Moving on day again 🙂
But first I was covering the office as Jill was off buying furniture and Shirley was off volunteering at the TIC. I was tasked with ‘making new friends on twitter and facebook’ and given usernames and passwords for both accounts, so I spent a happy couple of hours following and friending and liking in hopes of reciprocal following and friending and liking to bolster Jill’s numbers. Not entirely sure it will actually translate as remotely profitable but if it raises her profile and gives her more online presence in such places I guess it brings her in line with other such businesses.
I also sat in on the VAT inspection that was going on, just by virtue of being in the room but I actually was able to answer some of the queries about the business 🙂 I’ll be being listed as an asset! 😉
Meanwhile Ady and the kids packed the van up and did a few last jobs such as watering plants and then it was time for us to head off. We’re only 7 miles away from Glastonbury at what I guess you’d class as a smallholding – 3-4 acres of land on an old quarry site, with 3 generations living in two adjoining houses – Jane and Rob, Jane’s parents and Jane & Rob’s two teenage children (a third is away at uni) who have been here for about 25 years. They currently have 4 sheep and 4 lambs, about 10 chickens and 3 cats. They sometimes have pigs reared from weaners to slaughter-ready and have at times had a bigger flock of sheep. They grow fruit and veg in a polytunnel, various raised beds and fruit cages and have lots of soft fruit and orchard type trees, woodland they coppice and pollard for wood burning and land used for grazing. There is a very small CL site for about 5 tents / caravans with basic facilities of water and chemical loo disposal (although we are able to run our hook up into the shed for power too). I’m not sure what Rob does although I assume he also works but Jane does some teaching on growing and cooking and preserving your own food locally. They have been WWOOFers themselves in the past and seem nice people. The two kids at home, aged 13 and 17 are lovely, really chatty, friendly, articulate teens.
We arrived at about 2pm, parked the van and then had a tour around the house and land before being put to work for a couple of hours moving some firewood around. There was a large pile in the back garden and several large heaps in what they refer to as ‘the top acre’ – up the hill and through several gates, all of which needed wheelbarrowing to the house, sorting into size and putting for further chopping if too large, bonfire burning if too skinny to bother with, wood burner pile for Jane and Rob if medium sized or Jane’s parents if very small. Davies and I proved better and building woodpiles than Scarlett and Ady who were hampered by Scarlett’s enthusiasm over technique and Ady’s lack of grasping the jenga style building of the woodpiles 😆
At about 530pm their daugthter, Catherine arrived home and took Davies and Scarlett off to introduce them to the chickens and play on the swing while Ady and I did the last couple of barrowloads of wood, then it was teatime. We met Brendon, their son over dinner – beetroot soup, home made bread, salads of peppers and feta cheese, tuna and sweetcorn and green leaves from the garden. It was all pretty nice despite the lack of meat although D&S mostly just ate the bread.
We chatted over dinner and they appear to be nice, normal people. We are working with the co-host tomorrow, which should be interesting as he is the actual person I corresponded with initially – through him we ended up at Paddington Farm and of course indirectly Jill at Middlewick so he has unwittingly shaped a lot of our experiences so far, so it will be good to finally meet him. We have been given bread, butter, milk and cereal to breakfast in the van all week as it is rather chaotic in the house trying to get the kids off to school so we are better off in here having a more leisurely start (which suits us just fine) and then we will be fed lunch and dinner by whichever host we are working with. Tomorrow there is the offer of an evening out in Glastonbury at a folk music evening which we may or may not take them up on depending on what the work is like and our mood at the end of the day.