Shy But Not Retiring

It’s pointless to pretend that I’m not envious of the many 60+ folks in my feed, and indeed my life,  who played by the rules, and now have a paid off house, and the liberty and security to let rip and be who they truly are. Of course I am. It’s also pointless to dwell on this, since we are, in my least favourite of modern cliches, where we are.

I’m put in a position where I shall have to continue to work for a while, and although Neil works very hard (and is a tad younger, I might add) the fact remains that we will both have to press on for a bit.

I’m sure I’m not the only one,  so it may be of some use to run through the adaptations we’re looking at to get us through the next few years.

Retraining

Until recently, I worked as a business manager in a residential care home, and that fell apart just after I’d donated my heart and soul to keeping the place going during a pandemic. Gratitude was not their long suit. 

I ran the veg box scheme for a couple of years, but without grant funding, it was not going to earn me any money, and the writing was on the wall for the physical commitment needed.

I had to pivot, and come up with an alternative which would work longer term.

I love to write, and do earn a very small amount now and again from wordsmithing, with one particularly gorgeous client.

I am also working as a Virtual Assistant. I have a couple of really good clients, and could do with a few more! Do think of me if you need help!

Meanwhile, I am also retraining - I’m studying bookkeeping, which I think might be a sound back up in years to come.(I already offer basic bookkeeping, for which no qualification is required. This is the more advanced version.) Much as I love to potter in my garden in almost all weathers, the time must come when I can take shelter in the little old van, and work productively while the storm passes!

I don’t believe it’s ever too late to retrain, but it’s also possibly not too early - have you thought about what you’ll need to do to future proof your income, should you need to?

Redesigning

The land tenancy is up for renewal, and despite our advancing years, we can’t imagine life without it. We moved to this house on the understanding that we hoped we would move onward and upward at some point, but if we didn’t, then we’d be content to stay here. It couldn’t be a place that we just needed to escape from day one. That acceptance was based on knowing we had the land to turn to, and for the first two years I spent most of my working life out there.

We plan on renewing the tenancy, but we know we will have to reframe how we work, and redesign how we use the land. What was a market garden, providing ten veg boxes a week, plus restaurant sales, has to go back to being a family garden - and a small family at that!

I’m a great lover of allotments, and in many ways, wish I could just throw up my hands and go and get one, instead of dealing with the complexities and demands of livestock and grassland as well as the growing patch - but once again, we need to make the best use of what we have got. Sometimes it’s as much trouble to have too much of something as it is to have too little!  What we need is an acre or two, but that’s just not available.

I’m learning to sow a little of this, and a little of that, and trying for the umpteenth time to follow the Dig for Victory leaflets, issued 80 odd years ago in the war, which taught you how to ‘grow food for winter, as well as summer’ and supposedly did not require too much of a time commitment. I’m still recuperating, so not out on the land yet, it will be a rush to get things done when I can go out there. 

Do you find that you’re longing to sow seeds and it’s too early, then February and March have passed in a whirlwind, (or in this case, a rainfall) and suddenly it’s too late?

Reviewing

The budget has long been a part of our life, but if I’m honest, we’ve been too flexible with it. We’re both optimists (Neil more so than I) and have been of the ‘there’s always tomorrow’ frame of mind.

Well, time marches on, and it turns out there is not always tomorrow - and the future needs funding. We really have to re-budget, and this time, we have to stick to it until it hurts.

I’ve started a review of all our spending, and like so many of us, I’m afraid there’s not a lot of slack.  As Dave Ramsey often says, if the hole is big, you need a big shovel, and our shovel (income) is just not big enough. 

Neil’s business is on a cusp - I won’t bore you with the details, but further expansion either has to be quite big and quite rapid, or not happen at all. So I need to up my game somewhat, and either facilitate that fast and furious growth, or get more paying work myself.

We also need to check our spending back to zero on non essentials.

If you are also one of those who did not do all the right things, and find yourself now beyond, let’s say, 50, and with no real financial roadmap - what do you plan to do about it? I’d love to hear. 

Reflections

I've decided for the time being not to publish this over on Substack - I don't know why, it feels quite personal and vulnerable! So this little on is just on here for now.

This is the sixth week since my surgery, so the last one where I need to be careful about being outdoors in the pulling mud and lifting anything. It's flown by to be honest, and hopefully the weather will pick up, and I'll have chance to get on the garden.

Is it Me? Are We There Yet?

This post first appeared on my substack, and I'm copying it over as a gentle intro - I think I'm going to start posting both here and there, and see what finds a home, where!

Under the Weather

For the last month or so, I’ve been missing in action for various reasons, and my overwhelming feeling has been one of constraint, imprisonment, even.

In the middle of February, I became uncharacteristically convinced that the removal of my gallbladder was really the best thing to do, and despite my terror of anaesthetic, I went ahead and presented myself for day surgery. All went well, but the ongoing convalescence has undoubtedly contributed to the cabin fever.

Our house and its position - of which more later - has been another factor, and the utterly relentless rain a third. We Brits are known for our weather obsession and in particular an unhealthy preoccupation with precipitation, but really, this has been exceptional.

The final straw on this particular camel’s back has been  the need for both of us to work as much and as feverishly as possible, for scary financial reasons.

Unable to drive for a couple of weeks, and pretty much holed up on the sofa, I had originally convinced myself I would use the time to write, only to discover that my brain is one that absorbs general anaesthetic enthusiastically, and holds onto it for as long as possible - leaving me unable to string a sentence together for the entire period of my immobility.

The notes urged me to go for a walk - just five minutes at first, then a bit further the next day, and further the next. Well here was a thing. Without driving, and perched on the edge of the world’s least inspiring housing estate, my only option was to trudge down its faceless pavements, looking listlessly at the people hutches, and longing even more to just escape. How do people do that? I’ve spent more than a quarter of a century trying to escape the rat race, and here I am walking round the flaming vermin velodrome!

My eclectic reading, viewing, and social media consumption does seem to coalesce at least a little around alternative lives: the opters-out, those who have gone counter culture, in order to find the simple, slow life I also crave. The ones that got away.

Restless in my centrally heated box, amid a square of square of boxes, I wondered:  Who are they?  How have they done it? Have I missed a turning somewhere?

The On-the-Roaders

The first group I suppose I would loosely characterise as nomadic. Van dwellers, boat dwellers, travellers. Many of these folk are, to begin with, very young and in each case, I have to accept that a lifestyle which appealed to me at 24 is not the one that will work at 64.

The side benefit of being so young is that this subgroup has Somewhere To Leave The Stuff. 

My parents sadly passed away when I was 25, but until then, like many of us, I took full advantage of their loft, their garage, and my old room. I was pretty nomadic myself but never had to worry about storing core stuff. 

Should the call of the road reassert itself, of course the storage clause is no excuse. There are lock-ups.  But the bigger thing is that those younger folks who are happily globe-trotting have a home to go back to when things get tough, a hopeful future which will probably not involve living in a van, and a lifetime ahead of them to do all the things.

With one or two notable exceptions, older ‘van-lifers’ do often seem to me to be putting the bravest face they’ve got on fear and loneliness, and fair play to them for doing that, but I don’t view it as much of an escape.

An example of a (slightly) older happy nomadic (and I lay no claim to having any background knowledge, so there may well be a hidden layer of security I know nothing about) would be the gorgeous boat dwelling  Michaela Cordes. 

I note that crafts such as spinning paired with great creativity often unite the nomads.

The Off-the-Gridders

Among my obsessively viewed YouTube playlists the Tiny House Movement snuggles happily in the midst. Unfortunately, Tiny Housing in this country is a bit of a non-starter . 

I just love to watch because of the designs, the simplicity of the lives, and the cosy contentment, but building something of  that size and complexity and then finding land to site it on would probably cost more than an actual house, if it was possible.

For this reason my favourite Tiny Houser of the moment is Carol of The Dragon’s Nest in Canada, because she at least does seem to face some of the challenges the UK offers to anyone trying to grasp simplicity from a fresh angle. Also, she has goats.

Other off-gridders more successful in this country are Eco Villagers such as Lammas (a project we’ve followed from its inception, and nearly applied for, a quarter of a century or so ago. Nearly. Sigh) and the more recent One Planet Developments in Wales, of which my absolute favourite has to be Dave and Irene at Gardd Darna.  I am so often tempted to write off this option with ‘we are just too old’ - and then I look at Dave and wonder if I am just spelling ‘scared’ wrongly!

Again, in honesty, we’d struggle to raise the funds to take part in any such project without pretty much killing ourselves in the process - and then be faced with dragging our burnt out bodies off to a field somewhere to try to figure out how to build a house.

The Just-Stay-Putters

The last group, at least for now, are those who have found the peace to embrace their small, confining spaces, to love and appreciate the flat or very small house that is where they turn out to be, and made a great blessing out of it.  Chief among those is perhaps the lovely Amy whose trials and tribulations around their home have been epic, yet still her love for the limitations of that space shines beacon-like through all her content.

I also confess to enviously soaking up Benita Larsson’s ruthlessly minimalist Stockholm apartment, her riverside power walks, and urban wanders. But - a market town in Wiltshire just isn’t Scandi / Brutalist/ Minimalism however you dress it up (or rather, undress it, I suppose) is it?

These people have perhaps accepted that they will not be waking up to songbirds and fast flowing streams, in the middle of their own land, nor to a new and exciting vista each day, and decided, much like my great hero Rhonda Hetzel, that true peace is to love the home you are in.

Oh. Wait. It’s Me.

On reflection, it’s so easy to see each of these gangs as having grasped the nettle, and gained it all, but each of them has its own challenges and downsides. 

I think Neil would give nomadic life a go, but I just can’t. Without land to grow things in, and roots to home, I would break. One of the reasons we are stuck in the loop we are in is because we can’t seem to part with our rented land, and to be without so much as a garden I think would finish me off. 

The off grid options are not totally out of the question, but the raising of the finances to make it possible would be hard.  Had we done that, many years ago, and taken the leap, I think we would be up for it. If we had made different choices, and now sat on property owned outright, which we could sell in order to make a run for it, perhaps we would. (I often smile over Ben Fogle’s ‘New Lives in the Wild’ subjects who have ‘sacrificed’ or ‘given up everything’ to make that change - but of course they had the assets to trade, if you would rather look at it that way!)

The final group, I suppose, if I choose to make it, includes us. So for the hundredth (and please let it be the last) time I have navel gazed my way around to the obvious. We have a roof, and a safe place to be, a place to put the stuff, and, excitingly, land to play with, grow food on, soak up Vitamin D, and escape the estate. 

This all goes to show what a battle it is for me to remain ‘Present’ as I have vowed to be this year! And raises the question - how do we know when we have arrived, when we have spent a lifetime trying to escape? How much of the unsettling discontent, the constraint, the imprisonment, is just the state of mind we’re stuck at? 

Maybe, I am the one that got away?

Post Covid

 Ten days ago, just as I came towards the end of ten weeks training,  I felt ill at afternoon break, tested positive for Covid, and pretty much checked out for the next five days.

As I surfaced, feeling slightly better, Neil came down with it. I'm back at work, blessedly having a very light schedule the end of last week, but feeling utterly shattered. Neil is getting better, but the heatwave isn't helping anyone.

Over the years we've handled hay making in a number of ways. Last year, we got no hay - the contractor we normally use left us til later and later in the year, and finally left it too late. We bought in hay but weren't keen on doing that again Financially it's not probably any great gain making our own hay - we don't own a tractor any more, so pay someone to do all of it.  However, our hay is our hay, and it's better than everyone else's !

That is to say, that we don't spray or treat it, it's a very diverse sward, and it's a rather special site. 

This year, we've changed contractor and gone very early for us.  The bales were made yesterday and Neil and I went to sit up there and eat fish and chips - a long time ago, with two little girls, we would do that after we'd physically carted 300+ bales by hand, in a little home made flat bed trailer, towed by our 4x4. This year was very different, but nevertheless it was lovely to sit by a bale at sunset. They will be brought in today.

I'm now ridiculously tired and sitting sleepily with a fan on watching the Wimbledon men's final.

Current plans involve trying to safe enough of the veg plot to give us some food over winter and then plan well ahead for next year, and working over our tiny home garden to make it a lovely place to enjoy during these hot days and evenings.

Also, since finishing training, my work hours are down to 25 so I need to reschedule my regular week to get more home and garden work done.

What Goes Around

 A circle has been navigated, and I find myself very much in a similar place to where I was when I jumped off this roundabout some years ago, so I thought I would quietly jump back onto it.

I am 62 years old, and about to begin a new work from home job, because of the cost of living situation here in the UK, after a self employed hiatus of eighteen months.

I live in a tiny, mid terrace house with my husband of a quarter of a century, and one of our two daughters, who plans to marry and leave us in October.

We rent ten acres, two miles away, and we keep sheep, goats, hens, ducks and a retired pony, and grow vegetables.

Until recently the vegetable growing was a commercial enterprise, but it was failing to provide me with an income, so it is now back to being a self sufficiency project.

My dream is to own a house (as tiny as this one is fine) on a small plot of land ( a couple of acres would be nice, but half an acre would do) which we can call our own smallholding to retire to, after so many years of tenancies and travelling between plots.

I also dream of living a slower, simpler life where we provide almost everything for ourselves, and don't trade so much of our time for the money to cover our costs. If you look back, you'll find my dreams haven't changed much over the years! We've been closer, and further, further and closer from them like a tide. 

I do my best to live the simple life, while acknowledging that in order to get there, there are still things we have to do, which we'd rather not.

I will slowly update the links, and try to keep up to date with posting.

Lambing Nights

Given we only had ten ewes to lamb this year, lambing has gone on forever. We had an outlier at the beginning and we've got one at the end, so the four hourly checks go on. And on, and on, and on.

Yesterday was Mothering Sunday, and I was very glad that as a result H was cooking - feeling a bit fraught and over-tired, it was nice to be pampered a bit. I sat and read, with my new slippers on,  with my flowers and my brownies, and it was lovely. 

We still aren't back at church - services are taking place but we're in two minds about whether it's really in the spirit of the rules to drive as far as we do, to attend a service we can watch online. As a result, the simple breaking of bread we have shared as a family since lockdown began once again followed dinner.

A small glass of wine, and a torn crust of home made bread.

Then to bed for me at 9.30. I'm not sleeping well, waking up far too regularly, as well as when Neil comes back from the 10 o'clock check, and when he goes out at 2 am, I seem to have a love hate relationship with the hour of  3. I look at the clock and it's 3.05.  I go back to sleep, I'm sure I do, for ages. I look at the clock, it's 3:16. I think about John 3:16, go back to sleep. Some hours later it is 3.28. And on we go.

Up at 5, I stumble downstairs and make coffee - one each for H and me in travel mugs, and a small cup to take back up to get dressed. The bread lives in bread bags I made years ago. One's red gingham, the other a flowery number, made from an old pillow case. The bread today is Three Malts and Sunflower, I bought the flower from Shipton Mill with the last big order. It's dark, seedy, and malty. It smells delicious in the toaster, where I leave it as I head up to get dressed.

A small pile of clothes waits on my chair in the office - there are clothes all over the house, as people try to get dressed and undressed at stupid hours of the day and night without waking anyone else up - and I layer tights, jeans, t shirts and sweaters. H is buttering the toast and slathering home made marmalade on it. I made twelve jars, half of them in nice, bought in jars as potential gifts. Some hope. I made it in January and we're half way through it now.

We're in the truck by 5.30, and off up to the top of the world to visit the ewes, housed in Charlie's barn, where they came to escape from our flooded pasture a couple of months ago.

The remaining ewe, in the pen with old Frankie, the grandma of them all, looks at us and blinks. Nothing doing.

It's getting dramatically lighter each morning at this hour, and a quick glance round tells us we've still got all the lambs we should have, and everyone's happy. We sit in the pale morning light, drinking our coffee, and watch two young stags amble placidly across the track, barely 50 metres from us. They gaze back at us, and saunter off. These days we're a bit late to catch the barn owl returning to her box.

Both of us have work to do. We drive back up the track. I hop out to re-lock the gate. A grey partridge creaks in the grass beside it. The lights of the industrial estate on the edge of town, down in the valley, lose their brilliance as the sky turns pink. 

Monday.