I've decided to try cross posting between my Substack and here. The links are currently to mine and others' Substacks - that's mostly because I quite forgot I was going to try this while I was writing the post.
I'd really like to find my way back to the friendship and conviviality of blogging, so lets see how it goes.
I'm afraid I'm jumping in where I am!
Rain
Joining in with Mel, who is to be found here, talking about the weather, which is of course a British obsession, so I do feel an ancestral pull to do that a lot. Even if it wasn’t compulsory, it would have to happen this week, because it will not stop raining.
After the amazing Harry and his team planted 5 or 6 thousand hedge plants and an awful lot of trees, with incredible efficiency in the face of these continuous downpours, the fencers were supposed to arrive. The temporary inconvenience created by the new hedges is that we have to keep everyone off them until they are fenced, so sheep and pony are on restricted patches, which are turning to mud soup before our very eyes.
The avuncular and knowledgeable project manager, Simon, who is overseeing this whole show, formerly an instant WhatsApp double blue tick guy, has disappeared without trace, and is not answering messages. The fencers are not appearing over the horizon. Nothing is happening. Except we are drowning in mud. By the end of last week, I was close to tears every day as I trudged round doing afternoon jobs. It is just too wet.
Lambing
We are also now only about two weeks out from our potential first lambs. The water levels are not helping there, either. We had hoped to have goats outside to free up some barn space to bring the three early lambers. There is no way any goats can go outside. Goats aren’t waterproof, and even if they were, they are certified hedge murderers and not known for their respect of electric (or indeed any) fences. I’m sad and upset that they are confined, especially the young ones, in far too small a space, and there’s nothing I can do about it. It keeps on raining.
As a result, the amount of space available to lamb these three young ewes is also inadequate. We can’t just leave them out because, you guessed it, it’s too wet. A new born lamb with a good mother will laugh in the face of a north wind, but a cold wet lamb is all too often a dead lamb.
The idea behind the trio of early lambers was that we thought we might give showing another go, and to that end, we needed some big, early season lambs. I explained that plan here. We’ve since changed our minds and put the flock up for sale, as I mentioned in my last post, but here we are with presumed pregnant sheep anyway, and deal with them we must.
The Garden and Time
Absolutely nothing, bar the sowing of a tray full of broad beans, has happened in my garden, because it is too wet to set foot in. I could be working in the greenhouse, but the weather is so vile, I’m finding myself jobs to do indoors, and boldly hiding my face from the Spring Time Slip that I know is about to happen.
There are two significant time slips in the year, spring and autumn. In the autumn version, I begin to think about preparing for Christmas in September, and tell myself, for at least the twenty fifth time in succession, that it’s ridiculously early, and it would be better to start in October. I fall for it every year, though I in fact know that October and November are only mythical months, which, while they appear on all the calendars, incur utility and council tax bills, and can give you a nasty cold, do not actually exist in terms of preparing for Christmas, so that the next time I look up and decide to write a to do list, it is December 8th.
This role is reprised in spring by their co-conspirators, March and April. Here I sit, eschewing the wild wet wind and telling myself it’s way too early to start work in the garden, when I know without any doubt that the next thing that happens is that week in May when it is definitely too late to do almost anything.
Domestica
I did manage to can a fair amount of tomatoes, very late last season, you may remember. I thought it very noble of me, since it appeared that my digestion was developing an intolerance of the little blighters. However, I can report that my preserved tomatoes do me no harm. I still cannot eat them from the supermarket without disastrous consequences. One has to wonder what is on them, or in them, I suppose.
I am making progress on reclaiming the spare room, which turned into a chaotic workshop and store room over Christmas. I do need to use the room for multiple purposes - spinning, sewing, ironing - but I also do quite like it to function as a potential spare room, though we don’t really have guests. Neil’s mum would like to come to stay, and I am using this as a lever to get him to decorate it for me. Being married to a professional painter and decorator is a trial. If I do it (not that I have the time, but if I did) it will fall short of expected standards. Understandably, it’s not top of his list to come home and start painting again. Someone’s going to have to do it, though.
The Course in Contentment
2. ‘Avoid Distraction’.
In order to learn contentment and to embrace this word :
Make it your goal to live a quiet life, minding your own business and working with your hands, just as we instructed you before.
1 Thessalonians 4:11
I have realised that my focus must be [almost] entirely on the being and the doing, and not going beyond. The Machine/The Devil would have me set aside my spinning wheel, pause in my writing, delay yet further my growing - in order to consider how I will sell or share or disseminate the resulting product.
That, I feel, is where the Machine/The Internet has brought us to. Consider only the audience, only the market, only the consumer. Consider them long enough, and it won’t matter, because you will have traded all your time, spent all your days, your whole life, and you will find it is too late, in any case, to spin, or write, or garden.
If we are not careful, we become ants in a data ant farm, and all our striving is just the fuel that keeps the mining going strong. Ssssh. There’s a secret. You need never produce a thing, as long as you keep striving for an audience.
My self set module this week is to farm for the sake of farming, and write for the sake of writing. Prayerful in both. Quiet as far as possible. To read, and sew, and spin, and grow, without a thought for any further result. If there is no expectation, then there will be joy in the being and the doing, and that may be learned contentment.
I leave you with an extended quote from The Screwtape Letters on the subject of Distraction. For those unfamiliar, C.S. Lewis dedicated this book to his friend, J.R.R. Tolkien, and it is a sparkling satire, in which a worldly wise old devil, Screwtape, instructs his young nephew, Wormwood, in the ways of tempting a soul. Prescient, it now seems, given it was written decades before the internet existed …
From Letter XII
A few weeks ago you had to tempt him to unreality and inattention in his prayers: but now you will find him opening his arms to you and almost begging you to distract his purpose and benumb his heart. He will want his prayers to be unreal, for he will dread nothing so much as effective contact with the Enemy [God*]. His aim will be to let sleeping worms lie.
As this condition becomes more fully established, you will be gradually freed from the tiresome business of providing Pleasures as temptations. As the uneasiness and his reluctance to face it cut him off more and more from all real happiness...you will find that anything or nothing is sufficient to attract his wandering attention. You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a column of advertisements in yesterday’s paper will do. You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but in conversations with those he cares nothing about on subjects that bore him. You can make him do nothing at all for long periods. You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room. All the healthy and out-going activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at least he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, ’I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.’ The Christians describe the Enemy as one ’without whom Nothing is strong’. And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.
You will say that these are very small sins; and doubtless, like all young tempters, you are anxious to be able to report spectacular wickedness. But do remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy. It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing.
*Just to remind you, ‘the Enemy’, to Screwtape, is God.
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