dozens and dozens of little ones.

They are just the best.

Cinderella, Wolverine, Snow White, Hulk, Elsa,Thor, Anna, Batman, Rapunzel, Captain America and lovely Belle.

Who was I again?

Muddly sort of day sorting out some ebay listings and trying to catch up on housework.

I really do need to stop faffing on a Monday and get on with work.

At the weekend our CIC Certificate arrived, which was exciting and intimidating, and I have a grant application teetering on the brink. I have envisioned this project, I am convinced it is where I am being led in life, and yet I seem to stall constantly.

I don't know how many others suffer - I know one or two! - but I am terribly changeable and almost have multiple personalities! Not in a scary way, but enough to keep shooting each other in the foot so that I don't make much by way of progress.

I think I'm finally getting a handle on it - and managing to stay focused on being one person, with one mission in life.It's still two steps forward and one back though. I wonder do many people suffer from this changeable heart?

I think it's a complex mix of fear of success (and of course failure) and procrastination! I'd love to help anyone else who has this problem - if and when I eventually nail it so do contact me if you do.

After a long day I sat down with my knitting, a cup of chai tea in the lovely cup/pot combo my daughter bought me for Christmas, and the penultimate episode of Wartime Farm. Bliss.

As long as I don't suddenly decide I must make myself a flour sack dress ;) That's how it works, this diversion disorder!

Well, here's the dead hedge, bumbling along, turning itself quietly into a wildlife habitat.

It is hard to think about leaving here, but we do think about how we really must try to bust a gut to buy some place.

We're applying for shared ownership properties in town - we'd keep our rented land, and keep our life, but start with the Big Girl Knickers and buy the roof over our head - and although this time around it seems unlikely, it's giving us a feel for what we need to do.

I've been looking at budget planners, and following Frugal Queen's new webinar series. The problem for us seems to be the complicated nature of our outgoings. There are a hundred columns on my spreadsheet. So I'm going to address that somehow, because we need to pay down debt and get ourselves into our own home some how.

Meanwhile I've been selling at the local Country Market. If you're not familiar with Country Markets please look up your local one and take a look. Really wonderful locally grown, baked and crafted goods are on sale at fabulous prices, plus friendly faces and (I can only speak for Pewsey) fabulous coffee.

We take along wonderful small culinary herb plants for a pound a pot, as well as some bigger and more exciting herbs, some baked goods including our signature Homity Pies, and I plan to start to take along some crafted items too.

Diploma work has ground to a halt. I just don't seem to have the hours in the day.  However it is half term, and it's a great joy that H is out working with her dad - who is now back into the family business of painting and decorating - as well as studying hard for her exams.

Boo is also studying, learning clarinet and gearing up for the new sheepdog trial season.

Well, that was a bit of a random round up.  Focus on the finances coming up!

A new year?

Right before Christmas, we received a letter from the Crown Estate, or at least their agents, giving notice of the end of our Farm Business Tenancy on the land - a notice to quit. Or not. There is a paragraph which says, it may be up for renegotiation (trans: a rent hike) - it isn't clear to us whether that paragraph is standard or bespoke - in other words, we don't know if they want us off, or just want to take more money off us.
We had a beautiful, quiet Christmas, with much joy and laughter, prayer and gratitude.
Yesterday, we took the dogs and walked up on the high downs, went to visit our rams, and generally wondered ...
We can't know anything more until the proposed meeting on 5th January.
Should we fight for it? We've had it nearly seven years. We have a year's notice. When we look at it, although once it held a lot of promise - I ran the box scheme from there for two years - it is now pretty unkempt and provides some sheep grazing, and a LOT of hay. The hard truth is, we haven't done what we intended to do with it.
A harder still truth is that we have knowingly or not, offended, upset, and generally peed off a lot of people in the last decade, living here or hereabouts.
The psycho nutcase who got Neil chucked out of his last farm job down in the village, and threatened to rip his head off if he showed it around the farm again (because I did not run Brownies the way his wife liked!) is only the part of it. We started life at the school, Neil was a governor. We left the school and homeschooled our children for six years. That went over not so well.
We started life in the village CofE church, again, Neil was a church warden. Then we realised things were wrong, moved churches, found God, and received the greatest gift of all. It did not come with local approval.
The people over the road don't like us. Because our cockerel crows.
The family Neil used to work for who, when he was friends with the psycho nutcase, he was hoodwinked (by the p-n) into leaving without notice - they're not over fond of us.
The guy in the village who made an official complaint because I told his Brownie daughter to 'shut up' (in jest, we say 'shut up' all the time in our house! apparently, she had never, ever been told to 'shut up' in her entire life (which was actually self evident) and it destroyed her self esteem totally) whereas, I had no redress for the fact that she blasphemed almost continually, and I was pretty offended by that.

Is this really the place for us to try (yet again) to launch a community project?! Is this not maybe time to move on?

I have just begun with my Diploma in Applied Permaculture Design - and as part of the process, the Learning Pathway, I am going to have to figure out where I am going. Where we are going. Are we staying here? Or moving onto new horizons? What do you reckon?

What I learned at Ragmans - Part One

The title has a ring of 'What I Did in My Summer Holidays' - one of those first day back at school essays which my mother swore were just a not very subtle way of checking out your family circumstances, and spying on your parents. My sister once spent an entire summer doing the most exciting, stimulating things she could think of with her youngest daughter, to give her some real fuel for the fire, and come open evening, opened her book to find she had written 'we went down the pub and I played on the swings'. You can lead a horse to water, and all that.

This was no holiday. What I learned on site was one thing, and what I have learned, having sat back and thought about it over not quite a week, is another.

Ragmans Lane Farm is in Gloucestershire - I referred to it as the part of Gloucestershire that should be in Wales and nearly got shot for such a political statement - what I meant by 'should' was not in any sense meant to trigger a border conflict. I didn't mean politically. I meant logically - in other words, it's the far side of the Severn Estuary, where almost everything is Wales, but the Forest of Dean isn't. It's England. Which is OK. Breathe!

The Permaculture Design Certificate course I was attending was tutored by Patrick Whitefield with the assistance of Sarah Pugh. If you're asking, 'what is permaculture?' - well, that's a huge question, and you can find some answers here but the real answer is to go on an Introduction course, and find out for yourself, what permaculture is to you - because it's not a dogma. It's easy to condemn it out of hand as 'not for you' because it can appear to belong to a 'tribe' - a converstion I had with Ciara Cullen all too briefly as we were leaving Ragmans - but it doesn't. The more diverse the people who become engaged with permaculture, the more possible things become. If you think permaculture is not consistent with christianity, you and I will have to agree to differ. Unless perhaps by reading this you can see where I'm coming from?

So rather than the actual course material, I'm thinking about what I learned about myself, I suppose, and what I'm thinking now.

Firstly, living in community. This has been something of an obsession of mine since I spent the briefest time with Marthe Kiley Worthington probably 30 years ago on Mull. Although the experience of actually living in community at Ragmans was halved by the fact that in the end, Patrick asked me to take the caravan as extra accommodation for the first three weeks and my own for the last two, it was still a taste of what it is like to share all your meals, your bathroom, and all the living spaces.

I think, as I have said earlier, that the time has passed for me to do this - my community now, is my family, and living in it is at least as complex as an intentional community. I thought about how, when we are sharing our space with non-family, we consider at great length how we will get along together, how we will make decisions, how we will respect each other's differences, how we will capture a vision, come to concensus, solve disagreements, put plans into action (framework shamelessly nicked from the above-mentioned Sarah Pugh's communications session. Thanks, Sarah!) and yet, in our family home, we fail dismally to think these things through. We simply expect that because we are tied by blood, all will be well. Big food for thought.

I also learned, finally, how to make sourdough bread by the really wet method, with a long lived starter shared by Ciara and skills shared by the lovely Olivia Heal - which in turn I shared with my daughters, of an evening, upon my return. Again, we share skills consciously, and with care, among strangers, but as our children grow older, if we are not careful, we just expect them to absorb what we do, and we lose the pleasure of sharing, as much as they lose the joy of learning, traditionally, from mothers and fathers, the sustaining skills we value so highly.



We visited Royate Hill Community Orchard as well as St Werberghs, Eastside Roots and Easton Community Allotment on a day field trip to Bristol, and it got me to thinking - the city can be a vibrant and wonderful place. Towns can be good. We still live quite an isolated life, in the countryside, which, on balance we prefer. We have considered of late, moving into the small market town where we go to church - because of the ages of the chidlren, and because, you know, sometimes, a change is a challenge, and a challenge wakes you up and gets you going all over again. We've thought about it all quite long and hard, and it seems maybe we won't do that (always worry when I commit such things to black and white ...) but the experience of the hidden green spaces and brilliant community feel of Bristol, made me view the idea quite positively, rather than with fear and dread, as previously.

Well, this has lumbered on long enough, and has earned the extension 'Part One' to its title. I hope there will be a part two - I certainly feel like I learned a lot!

Thursday

first week nearly over, and tomorrow, I get to go home for a couple of days.

I'm now concentrating on taking so much in, I find everything else is on auto!

The course appears laid back, seems low key, feels comfortable, and then you look back and you have vertigo, realising how much you have learned, and how much you are changing your view point. I keep sending Neil texts like 'stop, don't dig that ditch, we need a pond'

We've been surveying a site on a sloping, undulating field. It's deceptive, you stand at one point and decide you're looking at a level piece of land, and then you walk to the top, turn round and feel like you 've walked a long way uphill. Looking up, the incline looks gentle, looking back down, it looks intense. It's a perfect allegory for learning about permaculture - the process is gentle, but the view from the top is awesome.

Ciara Cullen who is on the course with us, gave a yoga session this evening, which I found fascinating - and also extremely good for my back! We've also been looking into the ethics, sustainability and practice of using horses on the land, as well as covering energy in building, water on farm and domestic scale, and of course the continuation of the site survey.

I'm still not getting pictures transferred, in fact, I'm not remembering to take any, unless I am in the same group as Camilla, who's from Norway, and remembers to photograph everything!

The experience, on a trial level at least, of living in community continues to be challenging. I think for me, now, the time has gone for total community living, as my family is really the unit I'm happy with, but some kind of opening up during WWOOFing season might be something we would like to do. Of course, it depends on everyone in the family.

For once this update has been typed in relative peace in the bunkhouse, with current wireless connection, so I can click send, and it will be with you. Good night.

So I'm into my second half century

and beginning to take stock, here.

There is so much I would like to change, and yet I am so inextricably tied to others, that it is no longer simple.

I have a sense of needing to get beyond. I feel limited by what everyone imagines me to be, imagines my family to be, imagines community to be, imagines christianity to be. By and large, it is all a complex fallacy.

I long to be able to get beyond it all. And yet in some sense, I know that to do that, I have to breathe, stay calm, and concentrate on the minute detail.

We went out for lunch, and I got some lovely presents, including a book about year round growing in the polytunnel, which is absolutely brilliant. Oh and Nella Lasts 50s from Ali, which is pure treasure.

Beautiul flowers, and lots of fuss from the girls. A typically foul November day, in which we got to battle the wind and icy rain.

This evening, Neil had to go back out to work, and I have curled by the fire, reading my polytunnel book, browsing around websites, reading up on communities, and trying to decide if I can find a middle way - a way to be family, and therefore separate, but also open, and therefore community.

I worry that my daughters don't get to travel, and travel broadened my mind so much, and is so vital ... but am thinking with restarting our WWOOF programme, maybe we can bring the world to them?

Ah, the ramblings of an old woman by her fire of an evening.