One word? When seven would do…

We’re done here and have learnt tonight that it is our last night in the yurt as my Mum has finally booked a holiday cottage (that I found in the end) from tomorrow. They have two nights booked at a hotel in Newcastle so are heading for there for the weekend and will meet up with Dad’s cousin who lives in Newcastle, while we head in the opposite direction to enjoy two nights in the cottage just the four of us before they join us on Monday.

Today we have been in the garden all day. We spent the morning working with Wilf on carrots. Some evidence of rat damage was discovered in the carrots yesterday so we swung into action. The first bed of carrots was all pulled up as they are grown, although they could potentially grow to double their current size the risk of leaving them with rats around is too great now they have started munching on them so a full crop of half size carrots is better than a total wipe out of any crop at all. We pulled them, cut the leaves off and any undamaged carrots are now stored in the dark until next week ready for the customers veg boxes, while any nibbled ones have been cut and put ready for carrot soup for everyone here next week. The second bed (later sowing) needed thinning and the skinny but supersweet carrots from that will be used here for eating or as salad for next weeks veg boxes and the third bed which had only just germinated was weeded and covered with netting. All of the beds were then watered with a comfrey feed which is reputed to disguise the smell to foil the carrot flies. We also set some rat traps and laid out instant mash potatoes and coke which is Chris (Ady’s brother)’s method for rat disposal which we have shared with various people this year.

That took us to lunchtime so we came down to collect lunch supplies including fresh from the oven bread and then Ady and I sat in the garden eating lunch together and reflecting on this host as Wilf went off to do some paperwork leaving us to it.

After lunch we did some moving tyres – they have them delivered here for free to use as building materials on the new build house, weights for the netting, pots for growing potatoes and so on and dropped off at the gate so we moved a huge heap into the land properly. We counted 60 moved which we thought probably qualified us to work in Kwik fit should the need ever take us 😆

Jo arrived back then and we had a lovely couple of hours working alongside her planting out various brassicas and salad leaves and chatting. We have not spent as much time working with Jo but she is lovely, very peaceful and kind and it was really nice to chat to her, get to know her a bit and hear her perspective on the community. We finished our working day by gathering some empty egg boxes and taking them down to the chicken house ready for next weeks egg collecting.

Ady went off with Matt to do some shooting practise as Matt has recently acquired a gun but didn’t know much about it so Ady showed him some safe use ideas, some hints and tips and also got a look around the new build house inside. Matt is the person here we have had the least time with, which is frustrating as he has so many skills, many of which I’d have loved to have learnt more about.

Beth and Wilf headed off on holiday for a week so there were teary goodbyes and cuddles and promises to stay in touch and invites to come back any time. We’ll see Matt and Jo tomorrow to say goodbye but we’ve been presented with wine and chocolates from them all and lots of lovely exchanges of thanks going both ways for a fab two weeks WWOOfing experience.

This time tomorrow we will be back in the real world, the right side of a bath, a dinner containing loads of meat and things like plug sockets, sofas, TV and so on. Personally I am in no rush to return to that at all and will be mourning what we leave behind here for some time to come.

We started slightly earlier today just because it is so interesting being part of Veg Box Day. Ady did lots of harvesting veg, salad etc. mostly working with Ange and Pia who were still here today. Davies and Scarlett did some pea and bean picking (and eating) with Pip before disappearing off into the woodland for the rest of the day. I mostly worked in the field shelter getting stuck into the packing side of things. First thing I was with Wilf (who is very interesting and reminds me loads of Chris P. He has the same measured way of talking and dry sense of humour), learning the Ways of The Veg Bag. This included some admin type stuff with labelling bags and then some weighing of potatoes. The scheme here is about 80% what thet grow and 20% bought in from an organic wholesaler. This week they bought in potatoes and cucumber only. They are very honest with their customers about the bought in element which apparently some veg box schemes are not, they also work with other local-ish schemes to swap gluts and even barter with some of their veg box customers for their gluts – eg one of the people who has a weekly box from them had a huge amount of rhubarb last year, enough to supply all their customers for two weeks running in exchange for 2 months worth of free veg.

I then did cucumber inserting into each bag before going to do some harvesting – nasturtium flowers, chard and spinach. I then helped Jo with salad bag packing – she did the leaves and I did the twiddly bits – rocket, flowers and basil leaves and then it was lunch time. We all had lunch together which was a lovely communal affair.

After lunch Ady did some more gardening type stuff while I did packing up of stir fry bags (spinach and chard) and then helped Beth load the various rounds of bags into the car ready to be delivered to the pick up points.

Ady and I finished for the day and spent far too long looking for Davies and Scarlett who were happily and obliviously playing in the woods before cooking dinner. We’d been given sausages so Davies and I had them with new potatoes, while Ady and Scarlett had tuna and new potatoes fishcakes – Scarlett, Ady and I had salad too including all the little flowers :).

Must end here as laptop is beeping about the battery dying and I don’t want to lose what I’ve written!

This morning started with breadmaking for me again – today was raisin bread with cinnamon and sugar, it was delicious and tasted like hot cross buns 🙂

Then more building. A final application of render and then the start of the cob layer. We were working with Wilf today and two women who have been on one of his permaculture courses and instead of paying full rate have bartered some hours work instead – they are here tomorrow aswell helping with veg box picking and packing. I love this alternative tender to cash for things that happens round here :). They were interesting people to chat to; both very much with a foot in both the conventional world and the alternative community type world and both agonising over where they belonged. It’s always interesting to see ourselves through others’ eyes and chatting to them reminded me that most families don’t go off in a campervan for a year but hopefully reminded them that there isn’t really any good reason not to if it’s what you want!

The cob layer is the same mix of sharp sand and clay with added chopped up straw, applied much thicker to the wall on top of the clay render mix to fill any gaps and create the undulating but smoothed finish prior to the lime render level. There is something hugely pleasing about this type of building, very reminiscent of playing with mud or playdoh as a child and almost instinctual in the smoothing and shaping. We had an interesting conversation as we worked about how most historic building was done simply using the land content in the area and how many large buildings such as cathedrals have a quarry next to them where the stone came from – often the only remaining sign is streets called Quarry Lane in the vicinity but it was the way all architecture was formed. Certainly all of the green buildings we’ve come across this year are using reclaimed, local materials – stones or clay dug up from the land itself.

We all had a go at all aspects today, from mixing the cob in the bathtub which involves treading it in, shovelling it from one end of the bath to the other and generally agitating it, sieving the clay to get the stones out (which will be used as drainage material elsewhere on the land), applying the render or cob or spraying the walls in preparation for each new layer. I did a full on up a ladder right at the top stint of cob application which was slightly daunting as you had to wedge the heavy bucket of cob between you and the ladder, rest your head on the roof struts and lean out to apply handfuls of the mixture. Very rewarding though 🙂

Lunch was a shared affair and then after work we walked to Matt & Jo’s flat which is just around the corner from the land and was bought fairly recently with an inheritance. It is a small two bedroom flat that Matt & Jo sleep in at weekends and they all use for the washing machine, bathroom, getting away from the land when necessary and a postal address – a toss up between a haven and a reality check into suburbia! We all had a bath – blissful, I brushed my teeth with running water, we stuck a load of very dirty washing through the machine and then walked back again. A friend had bought over a huge salmon he’d caught yesterday so that had been cooked for dinner and a large chunk of it offered to us for our dinner which was a real treat :).

We had new potatoes and salmon and a cheesy sauce all rather grudgingly cooked by Ady while I read through a folder Beth had lent me containing all her celebrant work, copies of her notes and services and the thank you cards people have sent her after her services which was all really interesting, and often very tear jerking to read, particularly the memorial and funeral services. Definitely something I want to look further into in the future.

I can’t believe we only have two more days left here, visiting the flat today was a stark reminder of the outside world.

We’ve had a great day today, loads more green building :). We started with chicken feeding and breadmaking (Ady chicken feeding, me breadmaking). The kids came into the house where I was breadmaking and while Davies played with the boys Scarlett came and did some breadmaking with me. The kids then disappeared off for the entire day, finally coming back at 515pm asking if it was nearly lunchtime! 😆

We worked with Wilf and Beth, listening to music and chatting about all sorts of things while mixing up clay render, stapling chicken wire over straw bales and then applying the first ‘slip layer’ of render to the wall of the house. We’re really getting an understanding of how these houses are constructed and although we’d still need loads of guidance and help to do it ourselves it is fab to grasp how they go up and what is underneath – they are built in the same was as Ben Law’s house which most people have seen on Grand Designs.

Beth is a celebrant, which is something I have thought I might like to do one day so I spent some time chatting to her about that and she has lent me a load of her paperwork and work on that to read through and is very encouraging about that :).

We had lunch and then did another couple of hours on the rendering before finishing for the day. Ady and I picked some salad and greens for dinner, which was communal today as happens here once a week. It was the massive courgette that Scarlett found last week and we cooked as a stuffed marrow. Our contribution was new potatoes cooked by Ady and a cake cooked by me. Last week for communal dinner Frankie made a cake which utterly failed to rise and was only really saved by it’s butter icing so the bar had been set pretty low although I did joke I could still attempt to limbo under it! I went for an equal weight of butter, sugar, flour and eggs batter and thanks to it being barley flour it was slightly on the heavy side but as we were having it with custard it being more pudding-y than cake-y went down and storm and *everyone* had seconds and raved about it 🙂

Dinner was really nice, lots of chatter with everyone there and we got talking further about unschooling, parenting generally and autonomy and other such stuff. I recommended some of my favourite books on the subjects and we talked about things like pocket money, chores, reward and punishment and so on. Davies and Scarlett have proved very popular here with the children and the adults so are thankfully being glowing examples of what I believe in. They said thank you for dinner as they left the table tonight and Jo went after them to thank them for doing so. Davies explained that he has helped prepare dinner before and knows how much effort goes into it and also that it made him feel good when everyone thanked him afterwards so he likes to extend the same back when someone makes a meal for him which was the perfect answer really 🙂 It’s been lovely having them all say how much they’d like to stay in touch with us all :). This has been somewhere where we have really felt like we have brought something in return for what we will take away over and above the WWOOFing relationship – the spending time with the people here has enriched our lives and taught us new skills in just the same way as we have given them new ideas and things to think about. It is a very open and supportive environment where ideas are constantly tossed about, everyone is open to suggestions and input from each other and all viewpoints and opinions are valued and appreciated. I like it here a lot :). The other three have been slower to feel that way but I think all four of us will leave a little bit of ourselves here, just as we have at a few other favourite hosts.

Argh, struggling to keep abreast of all the things I want to write online each day before laptop battery dies 🙁

Today we have barely seen the kids – Oaken has finished school so the four older ones were off for the whole morning playing down by the river – Davies definitely much happier with Oaken around aswell as Pip, they seem very balanced as a foursome, Oaken is just a few months younger than Davies although he towers above him.

Ady and I had a first task of getting chicken feed out of the car and taking it to the chicken house and feeding them. This involved wheelbarrows up and down hills so slightly more complicated than it sounds. I was issued with a red pencil to mark some eggs as when I was talking to Beth about chicken keeping and breeding she said one of the problems was knowing which eggs the broody hen had been sat on when she nicks all the other ones laid each day too, so I suggested marking the eggs (we don’t usually have to do that but have done in the past when that has been an issue). Scarlett came too and passed out the eggs to mark. Cool to think there will be chicks running around 3 weeks from now thanks to our help :).

Next we were told about some green building. There is a house almost built here and the tiny dwelling every one currently lives in which needed some maintenance / finishing off. It is timber frame with straw bale infill, covered with clay render, cob render and lime render. There are some areas which need straw pushing in to fill gaps and then the layers of render putting on. Our first job was to dig out some clay, which is simply the soil from here that was previously dug out to put the foundations in. That was mixed in an old bath having been saturated with water, 2 parts sharp sand to 1 part clay to create the clay render which will be a very thin layer over the straw. We did some of that, mixing it up in the bathtub by trampling on it, moving it about with a shovel and generally digging it with hands. Other jobs included spraying the current surfaces ready to take the render, which meant climbing up on a ladder against the side of the house with a 12l water tank on your back and spraying from it. Quite scary as the house is two storeys and the ladder is on a veranda which is about 12 foot off the ground anyway so the top of the ladder is a good 30 foot off the actual ground, with a very heavy load on your back! We learnt loads though and it didn’t actually feel dangerous. We were working with Beth (who is our favourite!) and Beth’s Dad who had come along for the day and is very nice, a retired vet, very posh and supportive, if slightly befuddled at how his daughter and grandsons live!

We had a late lunch, all very communal as we were all darting in and out checking on the bread baking in the oven and passing things out over the ladders tied to the veranda to each other and the children must have sensed it as they appeared just as we sat down to join us. Jo came back too, having had to go and open the hall for a home ed session that Pip had flatly refused to attend due to Davies and Scarlett being here but Jo had the keys for so had to go on her own anyway!

There wasn’t much afternoon left to work really so we did a little more of the same and that was our working day done :). The kids had been invited to go swimming with the kids here as Pip, Hollin and LLeu had swimming lessons but Oaken and D & S wanted to watch a film that Pip wasn’t allowed to see so that was the perfect opportunity and they ended up doing that instead. Ady and I chatted, read and had a walk and enjoyed being briefly childless :).

We cooked dinner and ate before the kids came back, so they had a later dinner than us while I caught up with Julie on the phone, then we had wash time and stories. This morning I had my first outdoor hair wash using heated rainwater and a tub and I am very much enjoying the feeling of clean hair :).

My (one remaining) wisdom tooth is moving about and rather sore so I am hoping it is merely a bit more errupting that kept clean will be fine as I am worried about needing to find a dentist on the road. I’m also feeling quite disproportionately tired which Ady is attributing to lack of meat!

It’s been a fantastic weekend off. This is most definitely our most hospitable host for all sorts of reasons 🙂

Saturday It was Wilf (one of the host)’s birthday and we were invited to participate in the celebrations which included rowing on the river and a picnic in the park. We declined, partially because we didn’t feel we wanted to intrude having only met him a few days ago and mostly because we were keen for some ‘just the four of us time’. As it happened we would have been very welcome to join them and would probably have had a great time but we did really enjoy our day so it was the right decision.

We decided to walk into Durham – about 2.5 miles away so after breakfast we set off. We didn’t really know where we were going so we decided to head off and just keep asking people, well we made Ady ask people actually. We were all in quite giddy moods and speculated on asking for more indepth directions each time ending with just getting in someones car and asking them to take us there! We didn’t go that far in the end although we possibly should have done as we went in a big U shape rather than an I and did three sides of a square on the last bit making it a longer walk in than it should have been.

We did the charity shop circuit, found toilets (flushes made us jump!), bought stuff from the bakery for lunch, I purchased two hats in the Millets £1 sale shop that had sprung up. We also bought two kag in a bag waterproofs for £1 each and then realised when we got them back that they have massive England flags on the back and all of our remaining hosts are in Scotland so they may not be totally appropriate! 😆

We bought ice creams from Iceland (£1.50 for a box of 6 instead of £2 each from the ice cream van!) and ate them down by the river watching the ducks, black headed gulls and cormorants that were gathered there.

It was gone 5pm by then so we started the walk back – a much shorter route but very steeply uphill for the first bit, which in the still surprisingly hot sun was hard work! We got back just after 6pm and collapsed in the yurt. No one was back yet so we debated dinner and decided to cook pancakes for tea as we had lots of eggs (we got a dozen in our veg bag) – that was delicious and everyone was stuffed afterwards. We heard about Amy Winehouse on the radio which made us all very sad and we sat talking about her and fame and drugs for a while. Scarlett and I enjoyed lying on our backs on the bed with our feet up in the air doing some upside down dancing to the music on the radio :).

Beth and Wilf came back and invited us over to their house for birthday drinks so Davies and Scarlett got into bed and had some DS and PSP time while Ady and I went over there to join the last few party revellers. Wilf ended up going to bed early as he was all birthday-d out (drunk!) but we sat on Matt & Jo’s bed with Beth, Frankie (the other WWOOFer), Frankie’s girlfriend Liz and two other friends Jack and Ruth, drinking wine out of the bottle, eating trifle and being very silly and talking about sexuality spectrums. It all felt very lovely and cosy and was the sort of evening you remember and smile for ages afterwards :). We left about 1am and did some star gazing through the clear panel in our yurt while lying in bed.

Sunday A lovely drifting into consciousness morning with lots of in bed cuddles with the kids. Jack stood on our front steps chatting to us while Tarly and I were still in bed – it’s just that sort of place here, lots of instantly feeling like family I guess :).

Davies and Scarlett went off to play and Ady and I went off to do some Willow tidying. We knew we had various things that can go home with my parents – mostly clothes – when they come up next week so we wanted to weed them out and generally rearrange stuff a bit. We also did a bit of clothing inventory work. Davies and Scarlett now seem to have communal jeans as they wear the same size anyway and S favours boys styling so it doesn’t even make sense to try and work out which pair belong to which child anymore. Scarlett seems to be lacking pants and Davies socks though so that needs addressing next time we’re near shops. Ady thinks he needs some jumpers but that is only because I have convinced him I do *need* all mine incase it is cold in Scotland and he doesn’t have anywhere near as many as me! 😆

We exchanged texts with Kirsty and decided to walk along to see where would be good to meet them as the track here ends in a very steep bridge which many cars seem to bottom out on and we didn’t want to be responsible for bringing them somewhere their car got damaged. We walked along and had a look at the village, which isn’t really a village other than having a green with a swing and a roundabout on it which the kids were playing on for longer than we realised as suddenly Kirsty and James were ringing to say they’d arrived so we dashed back to meet them.

We gave them the full guided tour and some people had a go on the rope swing. The kids went off to play and we sat in the yurt for a while drinking tea and chatting. I chopped some onions and then we all went up to the top to cook outside in the sunshine. We had some sausages in rolls that Kirsty and James very kindly bought along with them, some people had a go in the extreme compost loo and finally we waved them off. It was so nice to have friends actually come and visit us at a host and see how it all works, even better to have people come to this one as it is so special and different to how we all live and so very close to the sort of lifestyle we think we might end up living one day.

We walked back to the car to wave them off before heading back to the yurt for washes in the baby bath, stories for the kids and some online time for me as Wilf had kindly charged my laptop up for me again. And I have now drained it again! 😆

Thursday is Veg Box Day here each week – they run a veg box scheme for 40 local people selling small or large bags of fruit and veg and eggs. Everything has to be picked and packed the same day and delivered to four different drop off points – they leave here with the car loaded up at 330pm so it’s quite a tight schedule. It’s all very military precision and I am in awe of their set up here on that, although they are ten years in to their time here and have various uni degrees in such things as permaculture. They certainly know their stuff though, although they shared some hilarious stories about the early days which heartened me that they have not always been quite so switched on :).

So work involved picking various things – salad leaves, basil, garlic, chard. Davies and Scarlett came and helped during the morning and were set to work on courgettes and marrows. I was really proud of them actually; they did a great job of finding and harvesting stuff and talked to all the adults around them (Beth, Wilf, Jo, Frankie the other WWOOFer and Jan who comes to do veg box stuff) asking all sorts of interesting questions and making observations about things like different coloured flowers on borage plants and which the bees prefered and speculation as to whether the flowers changed colours at different points in their pollination process.

We had tea breaks (all four of us rather cautiously trying the mint tea on offer and being surprised at how much we liked it!) and lunch breaks all together chatting and laughing. There is a lot of love in this place, it’s very inspiring and lovely to be part of – we already feel like part of the family and today I was greeted with a big hug and kiss from Beth who is particularly tactile. Of all the places we have been this is definitely the one I feel most at home in and could totally see myself fitting in to. The others are less sure and it is not something we are even considering but it is a mark of how welcoming I find it here.

We’d started work early so finished early and got our veg bag and went for a proper explore of the land as Ady and I had not walked around much before although Davies and Scarlett have thoroughly explored the land. They have about 15 acres here including a section of river, some woodland, some open pasture, the areas of land with dwellings on, the land given oven to the chickens and the growing areas with polytunnels and raised beds. It is a very cool place for the kids with loads of camps, dens, treehouses, rope swings, places to scramble across the river and so on.

We tracked the kids down and walked back with them to the yurt then I got dinner going (pasta, made with a tomatoe, garlic, onion and basil sauce with grated cheese, mostly from the gardens). The kids went back out to play after dinner – they are getting on well with the boys here although I think Davies finds Pip the 9yo a bit needy and rather prefers Oaken the 10yo who has been at school this week. I rang my parents and the letting agent to find out whether the tenants want to stay for another 6 months and deal with some issues our neighbours have been having with the chickens and a pet ferret the tenants have got.

Today Ady and I have been on our own – Beth and Jo were out at a Home Ed / Steiner kinder group with the little boys, the older boys were at their grandparents, Matt was building and Wilf was doing admin, Frankie the other WWOOFer was busy on another task. So we spent the whole day in the gardens, completely clearing two raised beds of weeds and transplanting some stuff that had been mistakenly planted in one of them, watering in the polytunnel, digging the paths either side of the raised beds onto the beds (they do this every couple of years as the earth is like a sort of compost there by virtue of having all the weeds etc. left to rot down on the paths) and then spreading a couple of barrow loads of actual compost on the top. A very enjoyable day in the sunshine with the radio on and visits from the kids every now and then and Wilf coming up to join us for lunch.

Afterwards we went to the rope swing to watch Davies and Scarlett act out a scene from a film they had been practising using some daring rope swing stunts which had me cheering and Ady hiding his eyes 😆 We then both had a go on the swing too, it’s very exciting 🙂

Back at the yurt everyone else had gone out this evening – we had been invited too and even offered babysitting 🙂 but had declined and had a very delicious dinner of stir fry using herbs, greens, onions and garlic from our veg bag, spices, peanut butter, soy sauce and noodles and rice from our store cupboard. Davies and Scarlett added some spam from our own food stash too but Ady and I enjoyed the healthiness of it without!

We all had washes in the baby bath using boiled rainwater – it feels quite sufficient although I’m not sure I’ll be able to effectively wash my hair that way, I don’t think I can get the shampoo out properly. I read several chapters of story to the kids.

We’re looking forward to a weekend off, planning on walking into Durham tomorrow and hoping to see The Barts on Sunday 🙂

Monday More hanging around at Babs where I even got lured into Playing A Game (I know!). Ady took Scarlett and Rachael for a walk in the morning and in the afternoon Babs, Scarlett, Rachael and I dropped Suzy off at the station and headed over to collect a few bits from Willow when we heard that she wouldn’t be ready to take away that day.

We had communally cooked dinner (although I am unsure whether my contribution of grilling the dish was altogether well recieved I think the home made garlic bread went down well ;)), jelly madness for the kids and a final evening with Chris and Babs. We really can’t thank them enough for their amazing hospitality – FabBabs and Chris, we heart you lots! 🙂

Tuesday morning we rang to check on Willow’s progress and were told she’d be ready by midday so Ady and Babs went to collect her while I packed everything up ready to go in the hall, fed the kids some slow cooker rice pudding which was finally ready at about lunchtime, and made some sandwiches for our journey. We packed the van up and finally headed off about 2pm feeling slightly teary-eyed at saying goodbye again – this time I really do think it will be Christmas camp when we see each other again but as we said that at our Bye Then Party and we’ve now caught up with them various times since I’m not putting dates on anything now!

We had a straight run to Durham and found the hosts farm no problem, thanks to some very comprehensive directions they had emailed us (they are not at an actual postal address as they are on land without planning permission). We were shown to our yurt, made a cup of tea and left to settle in with a WWOOFers handbook which lists pretty much anything you could think of to have questions about along with loads of things you didn’t even think about but are very useful to know. It has lovely stuff like ‘STAYING HEALTHY. Everyone is allowed to get ill and if you are ill you do not have to work and we will look after you’ and ‘if there is anything at all you need please, please tell us so we can get it for you’. The yurt is fully set up with a double and two single beds, chairs and table, woodburner with stash of fire making stuff and an axe, candles, full kitchen set up including oven, full stock of food – tins, dry stuff, fruit fruit and veg, home made bread, tea, coffee, milk, butter, cheese. Rainwater to heat for washing, fresh water for drinking, a baby bath and towels and flannels for having washes, waterproofs to borrow etc. We sort out own breakfast and dinner out from these supplies, have lunch with the hosts and once a week we will have a main meal with them too.

The hosts are two couples; Beth & Wilf, and Matt & Jo. They have two boys each – Beth & Wilf have Oaken who is 10 and at school (but only since this year) and 4 year old Llew, Matt & Jo have 9 year old Pippin and 4 year old Hollin – all the other 3 boys are HE. They have 15 acres of land including woodland, a river, polytunnels and organic growing space. They currently share a house (tiny space) made of strawbales but Matt & Jo will be moving into their own house at some future point which is nearly finished and is stunning – straw bale and tyre build, 3 storey, 3 bedroom with grass roof, fully renewable energy etc. When that happens the currently communal house will have a double extension too and become full sized for Wilf & Beth.

They all do various things off site including green building, woodworking, blacksmithing, basket weaving, permaculture teaching and they co-operatively run a veg box & eggs scheme locally too. We have felt instantly at home and Davies and Scarlett have fallen straight in with the older boys here (although they both said the younger two are a bit annoying) and so far everyone and everything seems lovely :).

We shared dinner with them last night before settling in to the yurt for bedtime stories by candlelight and a first ever night sleeping in a yurt.

Today we breakfasted in the yurt and then ventured out. The kids were invited in to play Lego with Pippin which they did for most of the morning before venturing out to play near the river when the rain finally stopped. Today was communal dining day so we did food prep in the morning as it was so rainy which involved chopping veg, making a flapjack, drinking tea and chatting. There is another WWOOFer here this week, Frankie, who has been here 3 months and is about to leave. She has had a great time here and exchanged gifts with the hosts tonight at dinner which is always a good thing to see – WWOOFers and hosts who make it work for that length of time are always reassuring.

The rain stopped mid morning so we went to do some chicken house clearing out and some fence mending before lunch. In the afternoon Ady carried on with that and I did some watering in the polytunnel and some garlic harvesting and that was the day over with – six hours goes very quickly, particularly when over an hour of it is spent eating lunch!

After work we had a couple of hours to ourselves and the kids came back into the yurt with us – Scarlett to play on the digeridoo and bongo which are in the yurt and Davies to do some drawing – I think they are almost socialised out after such a full on weekend 😉

Dinner was done in two sittings – kids first and then they went off to play leaving the adults. We had elderflower wine with dinner which was lovely. Lots of chat over dinner about Home Ed and parenting as Jo is having a crisis of confidence about her approach which has previously been a bit structured but has been reading some Sandra Dodd and even met her on her recent UK trip so is thinking about different approaches and was very interested in how we do things – I’m guessing there will be lots more of that sort of conversation – hopefully Davies and Scarlett live up to their usual selves to demonstrate we are indeed raising fab individuals ;).

So, an excellent and heartening start to this host, long may it continue!

Friday morning we packed up Willow and prepared to head off. Bob came over to say goodbye and offer us the visitors book to write in – I struggled to think of an appropriate entry and settled on “a unique and insightful WWOOFing experience” which I felt could be taken pretty much any way and hold true ;). I did go on to mention how very helpful and informative Bob had been and that we were very grateful for his hosting too.

Bob had arranged for us to visit a neighbouring farm – Riddings Park Farm and we were unsure as to whether we were actually working there or just visiting. It quickly became clear that we were to be given a guided tour and a cup of tea and a chat and then they would be grateful for us heading off and leaving them to their very busy day. Do look at the website though – they are *very* close to my end dream and do it very well with a variety of rare breed animals, a very small area of land, holiday cottages, yurt camping, B&B, a teashop, educational visits etc. That was a great couple of hours and they were very informative about the whole Bob and Mary situation too which helped us to feel better that it wasn’t just us who thought the whole place was bloody mental!! 😆

We had a few hours til Babs would be home so we decided to head in that general direction, call in to a supermarket when we found one and see where the road took us. We ended up driving through Matlock, where Ady and I had been with my parents abouy 15 years ago and often talked of since so as a parking space at the end of a run appeared with perfect timing for us to just pull into we did that and decided to get some food and have a look round. The parking space was limited to an hour so we headed straight to the bath aquarium where we blew a quick tenner on admission and dashed around. The thermal baths were just as we remembered them with carp swimming about so we fed them and read the signs explaining about the water source, the origins of public baths and local history then walked round the aquarium, the hologram gallery and the petrifying well. To be honest an hour is probably as long as you could spend there anyway so that was great – we all really enjoyed the holograms.

Then we had chips and ice cream for lunch (we had a definite food deficit to make up so felt quite justified in eating crap!) before getting back into Willow to carry on to Babs’. The brakes on the van have been playing up a bit on downhill roads causing Ady some sleepless nights. He was very stressed about it on this journey as it was particularly hill-y so we decided to take advantage of the fact we were in one place and not actually sleeping in the van for a night or two and take it to a garage while we were at Babs’.

We got to Tescos at Chesterfield and stocked up on emergency food supplies for the van (having been so very grateful for things like tinned ham this week we wanted to make sure we had adequate stocks for the future), some snack food and alcohol contributions for Babs, some more pants for me as it had become clear a one week supply was not enough and in the scheme of things having excess pants is definitely better than not enough pants! Davies and Scarlett both came to us with pleading looks on their faces and a dvd each in their hands which we agreed to but were still quite shocked when the total was over £100 – we then went to Halfords and bought a set of levellers for the front wheels of Willow too having had several occassions recently where we’ve struggled to find level ground to park on and had to use blocks of wood to do the job. Rather regretting that little spend up now with the brakes to pay for 🙁

That took us to about 6pm so we headed to Babs’ arriving not long after they’d got home. Chris was out for the evening and after some online research at takeaway / delivery pizzas we ended up nipping to Asda to buy some and had a feast of pizza which was delicious. We utterly failed to get the kids to bed before Chris came home so we eventually chased them off and followed them some hours later 😉

Saturday morning Ady headed off with Willow to the garage. This was about as poorly executed an idea as possible – he woke me up to say he was leaving NOW and so I was out in the street, in pjs with bare feet and no contact lenses trying to think of all the things we might need out of the van for the day. Retrospectively we should have taken loads more things out AND thought about the possibility of an overnight stay away from us too. I only just remembered to get the dirty washing out as Babs’ had said we could stick a wash (or three!) on, but forgot clean clothes, my pillow, fleeces and various other things including the alcohol still in the van.

Ady arrived, the mechanics looked at the brakes and said yes the back ones did need repairing and the front ones were okay but would probably need replacing at some point soon so we decided to have the whole lot done. No idea really if we are spending money we don’t really need to spend yet but I guess brakes are something you don’t really take risks with and as Willow has barely cost us anything so far in maintenance (the work Alan did for us only cost £50 in bits and the flat tyre ended up being a valve that was fixed for free) we are happy enough to splash out on her I guess.

Ady was then stranded at the garage, about 6 miles away, in the rain, with a texted list from me of all the stuff we needed out of the van, a failing mobile phone battery, no cash and no real idea of the way back home again. Chris and I were at home with no car to come and rescue him and struggled to even locate him on googlemaps and give him directions to walk. Ady did check with a taxi rank he walked past how much it would be to get a cab back but they said about £20 which he wasn’t up for paying so he continued walking in the rain, hauling bags of stuff until Kirsty and James rang me to offer to rescue him. By then he had found a pub to sit outside so he was easy enough to find and bring home again!

We had a lovely afternoon and evening with everyone including Bab’s sister Suzy, eventually drinking the house dry and resorting to mulled wine with cherry brandy and watching youtube clips of Sorry I’ve Got No Head – always a winning evening! 😆

Sunday More chatting / playing / drinking tea / watching TV / sitting on sofas – all the things that are a novelty to us this year ;). Babs had put so much thought into food for us and got a leg of lamb so we could have a roast dinner, which was just delicious 🙂 We all pitched in with peeling, chopping, cooking etc. and sat down to a communal effort dinner in the evening, followed by a much earlier night all round 🙂

This morning was a free for all in the breakfast room again and as we sat there eating both Bob and Mary appeared and started to try and give us jobs to do, then had a big argument about what should be done by us. Very tempting to get out the popcorn…

Davies and Scarlett very wisely spent pretty much the entire day in the woodland making a camp complete with labels and signs and everything. I have some pictures on my phone I will upload at some point – it was excellent :).

Ady and I cleared a large pile of cut ivy from a stable yard which involved loading it into wheelbarrows and pushing it along the lane up the hill to the top field into a bonfire heap. We must have done about ten trips altogether today, which meant my arms and legs were aching by the end of the day, which they have not done for ages. They are tiny and still hidden in a layer of fat but I do actually have visible muscles in my arms now 🙂 Another 12 years of WWOOFing and I might end up with that Sarah Connor in Terminator physique I long for… 😉

We’ve also chopped more firewood and bagged it up ready for campers to buy this weekend including pushing a barrow with five full sacks of logs and carting them down a flight of stairs which I did myself as Ady was helping Bob move something with the tractor. It did make me laugh that he had been saying how he makes up smaller bags to sell to women camping on their own who can’t manage the full sacks while I was humping them about!

We all helped drive the cattle down into the barn this morning, including Davies and Scarlett which was a new (and slightly scary) experience for them, armed with sticks and told to pay very close attention to everything going on. Molly the barking dog slipped her lead and ran along with us which unnerved the cows a lot and they chased her a couple of times. I did get turned on by one of the feisty ones too but a shout at her and grabbing a metal gate and holding it infront of me and advancing back towards her drove her off. It probably looked like I was being brave but it was that or be crushed really – the kids thought it was exciting though, they were the right side of a gate watching! We also walked the whole of the farm with Bob and got shown the old lead mines, quarry and other landmarks of his land which was cool.

At lunchtime Bob and Mary were both out so we headed into the kitchen to see what had been left for us and found… nothing! We were just debating what to do when Bob arrived at about 115pm and apologetically found some pasta and various sauces and sat down to join us for lunch. Mary looked really hacked off when she came in at about 130pm and saw us all eating.

In the afternoon we helped Bob weigh, check the temperature of, medicate with injections and oral medicine a few of the calves who were looking a bit poorly. That was interesting. Cows really are very huge and pretty unpredictable. I’m not scared of them particularly but I don’t feel any great desire to work with them every day, although a house cow might still be appealing if it had been milked and handled from early on and was the right temprament.

Bob got food for our dinner for us – Ady reminded him at about 4pm incase stuff needed to be defrosted and we were given bacon, sausages and bread, some tomatoes and onions. We had some eggs leftover from yesterday so we had breakfast for dinner cooked on the fire which was lovely 🙂 It did lack a cup of tea although beer washed it down well enough 😉

We had another lovely evening = Bob came over and had a cup of tea with us and brought over a load of paperwork all about Organic standards, mapping of his farm, Single Payment Scheme forms and entitlements, details of the Countryside Stewardship Scheme and various other grants and payments. He showed us cow passports, sheep movement forms and other Defra paperwork. We’ve definitely learnt loads of that side of farming and land management from Bob and he’s been a really nice host. Maybe it is unfair to be blaming Mary for everything odd, strange or bloody out of order that has happened here but we do blame her.

After Bob left we lit the fire and got dinner cooking, the kids came and sat with us and my Mum rang. After dinner when it was properly dark and the moon had come out – new full moon tonight, the moonrise was beautiful – we lit the bonfire we’d been building all week and watched that – it was magnificent, really big and crackling and dramatic 🙂

The night ran away with us rather so it was gone 11pm when I came in with the kids for a quick chapter of story – I do worry we have forever spoilt them for normal bedtimes and sensible routines ever again but they are loving it 🙂 Ady watched a badger walk around Willow after we’d come in (clearly he imagined it) and we’ve seen bats swooping about every night.

When we went in for breakfast this morning it was so messy I had to take some pictures to remember it. One of the stools was upside down on the table with a net of berries strung round the legs straining (jam or juice making I assume), the sink was full of washing up, all the surfaces were sticky or messy and half the table had food and other stuff all over it. We made breakfast around it and I stood to eat mine due to the lack of a chair.

Mary caught us and said she wanted us to do some tidying up because they have campers due this weekend and she worried they would arrive and think the place looked messy. So the first task was wheelbarrowing a load of ivy that had been cut off the side of the house earlier in the week. She said Bob had been promising to do it with the tractor but obviously wasn’t going to so we could move it by hand – thanks! So not hard work but annoying to be used as pawns really – it took about 9 barrow fulls, filling, walking up the lane (pretty steep) and dumping in the field near our van where there is a bonfire heap. Next Ady was set to with the lawnmower (I think he got on even worse with it than I did yesterday!) and I was asked to help the kids crush cans.

The can crushing is an odd one really – it’s all the tins and cans from the campers that get theoretically sorted and washed by camper and are then stored and sold for scrap. Aluminium is worth more than steel so they need sorting into magnetic and non magnetic heaps and crushing. The kids had been doing this on and off over the last couple of days and quite enjoying using the magnet and stamping on cans. I feel bad that I had not previously checked but was quite horrified that the cans are not washed at all and all of the food ones still contained all sorts of leftover, moldy old beans and dog food 🙁 I got gloves for all of us and we carried on sorting. Mary came over laughing and said ‘have you found anything nasty yet, I have found things like used condoms and even bags of sick before now’ at which point I very angrily said that we had not and it was just as well as I had assumed my children had been dealing with sorting clean cans, not at risk of opening a bag of something unpleasant like that! She scurried away rather rapidly.

Once that was finished I sent the kids off to wash their hands and told them they could spent the next hour or so in the van drawing or playing DS. They did make Ady and I a drink each though and brought them out to us :). Ady carried on with the mowing and I decided to chop some more wood rather than make myself available for anything else unpleasant to do. I understand why the can crushing needed doing but it hardly constitutes WWOOFing work in my opinion. Ady finished mowing and came to chop some wood too until lunchtime.

We all went in to the kitchen where Bob said Mary had put some food out for us and were confronted with three prepacked roast chicken sandwiches with yesterdays date on, a block of cheese with Monday’s date and four chocolate brownies with Monday’s date on. All of the packaging looked dented and messy too and they didn’t feel cool or refridgerated. As Bob’s girlfriend Gill had only been bitching about her yesterday telling me how she got loads of stuff out of skips I was fairly sure that this was where these had come from so I marched in to where Ady was talking to Bob and said ‘All of the food is out of date so we won’t be able to eat that. I’m concerned that as Gill told me yesterday Mary gets food from skips it is probably got from there.’ Bob was really embarrassed and found us some tins of beans and some bread out the freezer so Davies and Ady had beans and toast and Scarlett and I had honey on toast (we don’t like beans). Mary walked in in the middle of all this and Ady said to her ‘we’re going to skip the sandwiches as they are out of date’ to which she replied that they had been in the fridge and if we didn’t want them the dogs would eat them! I didn’t reply that dogs also lick their own arses and eat each others shit but it was a close thing…

Mary asked us to fruit pick and off we went into the nettles – we reckon they are nearly 7 foot tall some of them, armed with gloves and a machete and buckets and found and stripped all of the gooseberries. We got a fair few blackcurrants too and then Mary came to ask Ady to move some branches into the goats area and for me to do some blackcurrant picking in the other area. Davies spent his afternoon building a very cool den in the woodland, Scarlett spent some time currant pioking with me and some climbing very high up into the trees so Ady got scared and begged her to come down again 😆

I spent the last hour picking blackcurrants in the nettles, but actually I was quite happy doing that, I find it quite theraputic picking fruit although I do have numb fingertips from nettle stings and gooseberry bush thorns. Ady got shown how to use a gas cutter by the resident blacksmith and was making holes in some more fire baskets for ventilation. It looked like a very cool spark making job to do so I asked to have a go too and we ended up working an extra hour just because we were enjoying it so much.

When we’d finished Bob found yet another battery for the caravan and we now actually have a shower working in there – not sure how long it will hold it’s charge but Ady had a shower and did all the washing up so he was happy. We were presented with a bucket of mange tout and then offered some eggs. We overheard Bob saying ‘no don’t give them those ones, give them the fresh ones’ before taking us into the shed and giving us some hens and ducks eggs. Ady asked for something else to go with it too and we were told to see Joe – Mary’s boyfriend – for some potatoes, so I went off with the kids to see Joe and get some firewood while Ady went with Bob to get the battery. I sent Scarlett back to ask for some milk intending to make omelettes and she came back with a whole pint :).

We could have cooked in either Willow or the caravan but we’ve been really enjoying cooking over the fire so decided to do that again and remembered we had a tin of ham and a tin of corned beef in the van so decided to make chips and fry the eggs to go with the ham and beef – we ate the mange tout raw as we were chopping up potatoes. Davies did potatoe chopping while I got the fire lit and then I cooked the chips over the fire and kept them warm in the oven in the caravan while Ady cooked the eggs. Dinner was delicious and we finished it off with toasted marshmallows, also from our emergency food stash using willow switches nicked out of the field.

We rang my parents and then ran up the hill again to catch the sun setting – we missed all but the very last tiny sliver of it. The kids played with the dog and the goose – Gerald and then they went in for a last half hour (which ended up being more like an hour) on their consoles while Ady and I drank a beer and watched the stars come out and chatted. We’re in agreement that this has been a real story-worthy host but will be more than ready to leave. We have enough food in the van to supplement whatever we’re given and this has proved to us how valuable our food stash is and given us more ideas of things to add to it for the future.

We have kept lots of empty weeks and have almost nothing happening WWOOF host wise in September so our final four months will be much less intense with hosts but give us the chance to take some time out, talk and discuss what we want to do next, see loads of Scotland, do some wild camping, try our hands at the hunting, fishing and foraging and living on as little as possible. We definitely feel a bit WWOOFed out in terms of doing the same mundane tasks of weeding, mowing, chopping wood (although I do actually really like chopping wood!) etc. and don’t feel as though we are learning as much as we hoped skills-wise, which is likely a consequence of only being around for a week although I do feel several of our hosts have rather misrepresented themselves in their listings. We are still learning loads just by being with this selection of people though and the little nuggets we do pick up every single day all add up when put together and we realised how much we have learn over all. I think in terms of hosts we were looking forward to from initial contacts we still have some of the best sounding ones ahead though so plenty still to look forward to 🙂

We went over for breakfast this morning and ate with Bob who appeared in the house just after we did. We’d been wondering about the domestic arrangements of who sleeps where as Bob and Mary are no longer a couple – but more on that later. Bob is like one of those teachers at school – really easy to get onto his favourite subject so he talks for ages and you don’t have to do any lessons! As it happens all of what he is talking about is actually very interesting – this morning it was details about subsidy cheques, grants, how the payments to farmers have changed over the years, historical stuff about butter mountains and wine lakes and other such financial stuff to do with farming. He is incredibly knowledgable and very good at explaining things.

The original plan was for us to do some fencing today – Bob had said he’d teach us how and then we could continue over the week. We have done a little fencing at various hosts but as always we said we’d never done it before. This is the best tactic as it doesn’t assume any prior knowledge and therefore means we get shown properly rather than being left to our own devices, everyone seems to do things slightly differently so we’d rather be taught ‘their way’ at each host and it reduces the expectation on us too! But Bob talked for so long he ran out of time to show us before he had to go off out to do something.

He set me up with the lawnmover and the kids with wheelbarrows to empty the cuttings on to the muck heap and then took Ady off to show him the beginning tasks for the morning. The mower was definitely older than me and far more grumpy! It was a bugger to start and then I couldn’t actually get it to stop at the end. It may have been self propelled at one point but it certainly wasn’t any more so pushing it up the slope of the lawn was interesting and there were loads of bits of bone, tennis balls and other dog detrius strewn on the lawn which I either didn’t want to touch to pick up, or missed in the long grass. Despite all that I got it mown pretty quick, the kids got rid of all the clippings and we went up to see what Ady was doing.

Ady had been tasked with digging out a mound ready to lay a fence and move any stones that would be in the way. So he was armed with a spade (couldn’t find a shovel) and a grumpy disposition. The kids made us tea and coffee and we listened to Popmaster. The other tasks associated with the fence were gathering some posts and some barbed wire from a heap of wood, behind the wheelbase of a caravan, lying on a bed of nettles. The nettles were taller than me, the wheelbase was rotten and uneven and kept wobbling and creaking as I climbed on it, there were rusty nails and screws at every corner, and the barbed wire was right at the back in great tangles. I dug out the posts but as getting the barbed wire would have involved clambering up the jenga-esque pile of rotten wood with only nettles or barbed wire to fall on if you wobbled I decided that was a definite NO and forbade Ady from doing it either. As that effectively left me redundant I went off to chop some more wood for an hour and the kids went off to crush some cans.

Lunchtime was called and we went in to find the rather offputting fishy smell from the morning that I had assumed was catfood was infact lunch – fish pie. There was a note to say ‘fish pie in the oven, sprouts as per instructions’ on the table and a bag of frozen sprouts making a puddle next to it. Ady put some sprouts on for him – the rest of us declined and upon serving out the pie I decided not to even try it and Davies took one bite and refused to eat any more. Ady and Scarlett ate it although they both said it wasn’t very nice. Davies and I went and made sandwiches in the van and brought them back over with us.

As we were finishing lunch which Bob joined us and then Mary appeared and asked me to pick some more fruit, showing me a place behind the polytunnel with nettles taller than me in and cautioning me not to cut down more of them than I had to (clearly we’d cut down too many yesterday) and to ensure I picked the blackcurrants leaving them on their stems. So I put on very long gloves and stamped and pulled nettles around the bushes and got two large bucketfuls. I actually quite enjoy fruit picking although I would rather it was not in a forest of stinging nettles and I’d rather be doing it with company than all alone but I was not going to get the kids in the middle of that and Ady was off doing something else. I stuck it for just over an hour before deciding I’d picked enough.

I went to find the others – Ady had been in the tractor collecting fire buckets and checking out the cows and Davies had been along with them which he’d loved. Bob is great with the kids but I guess being a father of four you’d expect that really. Ady had been talking to Bob though as he’d asked Mary last night if we could have a shower and been told probably not as the girls sometimes walk around naked upstairs and they might not like it. The caravan we are parked next to has a shower in it but the pump is battery driven and despite there being about 5 batteries here not a single one is holding charge so it doesn’t work. Last night I boiled a kettle and we all had a flannel wash in the sink which was fine but my hair was now disgusting and desperate for a wash and Ady had been digging for several hours so really needed a proper clean (don’t forget the campsite we were on at the weekend had no showers either, so although nothing to do with our hosts here we have not had a shower since we left Lynda’s on Thursday morning). There is also a really strange atmosphere with both Bob and Mary asking us to do different things and us not really knowing which to listen to, we’re being left to our own devices with regard to food which is fine but needs clarifying as to what is happening really. Bob apologised and rang Gill to come and meet us.

So Gill is Bob’s new partner, who he has been with for a couple of years and they live together in a caravan on the land. Most of the time. They live in the house in winter as their caravan gets too cold and Gill is currently living somewhere else looking after her dying father, along with her sister who she doesn’t get on with. And told me all about in great detail, along with slagging Mary off, also in great detail. Mary and her new partner apparently live in another caravan and only the daughters live in the house. There are four dogs all of whom seem to live in various places, mostly wherever they can palm them off to – Mary asked Ady yesterday if we wanted one to come and sleep on our bed – erm NO! and they all hang around us of an evening. On the plus side I am no longer really scared of dogs – certainly cautious of unknown ones but not terrified any more having spent so much time around them, but I am far from in love with these ones. The split is by no means amicable and Mary will eventually be leaving the farm altogether at which point Gill and Bob will move into the house and clean everything up and it should all be returned to the type of place mentioned in the WWOOF directory and their website but for now it has much more in common with a war zone really.

Gill got us some sausages for dinner tonight and with prompting from Ady also provided some rolls. Not at all sure that this constitutes feeding us properly really and as there is no shop in walking distance we will likely be resorting to our food stash in Willow to help with dinners if this continues. Ah well, only two more nights…

So all now much clearer we helped Bob drive some cattle down the fields, through the farmyard and into the shed. Two calves needed ear tags, three cows needed replacement ear tags. We’d done a bit of ear tagging on sheep before but never cattle and they are a different matter altogether. Scarlett and I watched from the other side of the railings as Ady and Bob moved them about into the cattle crush to tag their ears. Interesting stuff and with plenty of interesting tidbits of information from Bob about pedigree naming of cattle, milk and suckler herds and so on.

That took us to gone 6pm so we got the fire lit to cook on and banked it right up to burn off and make ashes. Ady put the kettle on and realised we were out of milk so nipped down to ask Mary if we could have some milk for tea. He got a really frosty response and a ‘I suppose you can have a little, just for tea’ and came back with half a mugful. This was the last straw for me so I went storming down to deal with it. We had just worked a 9 hour day, dealing with nettles, cow shit, jealous ranting of some sort of love quadrangle participant, wood chopping, ditch digging and dog sitting, been refused a shower and now more or less refused milk. I asked if we were able to have a shower, fully expecting the same response Ady had got last night and ready to reel off my full list of grievances and got a rather scared ‘yes’ in return. So I asked where it was and was told and said ‘fine, I’ll get everyone else’ and marched off again. When we came back one of the terriers was attacking the gosling Scarlett has been cuddling even though Scarlett was holding it up and Mary was yelling at Scarlett ‘just smack it!’ I got hold of the dog, which is just really poorly discplined and gave it a bit of a shake and shouted which no doubt really showed Mary my temper. All very fraught and just far harder work than it needs to be really.

We had our shower and very lovely it was too, despite the house being in utter disarray and chaos and then came back up to cook our tea. We will stay for the week but it has been arranged for us to visit a neighbouring farm on Friday for the day anyway and we’d already decided to leave on Friday night as I don’t see any purpose to hanging on here on our days off which means we only have two days left to work. It is a great shame as I can see how much there could be here and how much we could learn. I was reading their visitors book today and it goes back about 10 years with loads of lovely comments from previous WWOOFers saying what a fab place it is. Bob is hugely knowledgable and happy to share what he knows and teach us things but there is just too much friction and atmosphere here with no one wanting to actually look after us as WWOOFers but both of them wanting to get us to do work. I really think that in this period before things get sorted out with their domestic situation they should not be taking WWOOFers in as it is not a fair environment to thrust strangers into and although I suspect they think they are coping well with it all they really are not. Domestic discord is one of the things I find personally most difficult to be around and we are certainly finding ourselves caught in teh middle of way too much of it this year.

On a positive note though we had a lovely evening the four of us 🙂 We ate our sausages and rolls, cooked over the fire, I found a stash of ketchup sachets in a McDonalds cup in the van which we’d forgotten we had and meant we could have ketchup after all as we thought we had run out 🙂 Just before sunset we all raced to the top of the hill to sit and watch it which was beautiful and fun. The others ran down too but I needed a wee and I don’t run well downhill anyway (running uphill, infact running at all is a pretty new idea), then we read bedtime stories by the campfire which was also very lovely before coming inside for hot chocolate. We’re laughing a lot at the moment – we have plenty of material here to laugh at 😉 and sitting round a fire chatting in the evenings is one of the very lovely things about this year. Being outside, getting to know each other so well away from the distractions of home and talking about what we’d like to do next, what our dreams are and how to make them come true is just so lovely. There are plenty of cautionary tales to be learnt from our hosts so far, we’ve seen more than our share of dodgy relationships which is very sad but I hope that in seeing all these examples of how not to do things we are getting the benefit of their experiences and strengthening our own relationships in order to ensure we don’t make these mistakes ourselves.

We’re at New House Farm this week. Bob and Mary seem very nice but clearly domestic issues are rife as they have seperated. We’ve met two of their four daughters who also seem nice and some of the many people who seem to live and work on the land here including a blacksmith, a guy who builds yurts and camping pods and another bloke who does banger racing and stores his cars here.

Bob seems very shrewd; he grew up on this farm and took it over 19 years ago. Although the website promises archaeological farm trails there is just a leaflet detailing points of interest around the farm with quotes from an archaeologist and all of the markers around the farm trail so you know where to stop and read the relevant text have gone missing. The leaflet was produced with grant money and therein seems to lie a lot of the great promises here – they do all the paperwork and sing the right songs to get grants, funding, subsidy payments and so on but appear to do very little in the way of actually delivering all these things. We’ve seen no evidence of veg box schemes, there are barely any animals here aside from ducks, chickens, geese and a pair of goats and some sheep that need to be kept in view as they are ailing or lame and the farm dogs. No actual farming as such seems to go on and the land is being almost entirely used for renting out either as camping ground or to local people for their work – one of the blokes is growing hazel and willow in part of a field for his own businesses for example.

We have use of a caravan parked next to Willow but the shower doesn’t seem to work and I’m not at all confident that Bob will actually get it sorted, so we’ve had washes using boiled kettle water in the sink (which is fine, we’re quite content with that, although a shower would be nice). The mifi doesn’t work in the caravan either so we’ll likely spend our evenings in Willow anyway.

So today started with breakfast in the house at 830am – toast, cereal etc was all put out for us to sort ourselves out, which we tend to prefer really. We’d already been shown our first task for today when we arrived yesterday of sorting through a pile of wood to chop up for logs and kindling and stack to season, so we got on with that. Davies and Scarlett spent some time sorting out cans – they recycle all the campers rubbish and sell on the aluminium and steel cans but they need sorting and crushing so they were armed with a magnet and told to test to see if they had steel in or not, crush them and put into seperate piles. They then spent some time walking the dogs (three terriers and a larger cross) and cuddling Gerald the orphaned and very tame gosling who is Scarlett’s new best friend!

The kids spent some time with us too and both had a go with the smaller kindling axe and the full size log axe – Davies was much better with the kindling, Scarlett much better at the log splitting.

At lunchtime it was self service again, this time pasta with sauce followed by fruit, rice pudding and chocolate biscuits. Bob arrived home then and made us a cup of tea and stood chatting to us for nearly an hour.

Our job this afternoon was technically fruit picking, but we did have to go armed with long armed gloves and a machete as the fruit bushes were surrounded by nettles and hogweed so we had to battle through that first to actually get to the berries and currants. We got a good crop though and that took us to 5pm.

Dinner tonight was burgers, sausages and some rolls supplied for us to barbecue using one of the fire dishes for the campsite – old wheels mounted on steel plates and legs. We tried to do the farm trail but gave up and came back to sit round a campfire, cook our dinner and chat about what happens next. As we shared with friends this week we have started to consider our next options and have a list of 4 possible ideas.
1. Go home, find some work that pays the bills, preferably both of us part time, with as few outgoings as possible. Give over the garden to growing, try to get another allotment, increase our poultry to some breeding and get involved in the Transition Town stuff happening in Worthing and other exciting ventures.
2. Sell the house and go in with my parents. They would also sell theirs and we’d then find a property with enough land for us, a dwelling for them and some sort of business for them to run.
3. Sell the house and buy a chunk of land somewhere with all of the required elements to try self sufficiency.
4. Take another year at a slower pace and spend longer periods with selected people we have already stayed with and been invited back to, to learn more, see greater slices of the lifestyle and enjoy this way of life for longer.

I am very conscious of having been the one driving our current adventure so I am keen to take a backseat and let the other three have their say about what they want to do next rather than listening to me persuading them to come round to my way of thinking. No one was up for 1 so that can be pretty much ruled out I think. We all liked 2 or 3 and think 4 might be a good plan as either 2 or 3 would likely take a long time to actually make happen. Anyway, time for all of that to be further debated yet.

It was blissful sitting out as the sun set round the fire chatting about exciting futures –

And now as I am falling asleep over my laptop it is time to turn off the light.

I’ve missed so many days I imagine this post won’t have much change out of about a thousand words 🙂

So, where were we?

Wednesday I believe 🙂

Lynda and Stuart were both off out for the day – Lynda still does childminding a couple of days a week for a local family who keep having another baby once the youngest starts school, which keeps Lynda working 🙂 She had a nice easy day though as the baby had been awake most of the previous night so had slept most of the day – Scarlett used to do just the same for Lynda as I recall… Stuart is now retired from his job (Royal Navy defence engineering of some sort, never quite worked out what) but does a day a week volunteering at a local steam train organisation, is the fire man on the trains once a month and spends one day a week in the workshop doing maintenance and getting to use the tools. He loves it and was looking forward to retirement for that very reason when we met them 8 years ago :).

We had a leisurely morning before walking down into the town. We did the rounds of the charity shops again, got lunch from the bakery and then picked up supplies for dinner in the supermarket before walking back again. It’s amazing how used we are now to walks that would have not even crossed our minds about jumping in the car for back when we lived at home – I always thought we were fairly active and outdoors-based but I realise how reliant we were on the car now that we actively try not to use Willow unless we really need to.

Dinner was lasagne, salad and garlic bread so I set to getting that prepared and then both Lynda and Stuart arrived home, hungry and ready for their tea. We ate, I read the kids some story and then they headed off to bed. We sat up with Lynda and Stuart savouring our last night with them and messing about with Skype which I can’t seem to get any sound on for my computer. I am guessing there is a problem with the internal microphone which I’ve never tried to use before. It seems to insist there is one but I can’t get it to work.

We also bid on an awning on ebay – Ady has been going on about getting an awning for the van and I had not been convinced we needed one really but one came up for just over £100 and it was collection only from near the Trafford Centre. Stuart said he’d run Ady there to collect it so we bid on it and then lost it at the end. As always when you lose something on ebay you start desperately looking for another one and we bid £31 on a VW awning that matched Willow’s colours, collection only in Warrington ending the following day, never expecting it to actually go for that.

Thursday morning we had intended to stay until the post arrived as I had bought two freeloaders online at Millets, as they had them on buy one, get one half price with free delivery, meaning the two cost just over £50 which was a good price for them. So far I am reserving judgement until we have tested them more – the first charge has to be by USB and that charged my phone and Davies’ psp up really well but the solar charge the following day didn’t seem as effective. If nothing else they are a good back up for keeping charged when we do have access to electricity, even if the solar is just a trickle, but it would be nice to think we could charge phones and consoles with them using the sun too.

In the end they arrived really early by about 9am so we were starting to think we’d be able to head off early as although we were still winnning the auction on the awning we really didn’t expect to win so didn’t want to hang around for it. Ady and I were packing stuff into the van when Ady noticed Willow had a totally flat tyre on the front passenger side 🙁 Cue much faffing with the manual, unpacking things to get to the tools behind the seats, struggling to get the spare out from it’s suspended under the back of the vehicle position and then Stuart and Ady taking ages to jack the van up with Stuart getting out additional scissor jacks and both of them pressed up against the garage door as we had parked as far forward as possible on their drive meaning it was really inaccessible.

Eventually the tyre was changed and Stuart and Ady whizzed down to ATS for a new one. The bloke there said he thought it might just be the valve and it turned out it was! So he fixed that, re-inflated it and then didn’t charge Ady anything 🙂 Hurrah for nice people 🙂

By then we were getting later so made sandwiches to take for lunch, bade Lynda and Stuart very sentimental farewells – they are so lovely to us, seem to have so much faith and pride in what we’re doing… wish they were my in-laws 🙂 – Lynda pushed £10 each into the kids hands and we drove off. I whizzed into Tescos for dinner for that night, alcohol supplies etc. and we headed to the campsite.

The weekend plans came about when I sent Babs a message asking if we could come and park on their driveway on Thursday, Friday and Saturday to visit with them and hopefully the Barts for the weekend. Babs replied that The Barts and they were actually camping together that weekend to celebrate Marcus’ birthday and we hatched the plan to come too as a surprise :). As lovely an idea as it was to keep it a secret from Kirsty it simply wasn’t doable as Kirsty wanted to meet up once we said we were in the area and clearly we would have no reason at all not to do so as The Barts would be a definite meet up for us if we were anywhere near them. So I had to come clean as I simply couldn’t think of any excuse 🙂 Kirsty did manage to keep it a secret from James, Marcus and Alex though which meant we did have the lovely moment of watching their faces as we pulled up, they registed the van that looked just like Willow and realised it was Willow 🙂

Babs was doing whizzing back and forth with small car, child needing to be at choir practise, husband and tent needing collecting. We got set up as did Kirsty and James and then Babs and co returned, dropped Chris and tent off and whizzed off again. We assisted Chris in tent errecting which mostly involved Kirsty knowing what she was doing and the rest of us just laughing at features such as pouches for tent poles and sachets for guy ropes 😆 We might have already been drinking before we started…

The kids set their precedent for the entire weekend by disappearing off at the top of the next field into a wooded area where they created a camp. This seemed to involve lots of cooperation and teamwork, wilderness tasks such as whittling, flint knapping and brush clearing. I was hugely impressed with the way they organised themselves, taught each other skills, worked together and really enjoyed themselves. I did feel sorry for French Chloe who seemed to struggle with the dynamics, the language and very possibly a lack of tolerance on both sides but in the main it was yet another lovely example of what fab kids we all have :).

It was a fairly early night as it got cold and I think we were all saving ourselves for the following two nights too. Chris had to be up for work and as had ended up winning the awning a plan had been hatched for Ady and James to go to Warrington to collect it.

Friday The blokes all left, the kids all played and Kirsty, Babs and I spent most of the day huddled together under the tarp in the rain. Eventually we gave up on outside and went and sat in the van, having thrown sandwiches in the general direction of children who all seemed to choose to take them and head back to their camp anyway. Ady and James were gone for ages and seem to have gone via all sorts of places including McDonalds for lunch, Asda for beers (and the wrong pizza!) and the last address on the satnav which was not the correct one 😆 They brought back the awning and the sunshine, which meant we had a go, infact several goes at getting it to work which included moving the van from one pitch to the next (we’d decided to move after one night anyway as the original pitch was too sloping), reversing in, driving in and then giving up and reversing in again. General hilarity ensued at my ‘helpful’ instructions to Ady of ‘Go forwards. The other way!’

The awning sadly was not to be – as gorgeous and well matched to Willow as it was to look it simply didn’t fit. The door opened out onto the frame which meant you couldn’t actually get in or out properly and the canvas would quickly tear or get worn, if indeed it didn’t just keep getting dragged out of the awning rail. We tried all sorts of ways but just couldn’t get it to work so sadly it will get relisted on ebay as we can’t carry it with us and I can’t think of a simple and effective way to modify it really 🙁 Am quite sad about it (both as it looked lovely and it cost time and money getting it, which we may or may not recoup on ebay) but hopefully Ady will now accept we don’t need an awning as I can’t really see how any design would cope with the door – I think they work better with vans with sliding doors and from reading the CF forum it seems to be an issue finding one that does fit.

Chris arrived back and a mostly communal dinner was sorted (Davies, Scarlett and I had pizza which we’d been craving for the last few weeks anyway as we don’t like chilli but Ady happily joined in). A rowdy game of mexican wave with a twist was played round the circle of camping chairs, there was some dancing to 90s club music on the radio and general silliness, which didn’t altogether stop when the kids all went to bed… 😉

Saturday I had a spooky moment when I woke in the early hours and thought ‘camping chairs! must tell J&J to bring camping chairs!’ and then remembered again later in the morning when we were all up and drinking tea. I went to send a text message and as I started typing it my phone flashed up with Jan’s picture and started ringing. I answered with ‘how funny, I was just sending you a text!’ and got Jonathan’s deep ‘hello’ back in response 😆 The Janathan phenomena! 😆

After lunch Kirsty, Babs and I decided to walk to the shop but discovered it closed for lunch. We consoled ourselves with a visit to the local farm which sells milk 24 hours a day. We were expecting an honesty box and a self service but found a bloke there 🙂 We decided we should make full use of the 24 hour a day service and ensure we took the bottle back in the middle of the night. These services need to be used – use it or lose it – and we don’t want to go back there a year from now to find it has closed or worse still a Tesco has opened in it’s place!!! 😆 😆

We did venture back to the shop an hour or so later and took various children with us to rather overwhelm the shop with our bread and sweets purchases. As we walked back up the lane we saw J&J’s car pull ahead of us just as we were speculating as to whether they might be there or not yet. So great to see J & J and catch up properly on their news 🙂 We had a lovely afternoon and evening with a late night stroll to return the empty milk bottle and purchase another. We also told anyone we met about being able to buy the milk, whilst at the same time being conscious of safety and stranger danger.

When we got back we did some star gazing and spotted some satelittes, chatted, draped ever increasing amounts of blankets around outselves and decreased in number until just Ady, James and Chris were left whereupon I was also asleep in bed so can’t really blog about anything else that might have happened.

Sunday That’s today 🙂

We all did packing up, yet another example of how great it is to have a van rather than a tent 🙂 We drank lots of tea, the kids put on an excellent mime to a Horrible Histories song that they had been working on which was very funny. I love that the quality (and indeed length) of the ‘shows’ we are required to watch has improved so dramatically over the years 😉 We took the opportunity of everyone in one place with chairs to get a self timer 🙂

We helped take down the Raines tent in much the same fashion as we had helped put it up (ie not very helpfully and with much giggling about sachets) and then put Babs in the bag to see if we could.

J&J left, Chris left on the first leg of the Grand Raine Removal and the rest of us sat around, opened some tins of cider and giggled at a policeman talking to some villagers. Chris returned and after a huge group cuddle with everyone (other campers had their suspicions about us being mental utterly confirmed at that point) we all headed off.

We came via a KFC – have been promising the kids fast food for weeks and not managed it, this counted as dinner with just toast for later before bed so was a perfect idea and arrived at our next host. Will reserve judgement on everything until we have actually done some WWOOFing but we enjoyed a walk around the camping fields and a few chapters of story before bed for the kids. I’m waiting for flickr to upload and trying to pretend the alarm won’t be going off quite as early as it will be…

We’re loving these few days at Lynda and Stuart’s, it’s like we never left home to do anything mad and crazy!

This morning we rang my Mum as it’s her birthday and then we all hung around chatting / playing / drinking tea. The kids and I walked to the bakers to get some rolls (and some cakes) for lunch and then we watched the rain falling which cooled everything down beautifully and made all the pavements and garden flowers smell lovely (I do love light summer rain 🙂 ).

Davies wanted to watch a Pirates of the Caribbean film with Stuart who had only seen 1 & 2 and I wanted to wander down into the town to get some bio-oil as someone had suggested it would be good to put on my hogweed scars and I know from using it on previous wounds it does aid the healing. So I took Tarly and we left the rest of them here. We had a lovely couple of hours, walking into town via the park which has a small duck pond with ducks, coots, moorhens, a pair of swans and a heron on it. We stopped to stroke cats along the way and chattered about everything and nothing. She’s lovely company is Scarlett :).

In town we got the bio oil from Boots, did a quick tour of the charity shops and picked up a couple of cassette tapes for the tape player in Willow and the 3 pound shops where I picked up some hair accessories for me as I’m bored of my hair and passed the Thorntons which has a cafe in it – the only Thortons cafe I’ve ever known, where I regularly used to go and have hot chocolates when the kids were really tiny and we lived up here. They used to do a dark hot chocolate made with part cocoa and served with cream which was divine and I was telling Tarly about it so she asked if we could go and have a hot chocolate in there. It is stupidly expensive at £3 a cup and normally I’d say no but as it was just two of us instead of 4 I thought we’d splash out :). So we had hot chocolate (Thornton’s chocolate melted into hot milk with whipped cream, marshmallows and more grated chocolate, plus all drinks are served with one Thorntons chocolate on the side) – Scarlett had a large and I had a regular. She learnt a valuable lesson about hot chocolates, that less is more 😉

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very lovely but we both felt slightly sick afterwards 😆

We walked back via the park again.

More sitting around chatting before dinner, washed down with some of the mead from our last hosts. Scarlett and I made some plasticine dragons and I found the words to Puff the Magic Dragon and read them out to her, which made her cry 🙁 She’s so sentimental under her tough exterior, no idea where she gets that from 😉 We rang my Mum again for an other-end-of-her-birthday chat and then I read the kids some stories before bed. Lynda and I looked at wedding pictures from their younger son’s wedding a few weeks ago which was very pink, princessy and expensive and we told a few more anecdotes about our year. Sharing our stories with friends is a real highlight of this experience so far :). Looking forward to more of that later this week.

Tomorrow is our last full day here and Lynda and Stuart are both out for much of the day working so we have the house to ourselves and are cooking dinner. we’ll probably wander into town again and then have plans to cook lasagne – I’m really looking forward to being in the kitchen 🙂

Today I’d arranged to meet up with my friend Jay. I met her online quite a few years ago and although we’ve only met in real life a handful of times she is one of those people I wished I live next door to – I know we’d be in and out of each others houses all the time, quaffing wine together and being raucous and unruly. She has just started HEing her oldest boy (L, 12) so when we decided to take this week off she was one of the several people I was very keen to try and meet up with. A flurry of emails back and forth last week had us making plans to meet in Manchester at the Museum of Science and Industry which is a fab place we went to fairly regularly when we lived up here but have not been back to since we moved away.

So after breakfast this morning we packed up sandwiches and headed off to the metro station, about a 15 minute walk from Lynda’s and caught a tram into the city centre. The family return ticket was just £6 which we thought was a fantastic bargain :).

The museum is next to Granada studios and years ago you could look out of a top floor window in the museum and see down onto the set of Coronation Street which was alway rather surreal. I was telling the kids about it and said ‘this famous programme, you’ll not have heard of it, called Coronation Street..’ and Scarlett interupted with ‘I know about Coronation Street, I love it, it says about how the show is brought to you by different letters and numbers…’. Er no, that would be Sesame Street! 😆

We arrived at practically the same time as Jay and L, had a loud and affectionate reuniting with each other in the street and then Jay took us all into the coffee shop at the museum and insisted on buying coffee and cakes for all 🙂

We eventually roused ourselves to go into the actual museum and spent ages playing with the registration cards in the foyer where you swiped the barcode on a card, had your picture taken and answered some questions then your picture got beamed up onto a sort of sculpture of screens suspended from the ceiling – liked that 🙂

Next an interactive game about nuclear energy that we all six played together, a wander around the cotton and fabric areas and some marvelling at a coat made of thistle down. We spent some time in the Learning Lab area which was cool but rather invaded by a couple of groups of schoolchildren. Jay and I particularly enjoyed the area where your movements broke light beams and triggered sound effects 🙂

We decided our cake had gone down sufficiently to eat lunch at about 130pm so we went outside and sat on some benches. Jay and I enjoyed a can of Pimms each (which drew looks from the teachers and helpers with the school groups which walked past us) and the kids sat chatting, feeding pigeons and playing a game on L’s phone (which drew looks from the schoolchildren).

After lunch we walked round a bit more – the steam engines, the Manchester underground stuff including the sewers and the gasworks which all have authentic smells and sounds. It was incredibly hot so we called it a day and spent the last hour before Jay and L had to get back sitting on a different bench chatting. Jay very kindly bought D&S a small gift each in the museum shop when she bought something each for her children and then we waved them off as they had to catch trains and trams and busses back to Leeds.

We wanderered back to the metro, got the tram back, popped into Tescos and got back to Lynda’s about 6pm, feeling utterly exhausted. The heat, the busyness of the city and all the walking had worn us out!

Another lovely dinner with Lynda and Stuart, plenty more sitting outside enjoying their garden and chatting. I read Davies and Scarlett the last couple of chapters of the current Adventure series book we were on and one of the books from Eric before they went to bed and then we sat outside watching bats swoop and drinking wine. Loving this real feeling of being on holiday :). Even more excitingly the rent has already gone in to our bank account this month so no having to chase the letting agent or being quite so frugal with spending for the rest of the week.

Saturday morning we got up and packed up. It always takes longer than you expect and it was no exception. We said goodbye to Lisa and Carina who were heading into town and then John came to say Eric had rung to ask if we were going to visit him or not. We’d decided as it was now no longer morning we should probably get going and give it a miss but on a whim I changed my mind and decided we should go after all – opportunities like this don’t come up often and I was still very excited about having met him. A quick search of my blog for his name shows how often I mentioned his books over the years, plus John was very enthusiastic about what an amazing place he lived in and how worth a visit it was. So I rang Eric to check it was still okay to go and he said it was and he was looking forward to seeing us again.

We headed over to say goodbye to John who was next door with Ian the neighbour and then got talking to him and had the ’10 minute guided tour’ of Ian’s which lasted more like 45 minutes but was fascinating and very entertaining. is a right character, 63 years old, he used to squat on the site of Pen Y Bonc some 40 years ago with a load of other hippies. They got chucked off the land and he drifted abroad for a long time, spending time as a lumberjack in Canada and learning about trees, having a couple of kids and bumming around living in campervans. He returned having made a fair bit of cash and bought some land, found an old book about traditional Welsh apple trees and managed to track down one that had all but died out. He’s pretty famous in the apple world 😉 and is even on wikipedia (that measure of notoriety!)

He was most interested in us, what we’re doing, where we think we’ll end up and then said we’d be welcome to come and stay any time and could park up the van on his land whenever we liked, no need to do any work in exchange and he’d happily teach us about apple trees if we were interested. Wow, an apprentiship with Ian the Apple Man! 🙂 I so think we need to go round again!

Running very late now we said a final goodbye to Lisa and John, who presented us with a bottle of mead, a jar of honey and invitation to come back any time. Sob and sniff.

Then, on to Eric’s. Ady was muttering about it being a silly idea, the van not being up to it, us running too late and other such dark murmurings but I was adamant and I am so glad I was :).

We arrived – stunning views of Snowdonia, Llanberis lake, the Menai straits and gorgeous Welsh countryside. We decided to leave Willow at the top of his lane as it was very steep and narrow and she was overheating rather with the warm day and the need to drive up and down hills slowly. On the walk down we discovered a baby shrew scuttling about and desperately trying to get up the leg of my jeans 😆 We rescued it from that fate and put it somewhere safe before carrying on walking down the hill. Amazing sights and sounds at every turn

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and just a feeling of real peace, calm and wellbeing. We stumbled across various people, all smiling but silent until we found a couple who were chatting to each other so we felt able to ask where we might find Eric. They were all attending a meditation course so we were right not to disturb the silent ones, but these had broken to eat and were able to point us to Eric’s own dwelling.

We were greeted with real enthusiasm, Eric made us coffee, ginger beer and cakes which we sat in the sunshine and enjoyed before getting a guided tour of the place. We were not able to go inside any of the buildings as they were all being used for the course but what an amazing place. There are a whole host of buildings made from all sorts of materials including straw bales, cob, cordwood, timber and thatch. Round houses, hobbit holes, octagonal dwellings, fairy castles – you name it.

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It was truly magical. I can totally see how Eric is inspired to write such beautiful stories and songs living there. You can’t help but see glimpses of fairies playing in the flowers, see shadows of dragons flying over the mountains and hear magical laughter in the waterfall and stream that runs alongside the path ending in a gorgeous natural pool at the foot of the land where people were bathing.

Eric showed us the growing space which has been let go to seed and brambles but has so much potential and the latest building addition – a cedarwood longhouse with vast windows in the roof so you can see the sky and the stars at night and a porch almost as big as the cabin to sit out on and look down on the lake and up at the mountains. He is looking for the right people to come and live there, grow fruit and veg, help keep the place running and be part of his small team. He asked if we’d be interested in WWOOFing there, possibly next spring? I have no idea where we’ll be or what we’ll be doing but we’re certainly racking up a whole host of opportunities and invitations to keep us going and mean we may never even have to make a decision to do anything other than keep saying yes to all the offers we get!

We sat back down and Eric asked us loads about ourselves, what we had done before, why we were doing this, where we thought we might end up. He loved the idea of Home Ed, of our WW adventure and we left with two signed books, a promise to email him with the blog address so he can follow us, information about his autobiography which he is halfway through writing and huge hugs for both children who he seemed very taken with. As we walked away he put an arm round me and said ‘well done, you are doing something amazing…’ 🙂 Meeting heroes should always go just like that!

We walked back up the lane and then drove along the gorgeous Welsh coastline and across to Manchester to Lynda and Stuart’s, arriving just before 7pm to hugs and kisses, a glass of wine put into my hand, a glass of Guinness put into Ady’s and the smell of sausages and chicken wafting from the kitchen to greet us 🙂

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We ate, we chatted, the children played, we caught up on each others news and finally we all went to bed. In real beds with duvets and soft pillows and everything 🙂

Sunday we breakfasted on croissants outside in the garden – the perfect way to start any morning really :). Ady, the kids and I had a wander down the road to post my Mum’s birthday card while Lynda and Stuart got lunch going and they suggested a walk to a nearby lake if we wanted to walk our breakfast off so we did. Through a park – it would have been rude not to check out the play equipment 😉
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and then to the lake which was just lovely, people fishing and walking around it, filled with ducks and ducklings, geese and goslings, coots and chicks, moorhens, a solitary swan and a heron nesting on an island in the middle of the lake. We walked all around it, laughed heartily at Scarlett who spotted a pair of drakes and said to me ‘I think they might be gay. Duck gay’ and then spotted a pair of ducks coming towards the drakes and said ‘oh no, here come their real partners’ 😆 Love the idea of ‘duck gay’ 😆
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We walked back and enjoyed sitting around in the garden. Lunch was delicious – roast beef and all the trimmings followed by apple pie or trifle. We always get so well looked after here :). My Mum’s competition sensor must have gone off as she rang me to ask where we were and was most huffy when I raved about how well we were being treated 😉

Ady and I played badminton, Scarlett and I played skittles, both kids and I did some drawing, the kids played on the swing, helped Stuart water the veg patch and made pirate ships out of the toy blocks and lego. We helped tidy up and just enjoyed a lazy afternoon all together in the sunshine. It was lovely 🙂

We eventually moved inside and had sandwiches for tea with leftover meat, then we all had baths (oh the bliss!)
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and now I’m sitting in bed with the laptop having fully caught up everywhere about to enjoy another nights sleep in a bed before meeting up with a friend tomorrow in Manchester for the day.

I enjoyed a lie in til about 930am as did Davies. Ady and Scarlett had been doing some hand washing of the last of our dirty clothes which led to some amusing spin drying before we hung them out 🙂

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Davies’ hair has been getting ever more unruly so I took to it with the scissors and you can now see his face and he can see out again 🙂

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Then we headed off into Bangor. We were determined to spend a Millets voucher that Ady had been given from his work as a leaving present so were pleased to find they had a sale on. We still rather struggled to find things we actually wanted but got a pair of trousers for Ady, a top for me, a communal jumer that fits both Ady and I and hats for all four of us. We picked up a birthday card for my Mum which I need to post tomorrow and then walked to the pier, calling in on charity shops as we went.

We walked past a very random bloke walking backwards up and down the seafront. We watched him for a while but got quite freaked out by him – it was a stretch of road at the bottom of a fairly rough feeling road with two very loud women swigging vodka out the bottle on the corner. I googled ‘walking backwards Bangor’ when we got home and found someone else had videoed him a few weeks ago and put it on youtube which entertained us greatly!

We wanted to visit Bangor pier as we had been there years ago when the kids were tiny and we stayed in Bangor the night before getting a ferry to Ireland, so the plan was to get the photo updated 🙂

January 2004
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July 2011

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We walked to the end – it’s the only pier I have ever had to pay to get on to, only £1.30 for all of us but still very random to pay to enter – and had an ice cream. I particularly liked the fact that the slats of the pier continued into the loos, so I could have a wee while still looking through the gaps at the sea 🙂

Then we turned round and walked all the way back again! We went via Millets again as we had decided to spend the remainder of the voucher on two chairs. We started off not taking chairs with us and bringing four tiny fold up stools but quickly realised they are no good for relaxing on outside the van and bought two chairs a while ago but had decided to get two more so we all had one as we think they justify their space in the van.

We got almost all the way back and were really flagging on the final half mile when Lisa and John’s neighbour Ian pulled up in his van and offered us as lift the rest of the way. We jumped at the chance so scrambled in the back. It’s a shame we didn’t get to spend more time with Ian as he is really interesting. He squatted here on this land 40 years ago and learnt his tree pruning, grafting and growing trade before heading to Canada where he made loads of money and was able to come back and buy the land along with a couple of houses which he lets out. He lives in the coolest log cabin (two storey) which he got retrospective planning permission for and then jacked the house up with car jacks from B&Q in order to get the height 😆 He has a pond which the kids did some dipping in with two rafts floating on the surface which looked great fun to leap from one to the next and back out again but I left to the children as I could see if was beyond me 😉

Back to the static for a cup of tea and sit down. Ady washed Willow and then we were showing the kids the Day trip to Bangor song on youtube when Lisa arrived and stayed for a chat.

John came home and we all headed off – they took both their cars so they could give us a lift, into town to a Greek Taverna where they were treating us to a meal and to see their friend, a storyteller who was singing some of his own songs this evening. We met him briefly beforehand and were sitting eating when he came on. He has a fantastic voice, really strong and pure and was singing some great songs about rubbish, waste, not trashing the world and so on which the kids and I were really enjoying. I leant over to ask Lisa what his name was so I could look him up later and she said ‘Eric Maddern’. When I explained he was one of our favourite authors she said ‘oh yes, I’d forgotten he writes childrens books too’ :).

Davies and I went to sit down next to his wife and watch the rest of his set and then I thanked him for his books which have given us such pleasure and said it was so great to meet him. He gave the kids a cuddle and we had our picture taken with him.

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He invited us to his home / camp to stay but we explained we are heading off tomorrow. Another time though most definitely 🙂 Still rather starstruck to have met him really 🙂

We got back about 1130 and D & S went straight to bed. Ady and I shared a cider and are now utterly worn out so are also off to bed.

When we arrived here the hosts daughter, Carina (14) was all depressed and mopey because she had had to cancel a trip to America due to a whiplash injury the previous week. Very understandably as the America trip sounded fab. The whiplash was from a slamming on the brakes incident in Lisa’s car and was the same as had happened last year. It seemed quite extreme for a non-impact incident really but when Ady got a lift to Tescos with Lisa he mentioned how fast and erratic her driving was and as they live down a windy, poor visibility, all but single track lane I could see how that could happen if she drove too fast.

Today I was here with Lisa while Ady went off with John and we talked about various things – her being an only child of a single mother (who died suddenly last year), family dynamics, parenting, education, value for our chosen path in life amoung our family and friends and selves. I happened to mention that I have yet to drive Willow since we left home and that I want to make sure I don’t not drive for this whole year as I think it would be a bad thing to be out of practise driving for that long. Lisa mentioned that she is a really nervous driver and no longer goes on motorways or even big roads any more as she has lost her nerve and gets really panicky. She then said that just last week she had had another slamming of brakes incident with Yannic (their son) in the car and wonders why this keeps happening to her…

This morning we did some feeding the plants in the polytunnel with wee solution, picking strawberrries, a bit of weeding and then some stripping dried herbs (tarragon, sage, majoram, savoury, rosemary) off their stalks and into brown paper bags to finish drying and putting others into jars. I also did some removing dried salad leaf seeds from their seed pods. Scarlett mostly helped and chatted to us, while Davies was making films on his mobile phone which he then sent me by text message!

After lunch Lisa took Carina off to school which left me with the washing and drying up. I did that and then carried on with the herbs. Davies and Scarlett brought me up a cup of tea and a plate full of fresh fruit and some chocolate which was very lovely 🙂 We had an interesting conversation about film making, casting, screenplays and actors and then they went off to play. I started to wonder what was keeping Lisa and then had a phonecall from John to say she had arrived with him and Ady (working at John’s sisters about 3 miles away) very upset as something had happened with Carina in the car and could I check their answerphone to make sure the school hadn’t rung them. I did and then just carried on with the herbs.

Lisa then arrived back, still flustered to say she had had yet another slamming brakes on incident and Carina was shaken and so was she. She then wanted to talk more and I confess to not being that keen to get into further discussions about her daughter struggling with friendships at school and their relationship with each other. She’s a strange one Lisa, sometimes really keen to have initimate conversations and be very friendly and other times very closed. She does a lot of soul baring without actually being that interested in learning anything about you in return which I find slightly disconcerting. I don’t think she’s ever really asked me a question about us or our lives.

Anyway, she went back off out again so I finished off the herbs and then picked a huge bowl of raspberries which actually took me half an hour past when I was supposed to finish but the picking was so good today with loads of ripe ones I was happy to finish on that high 🙂

The kids and I hung out in the static until Ady returned just after 6pm. He had been building with John who is putting up a wood cabin in his sisters garden and needed an extra pair of hands today. Ady really enjoyed it – Lisa appearing sobbing and hysterical in the middle of the afternoon aside! – and learnt lots about the green building style John knows about, so a useful day for him.

Dinner was late which meant everything else has ended up late but we had a nice evening with them and tomorrow they are taking us out for the evening as a friend of theirs is performing at a local Greek taverna doing music and storytelling and they have offered to take us out for dinner to watch. I’m mostly looking forward to not having an alarm clock set in the morning 🙂