One word? When seven would do…

Hate having the TV in the room where I sleep, especially if it gets turned on to a Simpsons video before I am awake. I end with Bart and Lisa guest starring in my dreams which is never good.

I spent some time going through all my clothes and putting two thirds of the stuff into bags to be put away until we go to Rum – stuff like thick jumpers and scruffy t shirts that will be worth keeping for working in but I am not likely to wear before that. Then I did some laundry processing and went to bake bread. I wanted to make rolls to go with the soup Ady had made and some flapjacks because we bought some oats for porridge but they are not getting eaten so I thought I’d use them up in baking instead. Scarlett came to assist so she did the breadmaking while I did the flapjacks. We had some nice conversations about bread and cakes, air and yeast, ingredients and what food group they fit in and then moved on to making memories, what she’ll remember from her childhood, whether games consoles and toys are more important than time spent with parents and being allowed to do stuff like hatch ducklings. We decided a bit of both was the best way forward 🙂

Leaving the bread cooking and Ady watching it Scarlett and I nipped off to Sainsburys – I needed to get some cash out for the carpet fitters and Scarlett wanted to buy an Easter egg for Humphrey from the pet shop. Scarlett *never* stops talking which can be distracting and hard work in every day life but when it is just you and her is is actually really lovely to be able to engage in proper conversation with her rather than feel like an empty vessel she is trying to fill with words! I love the way she always, always puts change in the animal charity bucket at the pet shop and her take on the toys which ‘look fun Mummy but are not actually to do with the animals having fun, but their owners thinking it looks cool for their hamster to run in a wheel that has a plastic motorbike attached to it’. Not sure how that fits with buying an Easter egg for her hamster mind you, given none of the humans in the house are actually celebrating Jesus rising again so the Humph is unlikely to be feeling any sort of call to praise! He does seem very taken with the dried corn cob she also selected for him though 🙂

Back at the house the kids did some final tweaks on their robot, called AC, who they then brought downstairs to show us. They have loved playing with all the inside components of a very old computer and have proved very efficient with the tools taking everything apart and building something new.

We had lunch and the carpet fitters arrived to do the hall, stairs, landing and the kitchen. It took them about 90 minutes which we filled by playing with the face merge toy on Davies’ 3DS (it’s hilarious, it merges two people’s faces together), looking at our John Seymour book and trying to find plate mills on ebay. It looks really good but oddly instead of enjoying new carpet and flooring we are just paranoid we’ll damage it before the house gets let out!

They finished and we gathered up the bits and pieces and went off to the tip – we’d got a cheaper price for the fitting for pulling up the old carpet and getting rid of it along with the scraps from the fitting ourselves. Then we called over to my parents to collect some money to pay Bruce for the horse box and pick up a couple of things from there.

Back home we had dinner, baths and so on. It’s been a bit frustrating not being free to enjoy this lovely weather as much as we’d like. We’re hoping next week will be nice too as we have far more time scheduled in for walking on beaches, hanging out with friends and generally enjoying the fact we don’t have any real responsibilities for a little while.

This morning Ady removed the kitchen floor – that’s the layer of laminate that my Dad put down just after we had Davies, the layer of carpet tiles that replaced a layer of lino we put down prior to that and a bit of the layer of crap underneath that we had a go at when we first moved in. When we bought this house we ripped up all the flooring in every room during the first couple of days. There was horrid 70s style shagpile carpet through most of the bungalow (as it was back then) and we lived with bare boards for the first few months until we had saved enough to have carpet fitted. The kitchen had lino tiles which were really grubby and damaged but we quickly realised would have been far better left intact and boarded over as they had been fixed using some sort of bitumen paint which resisted scraping, kicking, evostick thinners, blasting with a heat gun and wallpaper stripper and all sorts of swear words. One of my favourite home videos is the week we moved in this house which has clips of me, Ady and our friend Lee all working on the kitchen floor :). Tonight it’s back to the badly removed bitumen and floorboards peeping through, by this time tomorrow it’ll be overboarded and laid with proper vinyl flooring for the first time ever. Bet I am the first to drop something hot or heavy on it and burn it!

Davies and Scarlett did some more robot making and then played in the garden. They wanted to go scootering but I was being paranoid about them playing out in the street during school hours. I went out armed with hammer and much resolve and a plan to dismantle the chicken shed but after 10 minutes and a few removed nails I realised I was onto a loser and it was far too rotten in places and shoddily put together in the first place (combination of me being the one putting it together, it being a very cheap second in the first place and a collection of rubbish tools helping me put it together) to take apart without causing all sorts of damage so I put it back together again and decided it is better off staying here. There won’t be room to bring it (and I’m not even sure it would cope with being moved in one piece, as I recall it’s bloody heavy – it has a base and a felted roof – and probably wouldn’t fit round the side of the house anyway). So it can stay here and we’ll sort out a chicken shed a different way.

I busied myself instead with an email to Neil on Eigg asking for livestock advice and had a lovely email back later finishing with the imortal line

I hope all your plans work out well (they def. wont work out as you think)

which I love and may make my life motto 🙂

Then we got in the car to go to Eliot’s birthday party. We called in at my parents to collect some chairs we have given to Caz and Bid and Frazer arrived home so we chatted to him for a while. There is roadworks at Arundel which is a dreadful bit of road anyway so we ended up sitting there for over half an hour. This gave us time to mess about with checking the cds for scratched ones, playing Lady Gaga very loud and singing along. I emptied out the glove box and put all random sticky sweets, plastic forks, hair slides, ketchup sachets, reciepts and other tat in a bag to chuck out, spent some time sticking dot stickers on Ady (gave him a gorgeous pair of blue dot earrings which he forgot about for a while and walked round Lidl with still wearing :lol:). We called into Lidl and Sainsburys for party snacks and finally arrived at Caz and Bid’s new house. Which looks a lot like we should live there as it is furnished with our old sofas, table, chairs, cd player, crockery, toaster, pans… while messing with the cd player we realised we’d left a cd in it which turned out to be the disc I’d made for our Bye Then party and made me all misty eyed. We listened to it on the way home and it recaptured all the excitement of that crazy about-to-go-and-do-it time :). All the songs either had Wonder or Wander in the title, the artist or somewhere in the lyrics – Wonderland- Simply Red, Wonderful tonight – Eric Clapton, Size of a Cow – Wonderstuff, Wonderwall – Oasis and Mike Flowers Pops, Wanderer – Status Quo and Dion, Wonder of You – Elvis, Wonderful World – Louis Armstrong, Wonderful World, Beautiful People – Jimmy Cliff, Runaway – Del Shannon….

Various friends were there; Debs, Emma, Katie, John & Aida and their assorted offspring. Fab to see people we’d not seen since we left and talk about education, Rum and other people 🙂 We sat in the garden, the kids ran wild, it was all very lovely. We finally left about 7pm.

We forgot about the roadworks so sat in them for another half an hour on the way home 🙁 Ady called into Sainsburys as we needed milk, Scarlett and I called into Pets at Home as she wanted to check whether they were selling Easter eggs for hamsters (they are!). Back at home I cooked dinner while the kids had a bath and then Ady dashed off on a mercy mission to look at Mum & Dad’s TV which was playing up so the kids and I watched Good Life and ate, then Ady came home and had his dinner while I had a bath.

It was the last in the series of Sounds of the 20th Century on Radio 2 which we listened to every single week when we were on the road last year, the first coinciding with the very start of our adventure – this time last year we were about to leave Steward Wood – odd to be having anniversaries of that already. I sat in the bath and listened – tonight was 2000 which was a huge year for us.

We’d been talking about the year 2000 just yesterday when we drove past the dome as Ady and I did visit the Dome, I think on 5th January 2000. The turn of the century was something I had been aware of impending from a very young age, I distinctly recall being about Tarly’s age and working out how old I’d be in the year 2000 (26) and wondering what I’d be doing – would I be married? (yes, just. 3 months previously in Las Vegas), a parent? (I spent most of 2000 pregnant and the final few months as a mother). I started 2000 with no job having left my job at Bhs rather under a cloud and been interviewed for but not offered my next job as a Sales Office Manager. I discovered I was pregnant just days into the year, and within about 3 weeks of starting my new job. I ended the year with a baby, still on maternity leave and unsure what I’d do next (I ended up working one day a week in the office on Ady’s day off mentoring my second in command to step up to eventually take my job on, and doing a couple of days work a week from home remotely). 2000 was the year we turned our bungalow into a house – the roof had been put on and the stairs had been put in by Christmas but we didn’t actually move into the upstairs until January 2001. Hearing all the music and news took me right back to those moments just as the cd had earlier. Ah music 🙂

Oh I’m knackered. And hormonal.

We first went to Ecobuild back in 2008 when it was at Earl’s Court and was a fairly small affair, very much inventors and small scale sellers, there was a food stall from River Cottage, ‘talent scouts’ in evidence for Dragons Den and Grand Designs and just a smattering of solar panels in evidence.

When I got the annual email reminding me to book this years tickets and realised we might just be in Sussex for the dates I booked tickets for us and decided if we could go then we would. I hoped we might see some interesting ideas, get some inspiration and learn something about the sort of eco products that may be there, potentially find some companies or better still individuals we could work with / get sponsorship from / strike a deal with in exchange for reviews / marketing. Ady had read somewhere that in line with the exhibitions eco credentials they were discouraging exhibitors from giving away plastic promotional items or glossy literature to minimise waste.

After debate and checking travel options we decided to drive. We don’t have a travelcard anymore so the train would have been around the same for the four of us as petrol and parking and would have taken longer. Even with the Blackwall tunnel traffic we were still there in under 90 minutes and the same coming home, the train to Victoria takes that long and that’s without getting halfway across London on about four tube changes. I like the train journey up but *hate* it coming home when you can almost never get seats, are knackered from a day in London, fed up of carrying stuff and just want to be anywhere other than a packed train full of stressed people.

We left just after 830am and were parking by 10am. The machine didn’t take my debit card but we just about scratched together enough cash to pay the £15 parking from various places in the car where change was stashed and that was all we spent all day.

We started in the solar area and were stunned by just how many solar panel stands there were, easily 100 plus. Most were distributors rather than manufacturers and almost all were staffed by foreign people, mostly Chinese or Japanese. On one stand, manned by three German people both they and I gave up in the end as they simply couldn’t grasp my question about being off grid and not feeding in to the tariff on the national grid, utterly insistant that you still had to be connected to power… We did speak to one really interesting guy who was very passionate about his product – a Solarator (can’t find it online yet, very new apparently) which is effectively a trailer with two solar panels on it, a bank of batteries inside that can be towed by any vehicle to use / charge up and can also be charged by mains (not really of use to us but could be modified to take wind or hydro charge and have additional batteries added). Really good idea. We exchanged contact details with them and will follow that one up as he loved our story.

Sadly the waffle about lack of plastic tat was not true and the lure of fuzzy bugs, sqashy rubber polar bears and many, many branded mini bags of sweets was too great so the kids acquried a big bag each full of tat. I relented and collected pens (on the basis I’ll always need pens!) and cloth bags (ditto, although not as sure I will always need cloth bags on Rum! Maybe I’ll wash them and use them for curing meat or straining curds and whey or something).

We talked to about five different solar places, several rainwater harvesting places and a few more bio mass type stalls but nothing really excited or interested us. Individuals we talked to were really interested in us, one was an ex student from a uni course on renewable architecture and said a student on his course would *love* the chance to use us as a case study and plan a design solution for us. I had thought of that idea and mooted it to the two ex WWOOF hosts I have invited up to stay who were both permaculture course leaders, but this guy gave us contact details for his old tutor and it inspired me to collect more contact details for other tutors at other unis with similar courses. We’d put the student up and look after them in exchange for their ideas and a copy of their plans for our house / land.

Another product we had been toying with the idea of is mobile road surface type stuff – to create a track through our croftland and as a possible surface for the static and surrounding area. We chatted to two places selling that and both were really interested in our story and we’ll follow up both contacts. This sort of stuff .

We tracked down Babs’ friend and her yurt and chatted to Bo for a while, she is lovely :). Shared our woe at the ‘greenwash’ of the whole show and lack of alternative, human products with far too many big companies having stuck the word ‘eco’ in some of their marketing, dressed silly blonde girls with long legs in green outfits and armed them with lots of plastic keyrings to give away. That restored our faith in what we’re doing :).

We ate our lunch sat outside right next to the Thames. It was both charming and depressing there in the shadow of the Dome with planes landing all but next to us. Ady and I can still talk the talk with these sort of people at these sorts of venues but frankly we’d really rather not. Give us some chickens and gorgeous scenery and we’ll be far happier 🙂

By about 4pm we’d all seen pretty much everything. We’d already decided not to go to the seminars as none of them seemed really pertinent to what we’re doing and we thought the kids would find them fairly tedious. I collected various magazines so I could look through for interesting articles and see if any had contacts that might be interested in my writing and we headed back to the car.

We were glad we’d gone, we spoke to enough people who were interested in what we’re doing and potentially do have products that are relevant to us to make it worthwhile. I wouldn’t go again though, I feel it’s gotten far too commercial and instead of genuinely celebrating eco products and green building it is a big money making machine with the focus on business rather than environment. I know our choices are very extreme and out there and most people are shuddering at the very thought of our lifestyle but I would have expected a little more representation of the more alternative and hippy dippy type stuff at Ecobuild really. Certainly when the kids and I went to Green Aware in 2010 there was still plenty of that there and I’d have thought it was one area there is still plenty of room for little people to be making their mark.

Still on the plus side I won’t need to buy pens for years.

Back at home we had an early dinner as we’d managed to pick up two reduced to clear cooked chickens in the CoOp. We watched The Good Life to restore faith in our craziness and the kids had a fairly early night. They are currently making a robot up in Davies’ old bedroom using bits of old computers and other technology they have been dismantling. It looks very cool 🙂

I had a very long bath and a very chocolately hot chocolate and am now feeling very ready for bed having gone through all the brochures we picked up and created a long list of places to contact, websites to look at and products to learn more about.

This morning we had planned to dismantle the chicken shed (we’re hoping it comes apart easily and we can fit it in the horse box to come with us) but in response to my ‘what can we bring?’ text Tasha replied with ‘bread’ so as I’d planned to make some today anyway I brought that plan forward and did some breadmaking – one small loaf to bring with us for lunch, one larger loaf for toast and 8 bread rolls to take with us tomorrow to London. I had further baking planned but saved that for the oven being lit for dinner later on.

While I did that Ady cut the hedges in the garden. He came in for Popmaster which I won but he claimed I cheated 😉 we’re writing daily tallies on the kitchen calendar now, one day one of us might actually ring up and go on the radio, for now we use it as a tool to lord it over each other which is far more satisfying than public humiliation / victory 😉

The bread was finally ready so we took the small loaf and headed over to Tasha’s. The kids went off to play; I love how they have fallen back into friendships with Toby, Archie & Eliot etc after a whole year away. Ady and I had a great few hours chatting to Tasha, I laughed until I cried 🙂 I will miss sitting chatting over tea to friends but am hugely gratified that I am already having twitter chats with two women on Rum so am hopeful of further tea / wine / chatting buddies to carry this on with.

We came home and decided it was too late to start pulling the shed about so D&S went off to do some scootering while Ady and I looked at route planning for tomorrow. Then Ady and Scarlett went to Sainsburys for petrol and a few food bits while I got dinner on and did the baking I’d planned (snickerdoodles and chocolate chip cookies) and Davies watched a Simpsons video. I’d been planning earlier to get in touch with Jill about visiting them down in Glastonbury before we go and she rang in her usual spooky way and said ‘so when are you coming then?’.

I had a lovely chat with her including trying to tell her than no, we really don’t need a labradoodle puppy (she has two dog puppies left and is prepared to give them away. I have a sneaking suspicion we may have found our dog although it is not the border collie bitch I had planned a pup of Maggie’s will be okay with me, particularly if it’s free… we’ll see. I feebly protested so she may give them elsewhere but if one is still there when we visit I suspect we’ll be coming home with it…) We’re off there for a few days in April before Easter, really looking forward to seeing J&J and meeting those puppies of course 🙂

I caught up with Julie on the phone after dinner and we arranged a meet up each week from now until we’re hoping to go. They have a new puppy called Mable who we’re looking forward to meeting at the weekend.

The kids were in bed for 9pm in preparation of our early start in the morning but predictably they are still awake despite best efforts.

I had one of those ‘oh shit’ last waking thoughts last night as I snuggled down in my sleeping bag that the faulty kindle was being collected today and I hadn’t sellotaped the return label to the box. So I set a reminder on my phone which was what woke me this morning.

Ady was being very efficient and had already done stuff outside before I got up but once I was awake I helped sow some new grass seed on the lawn that had been lawn BC (Before Chickens) and we listened to Popmaster on the radio outside.

Today the sun has shone, we’ve been outside in t shirts, getting stuff done and feeling so positive. This time last year we were at Steward Wood (our first WWOOF host) and loving it. We all commented today that it feels like that again, exciting times ahead and the best of the year all opening infront of us with the lovely weather and longer days. Isn’t spring brilliant? 🙂

We started sorting the garage, Scarlett was indoors painting her dolphin, Davies was in the garden – I cut his hair this morning and it’s so lovely to actually see his face again rather than the Dougal style son I have been looking at. Davies spent some time emptying an old fire extinguisher which Ady had, I think he’s planning to get it refilled but it had been set off a little so was no good to just keep.

The garage is now fully sectioned and swept out. We have a heap of stuff for Caz and Bid, a few things to sell, a couple of smaller things that will stay here in the garage and a large pile of things to come with us. It’s hard to picture just what can fit in the horse box really but we have a sort of reserve list of stuff that can come if we have space and be left behind if we don’t. Renting the house out again means we have a bit of grace on making final arrangements for absolutely everything. While we were doing that I knocked Ady’s radio off a table and it broke 🙁 He’s had it for years and it came all around WWOOFing with us so he was quite upset.

We came in for lunch, I had a bit of a tantrum about the volume of stuff everyone seems to have acquired in just a week here and gathered everyone’s things up into one big pile each, put an empty box beside each pile and said they all had to get their stuff into just that one box and keep it in there too. It seems to have happened …

We had planned to walk into Lancing to pay the carpet fitter but we had a car full of stuff for the tip and realised we needed a few bits of food shopping so decided to go in the car instead. First to the tip to drop off yet more stuff. The tip has been turned into a Super Recycling Place and they really are very good there, it’s clean, the staff are friendly and helpful (and there are loads of them) and everything is very clearly marked and easy to work out where to put stuff. Almost everything does get recycled and they sell compost from green waste there. The landfill heap is tiny now, whereas it used to be the big stinking mass in the middle. I know reduce and reuse are better but at least we are contributing as little as possible to the problem these days.

Then to Lancing to pay the carpet guy and then having come up with a list of things we needed we decided supermarkets were probably the best solution so we did Tescos (and walked out with nothing), Sainsburys (and walked out with nothing on todays list but did get half price cordless drill and cordless screwdriver which is now crossed off our list at considerably less than we’d been anticipating) and finally Asda where we got everything else – two pairs of trousers for Scarlett. She must have tried on 10 pairs in the last few weeks, in charity shops everywhere. These are boys, roll up cropped leg if wanted (she doesn’t), neutral shades (not pink), cut to fit rather than be low rise or fitted around a shape she doesn’t have and are not tight or loose in places she gets cross about trousers being. So eek to nearly £20 on trousers that she’ll likely go through the knee of in the second or third wearing but hurrah for more than two pairs of trousers for her. Davies got some more socks (where do they go?), they both got new swimwear (again not straightforward, turns out that while supermarkets think most 9 year old girls want two piece or pink or flowery or with attitudey slogans or fancy backs my 9yo actually wants not pink, not frilly and not proclaiming she’s a princess or mermaid! You know, something to actually swim in, not pose in! We found mostly black with one small heart motif that was deemed acceptable if not desirable), we got flour, eggs, syrup and chocolate chips so we can do some baking for snacks for lunches, particularly to take with us to London on Wednesday, Ady got a replacement radio (after much debate I persuaded him a DAB was the best bet, he can’t take his large DAB as it is mains powered which isn’t workable for Rum and given how many hours a day he listens to it I think he justifies a nice one, it was still under £20 and he is really pleased with it) and Ady got some more jeans having also failed to find any in charity shops and being only in possession of two pairs of very tatty ‘work’ jeans.

Far too much money (and no crocs – Scarlett really needs cooler shoes now the weather is heating up, her feet stink in her winter boots) later we came home. The kids went off to play with their scooters in the street (oh the excitement of playing ‘out’) while we did some more garage rearranging. After getting really wound up by the disappearance of Scarlett’s wellies I nipped over to my parents to see if they were there and they were :). I had a chat with Dad and then Mum who arrived home just after I got there and it was a nice talk where they appeared to actually believe some of what I was saying about future plans and stuff. 🙂

Back at home the others had come inside as it was getting dark. Baths, dinner and bed all round. I ordered some crocs for the kids online and the cable for the horsebox completed what has been a very expensive day but has ticked off lots of our list of purchases required.

Yesterday we had planned to clear out the garage but it was grey and drizzly and just didn’t feel like the sort of day to be out of the house really. The kids worked through the piles of stuff up in the loft space in Davies’ old room while Ady and I ticked another thing off our ever shortening job lists and went through our list of tools we think we’ll need to get started on Rum and put them into an amazon wishlist. It helped to jog our memories of other stuff we hadn’t thought of but will need and gives us an initial list to work from to check prices elsewhere.

After much tea drinking we went upstairs to do an hours sorting with the kids. First on the agenda was seeing how many cuddly toys we could fit into one of the massive-est vacuum bags The Range sell. £6 for one big enough to fit at least two of us in (depending which two, probably not Ady and I!). We fitted a huge pile in and sucked it down to almost flat, very impressed with that even though the effort overheated our cheap and very substandard basics Argos hoover that we bought for about £20 when we got the house back. It did recover once it cooled down 🙂 We’ll get another couple for the soft toys which can then go back in the loft here while the house is rented, and several more to take to Rum for clothes, bedding etc. as they will keep stuff sealed from damp and squish it up small to save space.

We had lunch, tidied up in the bedroom and loaded some stuff into the car ready for the tip /charity shop on Monday. The kids went round the shop together to buy milk – they’ve been desperate to do that ever since we got back here, definitely wanting to explore independance.

Ady and I both had baths, the kids packed up overnight stuff and then Bruce arrived with the horse box. He’d been cleaning it up, testing lights and brakes and wheels and took it for a run so thought he’d bring it over here. Fab to see it and actually get inside. It’s huge and will be perfect for the moving and storage afterwards – really pleased 🙂 🙂 We told Bruce we want to give him the Sharan to say thank you and he was really pleased with that so another unwanted thing of ours passed on to someone who will use it. Hurrah 🙂

” alt=”” />

We chatted to Bruce and then he left and we headed over to Mum & Dad’s, via Sainsburys for wine and Guinness supplies for the evening, Baileys for my Mum’s mothers day gift and for Ady and the kids to veer off and select a couple of top secret purchases for me :). Only Dad was home so we waved the kids off for their first ever sleepover at Granny & Grandad’s and left. Scarlett has only ever been away from us for one night before, several years ago at Ali’s. Davies did Badger camp of course but sleepovers are really not a big feature of their lives without us although they are of course very used to sleeping in all sorts of places with us. They rang me at 11pm to say goodnight and had a really nice evening with my parents :).

We had a great evening too. The food was Irish themed – leek and potato soup, steak and kidney pie and colcannon mash, chocolate and Irish whiskey mousse with Irish coffees and Baileys afterwards, Guinness and white wine with the meal. Mike and Rose had invited another couple as they often do and when the first half an hour was a conversation about their daughter not getting into their first choice secondary school and their appeal process and general middle class educational angst I thought we were in for a rather tedious evening but it all livened up when they learnt more about us and our adventures and Home Ed. They were lovely actually – he was a film editor back in pre computer days and left when it all got more IT and less creativity to work in homeless shelters and similar places with socially disadvantaged people. He currently works with learning difficulty young adults in residential care on life skills and a level of independant living. Really interesting bloke. She was also lovely, child of very bohemian and hippy parents who loves the idea of our lives but couldn’t live without her hair straighteners! We had a fab evening with them, they left around 1130pm, Rose got broken and had to go to bed and we stayed chatting to Mike until around 2am as he has just been accepted on a teacher training course starting in September so is very excited about that.

We walked home and I remember looking at the clock at about 430am so when I woke again and it was 830am I didn’t feel fantastic!

Today we had a slowish start, taking advantage of a child free house to drink lots of tea and not get up. We finally headed over to Mum & Dad;s about 1030am and Scarlett was still not awake! The kids had both made me cards for Mothers Day which were fab.

Mum & I went to collect some more plastic boxes from her shop and pick up Granny who was coming up for the day, then we all had lunch. Ady cooked dinner, pheasant casserole which was delicious and after a restorative and medicinal slug of brandy in my tea at about 1pm I started to feel more like myself again!

Caz, Bid and the boys popped over to collect a van full of stuff – they took the kids old beds, the sofas, the table and chairs, boxes of kitchen stuff, our breadmaker and toaster and loads of unwanted crockery and cutlery. So good to give it to someone who needs it, wants it and will actually use it 🙂 I had a lovely text from Caz to say it all makes their new house feel like a home 🙂 🙂 There is a little bit more (TV, TV unit, freezers and chiller) which they will take next weekend.

We had dinner and left, dropping Granny home again to get home here for about 10pm. I had a bath while the others watched Robin Hood (animated Disney version). Our rythyms of our days are all messed up and I’m looking forward to getting into a home with bedrooms and some semblance of order.

It’s been a good weekend – friends, good deeds, nice food and interesting company, family and now, blissfully I’m intending to sleeeeeeeep!

Can’t believe we’ve only been back a week. At times, walking around this house again I can’t believe we ever went away really. Then I notice the lack of sofa, bed etc and it all comes back to me!

This is a far better place to be than the month or so we spent at Mum & Dad’s but sleeping on camping mats on the floor is no sustainable life. I have to keep reminding myself it’s only a month ago we had the interview and got offered the croft, a month from now we’ll be almost there and two months from now we’ll definitely be there. A year from now it will really be our home. I don’t want to wish time away so I’m trying to find the positives in the delay and having already sorted out all our stuff, arranged the car and trailer, planned the carpet fitting and house being rented again I guess we can focus on spending time with family and friends before we go and learning lots about crops and livestock from our library of books on the subjects. It is frustrating to have missed out on things such as the Big Bang and Albert Hall where friends have been the last couple of days as when they were first mooted I had to assume we’d not be around whereas infact we could have gone…

This morning we all went through our clothes – everything is over here now so we all had big trying on sessions. Davies has enough of everything other than socks. Scarlett is fine for tops but could do with more pants and definitely needs more trousers. She is not so bothered about socks ;). Ady also needs jeans. I have plenty of everything but have been very ruthless with getting rid of more stuff and now have just three bags of clothes and shoes. It still feels excessive compared to what everyone else has but unlike the kids I won’t be growing out of my clothes so what I have kept will fit me forever. It was quite gratifying to be trying on so many things and find them massively too big though.

A couple of washes went on and were hung outside to dry – towels and jumpers that had been in storage and smelt a bit musty.

Scarlett and I did some more of the craft kit she started last night – it’s really good actually Dazzling Dolphin – last night she put together the 3d wooden puzzle bit of it, this morning was sculpting it with plaster gauze stuff you dipped in water and then wrapped over the wood. She really enjoyed doing it and has a very cool looking dolphin to paint tomorrow when it’s dry using the acrylic paint and glitter than came with the kit. I picked it up cheap in TKMaxx before Christmas as my brother’s Christmas pressie for her but I’d really recommend it. Would get more of the plaster gauze stuff too, I think we could do some excellent stuff with it.

We had lunch and then headed out – first to the library where I tried to sneak in to use the computer but got spotted. A quick catch up with the four colleagues in today and £5 later I’d sorted out the croft application forms and printed off the kindle return label too with internet access and printing charges (sadly the colleagues in were not ones who would do it for free!). We picked up a mothers day card for my Mum & Granny and posted the forms off.

Over to Dad’s via the charity shop to drop off the last couple of boxes of stuff. We checked what was in the garage – mostly camping stuff which is coming with us, chairs which Caz and Bid are having and the dalek. Davies has asked Dad if that can stay there a bit longer and Dad said yes. I do like the idea of restoring it and bringing it to Rum at some point really 🙂 I see it becomming some sort of family heirloom that my descendants are one day terrified with the story of Mad Old Granny Nic and her curious antics using the dalek as evidence 😆

Back over to Lancing to arrange the carpet fitter for next week. He needs it paid for upfront as we don’t have an official address so we’ll do that on Monday but it’s booked in for next Friday which means we’ll be spending next Thursday evening taking up old carpet and much of next Friday taking it to the tip.

I had a phonecall from Vikki on Rum to say she thinks moving the static delivery back a couple of weeks would be a good idea and that if we want to stay with her in the period between us arriving and the static arriving she’d be happy to have us 🙂 It was great to talk to her actually, it made it all feel nice and real again :). We’ve got permission (backed up by a nice email from Sean with an official permission letter) to put the static on the path next to the croft land if the lorry can’t get it onto our actual land, which takes the pressure off on delivery day. I’ve since emailed to ask whether the new date (25th April) is realistic as I doubt the croft paperwork will be finalised even by then. From our point of view we are happy to move and get started on things prior to actual official tenancy paperwork but I need to check that IRCT is happy for that too.

Baths, roast dinner and Lassie as tonight’s film. Now Ady is asleep infront of Open All Hours while both children are still awake and watching!

Stuff today that has been grrr-y:

Insurance for the Pajero, not as cheap as I’d hoped. In the scheme of things this doesn’t matter at all as once we’re on Rum we don’t need insurance anyway, but I was hoping to just swap over to a different vehicle on my Sharan insurance and then have it roadworthy for six months incase we do need to pop back over to the mainland in the first few months. Ah well.

Ady walked in on Scarlett sitting in the bedroom at my parents going through her toys deciding what to keep and what to get rid of. She was talking to each one, kissing it goodbye, telling it she loved it and would miss it. Broke my heart when he told me and means we’ll find room for them all somehow. I hate that the kids have to go through tough stuff like that, even when I know it is all worth it long term. I don’t want them to have sad memories like that 🙁

I got a couple of emails this evening from Rum to say that the application form we completed was one of the old ones that was updated on 1st March and as such the Crofting Commission won’t accept it and it needs resubmitting on the form. Which means a trip to the library to print them all out all, complete them again and this will cause some delay as it needs advertising once the application form has been put in. Argh! Not sure how much delay there will actually be for us. We’d booked the static delivery for 12th April and we definitely won’t have the tenancy for the croft officially by then so it depends whether that is an issue and prevents us moving onto the land or if the IRCT can overlook it and we’ll just quietly start living there with the tenancy happening a few weeks later.

On the plus side we had a good morning; I sorted out the insurance for the house, found out about car insurance, dealt with various other paperwork stuff, processed some laundry, took delivery of the new kindle. Ady helped David the neighbour carry something heavy from his back garden to his car for which he has already been rewarded with two easter eggs and we anticipate many more tokens of his gratitude 😉

We had lunch and then went over to Mum & Dad’s where we went through all the boxes deemed stuff to be stored there. We managed to reduce that amount further and it is all now in situ in the area Mum had allocated us. I have no idea if it’s condensed enough for her, I guess we’ll find out at the weekend but it is really just photos and a few sentimental bits and pieces. We went through all the stuff coming with us and reboxed stuff in more logical fashion so it is easy to place once we arrive. Four large bags of clothing have come back over here with us to go through and decide which clothes are coming to Rum and which we don’t need. I am down to three pairs of DMs, three pairs of Oxygen shoes and my rigger boots. Not sure I can go lower than that 😉

The kids played with the lego and were building campervans with it – the character lego with instruction booklets to follow is all very well but I still think Lego is at it’s best when simply used to create something from imagination. I used to spend hours with the tiny doors and windows trying to build houses and create bricktastic versions of all sorts of things.

Back at home I dealt with the emails from Rum and the carpet fitter arrived. He measured up and quoted us for the various possibilities of flooring we wanted. We’ll probably get another quote just to be sure he is reasonable but then go with him I think. He reckons he can fit either end of next week or the beginning of the week after – if a competitor can do it sooner than may swing it for them though as the agent won’t start advertising the house until that’s been done.

Dinner tonight was steak – very nice 🙂 Davies has discovered the internet through his 3DS having previously not been remotely interested in such things. He and Scarlett decided to club together to pay for a download game for the 3DS so brought me the cash so I could pay for it on my card. Another parenting milestone there 🙂

Ady and I tried to watch iplayer but the mifi isn’t getting reliable enough signal to stream it so that was irritating and we listened to the radio instead. For every thing we seem to cross off our list of stuff to do another comes along to replace it. I’ll be soooo pleased to actually arrive on Rum, sit on the sofa in that static and raise my first glass of wine to toast our new home.

Starting to feel a bit like a generator today…

Scarlett woke me at 4am by shaking me as she’d had a bad dream. Something to do with monsters in a forest chasing her and when she’d woken the shadows in the hall had looked like the monsters so she’d panicked and needed me to wake up quicker than I did. She insisted on getting into my sleeping bag which was not comfortable for either of us and then she needed a wee but didn’t want to go alone. Eventually she was persuaded to move her sleeping bag next to me and then as Ady’s phone was ringing with text messages from people he has been talking to in America about generators I made him go and share the mat with Davies. So we did all get back to sleep in the end.

This morning Ady and Davies did some hedge trimming and Davies had a foiled attempt at riding a bike. He really needs a proper sized one so his little one has gone in the free ads paper / website today. Scarlett and I made some bread – two loaves and pizza bases for dinner tonight. I made a couple of phonecalls – one to sort out a carpet fitter to come round and quote tomorrow evening for the carpet that needs replacing. Another to Amazon to arrange for (another) replacement kindle as the screen has a smudge on it and I can see shadows of the previous page text when I turn a page. Last time I waited ages before replacing it but it was so straightforward this time I have sorted it as soon as I noticed it this time. I’ve read on forums lots of people having screen issues with kindles so Amazon obviously know it is a problem and don’t mess about. Ady made a couple of phonecalls – one to the static place to confirm they have received the cheque and to ask them to supply a few things such as water containers which they sell and can deliver with the static to save us getting them. He also rang his friend Bruce (the farmer) who has been looking out for 4x4s for us and had found one at £1400 that was over our price range so he thought it wasn’t worth telling us about. We arranged to meet him and look at it this afternoon though as it was being sold by Bruce’s BIL so comes with a really good idea of it’s history.

We had lunch – fresh bread, mmmm. Then went off to the charity shop to drop some more boxes off. The bloke parked next to us in the carpark was most fascinated by us and overheard Ady talking to the woman in the shop who commented we must have nothing left in our house anymore. He followed Ady out and got chatting to us both about what we were doing. He was really enthusiastic about the whole adventure and told us how he’d lived in a caravan for a few years, took our photographs and asked for our email address so he could stay in touch with us and find out what happens next. He was a very sweet, if rather eccentric old man (his email address is ‘lord’ someone but I’ve googled him and can’t find him anywhere) and a year ago we’d have written him off as a nutter and escaped talking to him as quickly as possible. We’ve learnt though, that people prepared to stand and chat and make friends are almost always worth knowing and left with his ‘I wish you every success and happiness’ ringing in our ears and a warm fuzzy feeling :).

The last few bits dropped off at the tip and then on to Bruce’s. We spent several hours with him including looking at the Pajero ” alt=”” /> having a sit in it, driving it forwards and backwards and agreeing to buy it. It has an MOT next week so will come with a years ticket on it, has four new tyres, new cambelt, two brand new batteries (they have two, not sure why) and is really clean and tidy. Diesel, automatic. Kids love it and although it is more than we anticipated paying I think it will be worth it.

Back at the farm we talked more about trailers and I shared that I had been wondering about horse boxes so we looked inside Bruce’s and decided that yes, a horse box would be perfect for what we want – easy to pull, carries loads of weight, full height so we can stand up in it when using it as storage, sound in terms of waterproof / rodent proof (as far as anything can be) and of course suitable for moving livestock and anything else farm related once we’re on the croft. We were about to leave when Bruce remembered one of the boxes stored behind his stables might be for sale so he went to ask the owner. It’s tatty but sound and Bruce is going to get it emptied, cleaned up and checked over for us to make sure the bearings / wheels etc are all okay. He knocked the woman down to £500 and gave her £100 deposit there and then for us. Hurrah for our wonderful friends 🙂 So that’s vehicle and trailer, under budget at £2000 and with a better car than we’d anticipated getting 🙂 Very pleased indeed.

Back home via Sainsburys where we picked up reduced to clear steak to have for dinner tomorrow (hurrah, Davies has been wanting steak for ages, his favourite food after pizza) and then pizzas for dinner while watching Mrs Doubtfire which is an excellent film that has totally stood the test of time and the kids loved :).

My fuel supplies are running low now though…

This morning we went to the local car auction – after Popmaster of course 🙂

Dad came along with us and it was very interesting, in a new experience with added people watching point of view. Nothing in our price bracket or right for us – all the vans had only 3 seats and the vehicles which would have been okay for us were going for thousands. Some real bargains there if you were looking for transit vans though. Watching the people was most interesting for me – a real mix of dodgy used car sellers, dealers and people looking for a bargain. I was particularly taken with the forced casualness of some of the bidding, people (almost all blokes) chatting to each other, barely seeming to pay attention to the auction but nodding to raise their bids. Fascinating 🙂

I dropped Ady and Dad back at our house and Dad went off home, Ady spent a couple of hours in the garden tidying it up and the kids and I went to Tasha’s for lunch. She’d been preparing for 2 days baking up a feast – proper gorgeous sandwiches, scones with jam and cream, cookies, pastries and other delights. And tea from a teapot and fancy teacup 🙂 I do love Tasha 🙂

The kids played, although Scarlett spent some time chatting to Tasha about cats and then more time adoring some of Tasha’s 7 cats, while Tasha and I caught up.

Just before 3pm we came home as the letting agent was round at 3pm and I wanted to at least meet her. We got here as Ady was making drinks for her and her trainee who were looking round. Rather oddly the estate agent who came round yesterday said to me ‘I know you’ when I opened the door to him despite me not recognising him at all and this woman said the same. She looked maybe vaguely familiar but I don’t think I know her either. Most strange.

She was very businesslike and insists that the hall, stairs and landing carpet is renewed along with the kitchen floor before it goes on the rental market but reckons she can easily get £975 a month and will rent it easily. They offer rental insurance for non payment and seem generally a lot more professional than Mike -all over it like a rash. Fingers crossed eh?! So tomorrow’s task among others is to get some quotes for that.

We then dropped a carfull of stuff off at a charity shop (the first one we tried refused, they said they were unable to take any donations at all!) before going and sorting out yet more at Mum & Dad’s. I helped the kids who were struggling with getting rid of stuff and we managed to fill 2 more boxes for charity shop, a bag of rubbish and several boxes of things like DVDs and X box games to leave at Mum & Dad’s for some other time. Really hard to know what to do with things like psp / ds game boxes when the actual games are all kept in wallets with the console but in the future they may use the box if they sell the game. So much plastic! Another car full loaded up ready for a charity shop tomorrow which means everything at Mum & Dad’s has now been gone through once and seperated into piles. One to keep there which needs reducing further and one to bring with us which needs packing better. Renting the house rather than selling means soft toys can go back in the loft here again, negating the need for hard emotional decisions but putting them out of sight and mind. Curse Toy Story for giving toys emotions and feelings in kids’ eyes! 😉

Tomorrow we were hoping to see Julie but Maisie is poorly and as we caught both the last two germs we had from them (one in November, one in February) we are not at all up for catching any more so we’ve put that off til next week. So I’ll be baking bread and making pizza dough for dinner and then we’ll be making phonecalls, arranging carpet and doing more box juggling at Mum & Dad’s.

I have been heard to state that there is not much that can’t be improved by bacon. So today we had Bacon & Co estate agents round to see if finding someone to live in our house could be improved by Bacon 🙂

It looks like it might actually. They do sales and lettings and as we don’t need the equity out of the house for the first year we have been debating renting it out again and living off the monthly rent for the year, thus protecting the equity and giving us a year to decide that it is definitely the right move for us before investing financially. There are pros and cons but given the house has not sold in the first month I think renting it again may well be the best option.

This morning I sorted through the clothes at this house and put them all into various bags. I still have more clothes than anyone else despite having gotten rid of *loads* but at least all the remaining clothes fit me. Some are older than both children (tops, not bottoms) and it means I won’t have to buy any more clothes for years :). I hung some washing out and drank lots of tea.

Ady did some more research into generators and between us we worked on a list of things still to do which was heartening as we realised we do have everything in hand. We rang Lance to ask him to look out for a 4×4 for us and made a failed bid on a trailer on ebay (that ended up selling an hour later for just £20 more. Grr).

Davies and Scarlett played outside in the garden, they wanted to go further afield but fear of someone spotting them and being nosey made us refuse. I hate that but am so very aware that unaccompanied children on a school day would draw attention. Attention that should it be followed up would result in all sorts of concerns for children who are currently living ‘rough’ in a house that is officially empty. We consoled them with the fact that a month today is provisional static delivery day so we should be sleeping in our new home on our new land for the first time a month today, with a whole island to explore and no prying eyes. We experimented with the four walkie talkies we have which are supposed to have a radius coverage of several miles. Very funny having four way conversations 🙂

The agent came and quoted his terms for both rental and sales, advised us on expected prices for both and gave us the benefit of his estate agenty wisdom. I rang him back later and the letting division are coming round tomorrow to start marketing it. So landlordiness may yet continue…

In other news we went to the tip again, went to my parents again and sorted out yet more stuff to be gotten rid of. Another six boxes to be dropped off at a charity shop tomorrow. We are now down to about 2 boxes to be sold (which we’ll give one punt on ebay / local free ad paper and then take to charity shop), a bed full of boxes that need condensing down more to store at mum & dad’s (mostly photo albums and home videos), about 10 boxes of stuff to come with us to Rum and a huge heap of stuff destined for Caz and Bid. The other three are not finding this process quite as liberating as me but I seem to recall that being the case last time.

I spent some time catching up with Julie on the phone tonight. Maisie isn’t well so we may not catch up with them in person this week but we have at least had a filling in session with each other on all our news.

Tonight we got my very first laptop (the one that got knocked off the arm of the sofa and nearly died) working and watched a Hugh Denis thing about the Highlands which was very good with Loch Ness, Chanonry Point, Skye and Applecross all featured. Nice visual reminder of why we’re doing all this 🙂

Tomorrow we’re going to a car auction. Exciting times 🙂

In all those miles we’ve done lately we only had about 10 cds, at least four of which were Horrible Histories ones from cereal packets. One was disc two of War of the Worlds, which Scarlett used to listen to but now says is too scary. That leaves us with Deacon Blue, Alanis Morrisette (scratched, but not on the most sweary tracks), Michael Buble (tracks 1-6 all scratched) and about 5 home burned discs of music. These include Mika (both albums), Little Shop of Horrors soundtrack and a rowdy shouty women one with Pink, Lady Gaga, Ting Tings etc on it. We listen to Chris Evans and Ken Bruce but Ady doesn’t like the Jeremy Vine show and I want to kill Steve Wright, we’re too old to listen to Radio One and local commercial radio stations are a) too full of cheesey adverts and b) go out of range too quickly when you are doing hundreds of miles at a time. Which means we have resorted to listening to those 10 discs (well not the HH ones, I can’t cope with Bring Me Back my Legions and Henry the VIII was a big fat man as earworms) LOTS. This had made for over analysing songs in far more detail than I imagine was intended when ‘that’s not my name’ was penned.

So now we can listen to Yesterday Once More, Top of the World and the much mis-sung ‘calling octopus of interplanetary crabs’. Hurrah and huzzah.

This morning Davies and Scarlett were playing the new 3DS game – I have long since been left behind with such technology now. When I was a kid it was a mark of feeling old to have your kids eclipse you in their geekiness, personally it is with relief that I can not even have to pretend to know such stuff any more!

Ady and I worked our way through untangling a HUGE sack of cables, chargers, leads. There’s a Michael McIntyre stand up routine about men and their ‘man drawer’ – this was Ady’s equivalent. It probably has archaeological value as the deeper entangled the leads the larger the ports to go into mobile phones, the chunkier the leads and the costlier they would have been when new. He tells me he is happy to sell them / give them away. I suspect he intends smuggling leads in his socks, pockets, under his hat, in cavities of whatever vehicle we end up with. He may try, drug dealer stylee, to persuade the children to eat one each too to get them past me…

Just as we finished that there was a knock at the door and our friend Bruce was there having been out on his motorbike and decided to come and visit. Really good to see him 🙂 He is our farmer friend who is van sitting Willow, took our chickens in and is a great source of advice and help. Ady’s known him for over 30 years and lived with him for a while a long time ago. We are godparents to one of his grandchildren (stop laughing at the back there!).

Bruce stayed for a couple of cups of tea and catching up chats before heading off on his bike. We headed over to my parents via the tip to drop off the load from yesterdays sorting out.

Mum was there and greeted us with great enthusiasm. She was about to head over to my Granny’s so took Davies and Scarlett with her. The first time she has ever taken them out on her own I think. It meant Ady and I could get on with sorting and we have almost got to the point of sorting everything out into heaps, although all three heaps will now need going through again and possibly reducing further.

Mum and the kids came home, as did Dad so we stopped and all had (very late) lunch together. We declared ourselves done for the day at that point and had very long chats about money and what happens next. Much frank debate later we have the first cheque to send to Macleods for static deposit and Dad is coming with us to the car auction on Tuesday with hopes of finding a 4WD.

It meant we were stupidly late home but having promised pasta bake for dinner to the kids we swung past the little CoOp for bacon and did get some bargains of cooked whole chickens for 29p each (reduced from £6 each!) and some pastries for breakfast tomorrow along with some reduced to clear fruit. Stocked up for next couple of days food then 🙂 I won’t miss the convenience of supermarkets, I might miss the buzz of such bargain food!

I cooked while the others tried, and eventually managed, to tune in the video on the TV. A blank video they were testing had some children talking on it who sounded familiar but it was hard to tell through the fuzziness on the screen. It cleared to a decent picture just as the little girl was telling the camera about how her Dad’s used car business works. Oh the cuteness! She finished by saying she probably will go to school when she is older and would like to be a dancer when she grows up. Very much enjoyed watching that.

We’re keeping crazy hours these last few days, hoping to return to something a bit more conventional from tomorrow…

Everyone else was awake and noisy long before I was in the mood for such behaviour this morning. I was particularly irked to realise that having put a Shrek dvd on (do you have any idea how much Gingie’s voice grates when it invades post waking slumber? It’s like fingernails down a sodding blackboard!) everyone else had buggered off out of the room anyway!!!

Good humour restored with a full pot of tea (Ady is LOVING having full on access to a kitchen ;)) we gathered ourselves together, Ady rang to book the static – we need to get a deposit cheque in the post and the balance following before too long. It’s provisionally booked for delivery on 12th April, but they’ll ring and confirm that next week. I made a phonecall to arrange a different estate agent visiting on Monday to look at the house and we headed off over to Mum & Dad’s.

Only Frazer was home so we got stuck in to sorting stuff out. The kids are sorting their stuff into ‘coming to Rum’, ‘begging Granny and Grandad to store for us for a bit longer’ and ‘can finally bear to part with’ piles. I imagine everything will start off in the coming with us pile and gradually move through the ranks… we are sorting out stuff into ‘coming with us to Rum’, ‘ask Mum & Dad to store a bit longer’, ‘ebay or charity shop (it has to be worth over a fiver on ebay we’ve decided to justify all the photographing, listing and faffing, we may amend this and do a car boot sale if we can fit a Sunday morning into our schedule)’, ‘tip’ and ‘for Caz and Bid’ who are moving into a house next week and are very grateful for anything we can donate to furnish it with.

So far the biggest pile by far is ebay / charity shop. The tip pile (which is currently residing in the back of the car ready to drop off in the morning) was pretty big – how? How did we end up with stuff that is going to the tip? The pile to come with us is fairly sensible and the pile to ask Mum & Dad to store is fairly small consisting of stuff like photo albums, pictures in frames, precious baby clothes, wedding dress, funeral suit each for Ady and I and a couple of size 10 cocktail dresses that I think maybe just maybe Scarlett might one day consider wearing. Oh and a pair of thigh high black suede boots with 6inch heels that I suspect I won’t get a lot of wear out of as a crofter but can’t quite part with either….

Dad came home and gave us some money to go and get some food for lunch so Ady and I nipped up to Sainsburys for the sort of food we only buy when someone else is paying ;). It was a productive day with a good third of the boxes gone through. Once we’ve gone through everything we’ll need to repack the stuff to take and stuff to store and make some decisions on the stuff to sell too but it felt like we made some real headway today.

Davies has been after a 3DS game and didn’t think he had enough money for it but we found a piggy bank of his in the boxes which was full of coppers and silver and he totted it up to discover he had over £10 in there which meant he did have enough. I also told Scarlett that if she wanted to get Humphrey a bigger cage (which has always been her plan) she needed to do it while we’re down here on the mainland really. So at 530 the kids and I went across to Argos to collect the reserved DS game and Pets at Home to look at hamster cages. We’d cut it fine really and looked at cages first where I got spotted by a friend – Matt who was keen to catch up on all our news (facebook had given him most of it but he was full of further questions). His wife is very jealous of our adventures and would love to do something similar but Matt tells me she can’t even consider camping as it means she has to be without her hair straightners so I’m guessing our lifestyle is not quite suitable for her 😉 Lovely to see him but it meant we dashed across to Argos just as they were closing to get the game and took ages counting out all the coppers and silvers. Then back to the pet shop which I’d not realised also closed at 6pm and the doors were already locked. Scarlett looked so sad and miserable that the manager opened back up again so we could go in and grab the cage! Bless him, and of course he got £40 in his till at the last minute too!

Back to my parents for a last cup of tea with Dad and the hope that Mum would get home (she’d been out with a friend for the day) but she didn’t so as we’re back there tomorrow anyway and the kids were desperate to get back to our house to show Humph his new palace and play on the new game we loaded the car up for the tip in the morning and came home.

Humph is most happy in his new abode, lots more room, two extra floors, play tunnel, ladders, cage to climb up etc. D loves the game. Ady cooked, we all had baths (Scarlett got in with me and we had interesting chats about bodies and puberty) and after an ill fated attempt to watch Mrs Doubtfire we ended up putting on a version of Oliver Twist that was rather dark (I know the story is not cheery anyway but this is really grim) which Scarlett declared a bit rubbish without all the songs! 😆 I’ve been looking at my John Seymour book and researching midge repellent. Our big priority now is finding a vehicle and trailer so we can book a passage on the ferry before the static and know just how much space we have for bringing stuff with us.

A quick blog. Much of the day spent in the car really anyway.

We left Lynda and Stuart in time for Popmaster in the car – what a great motivator that was to get out in time. Lynda left us with yet more positive words ringing in our ears 🙂

The drive back to Sussex was straightforward, particularly after the lengthy journeys we’ve gotten used to lately. We arrived at our house at 3pm, came in, put the heating on, checked the pile of post (the redirection to Dad’s has finished now so post is coming here again) and then headed over to Dad’s to check the pile of post there. Frazer was home so we had a cup of tea and catch up chat with him, then Dad arrived home.

We spent about an hour chatting to Dad and then realised Humphrey was still in the car and likely getting cold – he is so well travelled and mellow that hamster 🙂 so headed back via Sainsburys. Ady and I had curry cravings so picked up stuff for that.

Back at the house I put a wash on, unloaded all the food and took a bit of an inventory of the kitchen and put away the stuff Ady was unloading from the car. We’ve had less stuff for this month away than we used to take on a week away 🙂

The kids did some drawings with some pens that arrived for us to review and watched a film, Ady and I had baths and then had dinner. I have a feeling life will be rather a blur for the next couple of weeks.

She is so good for me 🙂

This morning Lynda and Stuart went off out for a walk leaving us to our own devices. The kids played for a while and then put a film on – Toy Story 2, while Ady and I did some work on our cash flow stuff to present to my parents.

L&S were back for lunch before heading off again to collect their granddaughter, Hannah from school. She is six and we’ve never actually met her although having seen so many photos and video clips of her it feels as though we have always known her. She is very curious about Davies and Scarlett, these intruder children who have known her Nanny and Grandad since before she was even born, come to stay and play with her toys and live a very different life to her. She has equally seen many photos of them and has been particularly entranced by Scarlett with her long hair and all her pet birds, Lynda said she talked about Scarlett and her ducks for months after she showed her those pictures.

So this visit we arranged that we’d be here to meet Hannah for the first time. L&S went off to fetch her from school while the kids watched two more films – Nanny McPhee and Jungle Book 2. I watched Nanny McPhee with them because I like that 🙂 then I went and got dinner sorted, lasagne. Ady theoretically watched the second film with them too but actually he snoozed on the sofa 😉

They arrived home and after a very brief period of sizing each other up Hannah, Davies and Scarlett got on really well and played together. They spent some time outside, Davies showed Hannah how to make animations on the 3DS and they sat and chattered together over their dinner and pudding. She’s a very sweet little girl and they found plenty to talk about. Most amusing was when she asked ‘why don’t you have to go to school?’ to which Scarlett airily replied ‘oh, it’s our choice’ and moved on to the next topic.

Apparently when she got in the car to go home at the end of the evening she said to Lynda ‘I wish I could be Scarlett’. Not sure quite what it is about being Scarlett that she is so keen to emulate although Lynda did say she suspected it might be having a Davies 🙂 Always nice to see other kids look at mine and think they have a good life though 🙂

We watched a wildlife programme while L&S ran Hannah home and I spent some time trying to find cats that need rehoming although I need to work out the details of that a little better so that we don’t end up with cats kept in cages for four days while we work our way up the country at the end of the month….hmmmm.

The kids went to bed when L&S got back and we shared a glass of wine and some further chatting. Lynda is always so very lovely to me, telling me how proud my parents should be of me and how wonderful she thinks our choices are. She knows my parents fairly well and doesn’t have much time for them really. I’m torn between feeling disloyal for listening to someone saying she thinks they are unsupportive and obstructive and feeling touched that someone who could quite feasibly be my mother is so very lovely to me.

I’ve got a cold 🙁 I pretty much avoided the lurgy that struck the rest of the family down but I have succumbed to it this time round and am snotty, coughitty and generally glum with it.

This morning after breakfast we headed off for a walk into Altrincham. I needed various cosmetic bits (it’s a challenge finding fragrance free stuff but I struck lucky between Superdrug and Poundland and now have a load of Simple stuff including some for bargain prices :)) and things like vicksticks for my poor blocked up nose. We’re cooking dinner tomorrow night so we also picked up ingredients for that from Tescos on the way back and stopped for a brief time in the park.

We got back for a late lunch and the afternoon passed with chatting and playing. Oh and Ady helped Stuart prune a tree in the garden too.

Dinner, more chatting, the kids and I had baths and then bedtime.

I forgot to blog yesterday some interesting conversations in the car regarding memory and how we pin memories to common places / themes / music / photo prompts / anecdotes. We are all at the very excited stage of looking forward to live changing stuff. Ady is more nervous and a bit snappy with the kids but they are being very tolerant ;).

We’re back to Sussex on Friday and hoping to talk to my parents over the weekend and get a deposit put on the static and the delivery booked so we have a firm date around which to start getting everything else sorted.

I’ve started a page with some info about Rum – the stuff I’ve been sent about how everything works and a brief intro to the people we’ve met so far. I’ll keep adding to it so I don;t need to reintroduce everyone when I mention them onblog 🙂

http://goddardstuff.co.uk//?page_id=5486

It’s in the side bar under ‘pages’

I can’t decide whether it is one of those quirks of memory that means I have several people’s postcodes stored in my brain now or whether it really is an indication that we have spent too much time enjoying their hospitality of late 😉

This morning was spent researching various things online and sitting very companionably with Ady and Babs on laptops and smartphones engaging with the world wide web 🙂

Then we had lunch and we left to head over to Lynda and Stuart’s. We were later leaving than we meant to be but what should be an hours journey (about 40 miles) took closer to two hours thanks to horrible traffic 🙁 Won’t miss that aspect of life here at all.

The kids spent the afternoon / evening playing with lego while we chatted and caught up with L&S. They are very pleased to hear we have plans not to actually build for the first year and may well end up renting our house out for longer rather than selling but I fear my Alfie Kohn ideas about reward and punishment may have been a step too far when sympathising about Lynda’s daughter in law pushing their granddaughter (aged 6) too hard with maths to the point where she’s now decided she hates school…

A nice dinner and a lovely soft bed (I think the spare bed at L&S’s is Ady and my favourite bed other than our own in all the world actually, we always sleep really well here. It’s all crisp white cotton, soft feather pillows and a sunshiney, airy room with nothing other than the bed and cream walls. Feels like a posh hotel room or a cloud or something! Also Ady’s being nice to me so had laid out the kindle and laptop on my pillow along with putting my pjs on the radiator 🙂 Coincidentally while we were driving through the night on Saturday from Scotland to Babs Lynda was up babysitting til about the same time in the morning so she is still recovering from such a late night meaning everyone has retired to bed at 10pm. I was given a tot of rum for my cough which I have to admit to developing quite a taste for (maybe I could join the navy if this whole crofting thing doesn’t pan out).

Yesterday I didn’t get up until midday. I felt much the better for it although I was back in bed again not long after midnight so still some catching up to do.

It was a perfect low key day, chatting and communal cooking for adults, playing and chilling for children. The kids watched a film before bed and then once we’d packed them off we followed suit with a film – the Thomas Crowne Affair, before bed.

Today was more chilling, chatting and playing this morning, and then after lunch we headed over to Kirsty’s. Babs and Kirsty had to pop out at various points to drop off and collect various people which meant Ady and I had a fair chunk of time sitting in Kirsty’s kitchen with Kirsty’s laptop, a notepad and a phone to start working out what is next on our lists of things we need to do. We now have the static more or less in hand, know what generator we want and have decided to try and swap my car in for a diesel four wheel drive while we’re in Sussex to take back to Rum with us as our island vehicle. Next was some form of storage for the land – we know the static won’t hold *everything* and we’ll have stuff like tools, extra food (we’ll need to do food shopping in bulk as much as possible), things like loo rolls, tools, camping stuff that would usually go in a loft or garage and we will want up there with us but won’t necessarily have room for in the static. Our original plan was a container but some ringing round demonstrated that this could cost more than the static once we’d got it delivered! Some debate about a second static ensued before James came up with the suggestion of a trailer.

Perfect 🙂 We can tow it up there with all the extra stuff when we move and it can remain stored in it until we have the right space for it, then we have a trailer which will prove useful on and possibly also off the island for the future. 🙂 Hurrah for friends and ideas 🙂

Kirsty made pizza and garlic bread for everyone, Babs and co headed off to chess and we stayed another couple of hours looking at toilet options and talking about Rum because Kirsty says she’ll never get bored of that 😉 😉 😉 We left having booked them in for their first visit later in the year 🙂

Back at Babs’ we’ve stayed up far too late chatting and emptying the free bottle of wine from Ocado. My back is aching from too long on James’ special massager but I’ve got a runny nose and I know it will get worse once I go to bed and lie down.

There’s a word / thing I didn’t know before yesterday 🙂

I called out ‘meadow’ when we were shown a picture and everyone else in their Scottish accents called out ‘machair’, I got drowned out so it was okay 😆

The second day of the course was equally full on in terms of information tsunami, only this time I found myself holding forth with a barrage of questions from fellow course attendees in the tea breaks and lunch so I had to wolf down my tea or soup too.

First session was from a guy who looked like a greying Robbie Coltrane (and I’d have said that even if he didn’t have the Scottish accent to go with his looks!) from Highlands and Islands Enterprise who exist to ‘generate sustainable economic growth in every part of the Highlands and Islands’. His talk was on Community – what is community, how do individuals fit into it, what HIE does to support it financially and otherwise.

Next was a guy from Business Gateway, also a part time crofter, who came in to talk to us about Finance, Marketing and Business Management. He covered business plans, finance, marketing and promotion, cash flow and how the BG exists to offer support, advice, training etc.

The final talk of the morning was about wildlife habitats, the benefits and downsides of being in areas protected for wildlife, how you can manage your land for wildlife and the positives and constraints of doing so.

Then lunch 🙂 I got talking to a few people interested in Home Ed having met Davies and Scarlett the night before. One of them who has no children at the moment was particularly interested and loved the idea of how we do it, going so far as to say she would definitely feel inspired to have the confidence to Home Ed herself if she ever has kids 🙂 🙂

After lunch was the course leader talking about horticulture, crop rotation and growing on small and large scales. It was interesting but not particularly essential as it covered the sorts of things I am fairly clued up about already. Always good to be made to feel knowledgable though 🙂

Then came a talk on renewables from a guy who makes his living from consultancy work on different energy but has also renovated a very old, very run down old farmhouse to make it more efficient and installed various solar systems (solar panels for energy and thermal solar for hot water) and a wind turbine. He is feeding in to the grid rather than self sufficient (oh the debates I have listened to on those options this last year!) so there is a high element of financial rather than ecological motivation too but he was interesting and able to answer lots of questions. A bit anal with his graphs and spreadsheets though and very honest about his own rather OCD levels of measuring every little thing – he had daily, weekly, monthly, annual breakdowns of everything including how much he spent on lighting, entertainment and so on. Reminded me of someone else I know… 😉

Finally we were presented with our certificates and there was a round up about Scottish Crofting Federation with some last question and answers.

The course was excellent all round really, it was real bargain at £60 and covered LOADS – it was more an introductory route to all the various aspects but I have a whole list of places to contact for help, advice, training, possible grants and funding and a far clearer idea of what to do next, first and ongoing with regard to the admin side of crofting and running the business. Plenty of ideas for diversifying into different things in the future and most importantly far more contacts of people who can help and a load more potential friends who are up for coming and being part of our build at some point 🙂 And some more blog readers 🙂

The course leader who happens to be friends with Vikki on Rum is visiting in April so I’ll catch up with her again then, a couple on the course are coming to Rum in May for a geology course so I’ll see them then. Five of the attendees (two couples and a bloke who is off WWOOFing with his wife) have said they are up for coming and WWOOFing for us once we’re in that position and at least two more were interested in that idea too. We all agreed to swap contact details so an email is going round next week with everyone’s details on it so I can folllow that up 🙂

Finally it was so very reassuring to realise that going into Crofting is joining yet another community, one specific to the highlands and islands filled with people who are all living a similar style of life, driven by loving where they live and having a simpler existance. Community, working with others, living a lower impact lifestyle and being more self sufficient is simply a way of life there and the support network is huge. Mixed ages, backgrounds, even mixed nationalities with loads of crofters going back generations as crofters but loads more incommers like us, different ages, interests, methods and ways of doing things but so much in common with a real backbone behind it of support available officially in terms of funding and grants and training and unofficially in terms of always having someone with the answer to your question because they have done it themselves already.

It was great to be in a room of 20 other course attendees, the various speakers and course leaders all of whom didn’t think we were mad or stupid or crazy or taking on something beyond us because for them we are just doing something completely normal and usual. In the same way as it is good to feel cradled in the Home Ed community sometimes when the rest of the world all sends their kids to school and wants to demand how your kids will get GCSEs, live in the real world and make friends it was nice to feel at home and like everyone else for a few days with fellow crofters and prospective wannabe crofters :). I was being congratulated, told our story was exciting and meeting people who want to join in with our dreams, that means a lot 🙂

Then it was the nine hour drive south 🙁 I can’t summon much in the way of enthusiasm about that really. It was tedious, tiring, cold and felt like it went on forever. The kids did fall asleep about 1130pm, they are such good travelers 🙂 We got to Babs just before 2am which isn’t super late by my standards but having been in a classroom for 9 hours previously and the wrong end of a very full on week with early starts every day and hundreds of miles in the car it felt very late indeed. We got in, got pj’d and were all asleep within minutes. Never has a triple sleeper bunkbed looked so appealing 🙂