You couldn’t make it up!

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 🙂