Up early (for me) for me this morning and away down to the village for interviewing. We saw the three candidates and as we’d hoped by the end of the morning we had a clear and unanimous decision on the successful one. All three were very strong and gave good interviews but one just stood out above the rest and Lesley, Ali and I all agreed he was the best choice. We’ll let them know tomorrow and fingers crossed he accepts the job and will be in post mid-April.
We retired to Ali’s for a final chat on the candidates and to drink tea as Eve is off school ill so Ali needed to get back home. That done I came home for a very late lunch. I sent a couple of quick follow up emails and then dashed down to the fruit cage to finally plant the pear and plum trees so I can fully tick that off this weeks list. I started looking at the netting on the raised beds too but it was very cold and nearly 5pm so I just took off the damaged netting and will look at that again tomorrow (if there are any breaks between the forecast heavy rain).
Ady and I walked down to the shop to get some eggs – that feels pretty crap given how many chickens, ducks and geese we are feeding! We fed the animals on the way home and met Davies and Scarlett out on the croft with the goose who has been ailing for a few days. Scarlett had picked her up (as she has done most days, she is pretty tame) and we looked her over again to see if we could work out what the matter was before coming in for a cup of tea. As we looked out of the window we saw her flapping wildly so Ady went out to check on her and as he picked her up she went limp and died 🙁 Very sad and very strange.
The kids are pretty upset, she was one of our original pair of geese and ironically the only one laying eggs just now. We will probably cut her open tomorrow and see if we can ascertain what happened, whether she was eggbound, ate something or had internal injuries that we didn’t spot from the outside. Geese can live for over 30 years so she was very young to die naturally and given the low risk of poison or disease here it is a little concerning and we’d like to try and work out what happened.
This evening Mel and Vikki came up for pancakes. Ady cooked an endless supply until everyone declared themselves ‘out’ and full. We had a nice evening with them, plenty of laughs and setting the world to rights.