One word? When seven would do…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, where were we?

Wednesday I believe 🙂

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday That’s today 🙂

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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very lovely but we both felt slightly sick afterwards 😆

We walked back via the park again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

January 2004
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July 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

of actually working here 🙂

We started this morning with some fruit picking – raspberries, jostaberries, gooseberries, tayberries and loganberries. I did some pinching off side shoots on tomatoe plants and then that was followed by cuprinol-ing the ends of some cut wood that John is planning to use as cordwood on a building he is putting up for his sister. It’s a real shame we have not got to spend more time with John actually, he knows loads about lots of subjects we are interested in.

We made that job stretch rather as we have realised our pace of work is way quicker than they are expecting here. And it was 1030am so we persuaded Scarlett to make us a cup of tea and we all listened to Popmaster 🙂

Our next task was to lop the willow growing at the top of a willow structure. Ideally it would be pruned and woven in in it’s dormant period in winter but some of the growth was so heavy it was preventing the light getting to lots of the other bits so it needed to come off. I held the ladder – when I wasn’t letting it go to take pictures 😉 and Ady lopped. We thinned one of the apple trees and then did some trimming edges of grass with the shears. Lisa asked me to come and help her with lunch which we ate early again today.

After lunch we thinned the rest of the apple trees, removing fruit where it would hamper growth and create smaller, rubbed against each other apples. We then pulled up some garlic and put it out to dry off in the polytunnel.

Our final task of the day was to remove some pipe lagging that had been put around some young apple trees that were getting ring bark damage from rabbits to protect them. The lagging was sweating though and holding moisture against the trunks which was doing them no good. A couple had the root stock sending out shoots rather than the grafted tree too so we took those off.

We retired to the static where Davies had two very spectacular nose bleeds, one lasting for ages. Lisa had one yesterday and Scarlett had obviously had a minor nose bleed in the night as she had blood around one nostril this morning so it must be the stormy pressure of the weather or something, but Davies has not had one for ages. We watched last weeks episode of Sorry I’ve Got No Head on iplayer but were most disappointed at the lack of Jasmine and Prudith 🙁

Dinner was bean soup. I know. Soup. With beans in it. To be fair it was actually quite nice soup and also contained carrots, potatoes, sugar snap peas and herbs from the garden so I ate all but the beans and then explained I really don’t like beans but Ady loves them and passed them across to him. I was left with a serious carb and protein deficit though and was most glad of Ady’s suggestion yesterday that we buy some cheese and crackers for just such moments, so enjoyed them a bit later with a cider :).

This morning was bottling mead. Oh how very Nic-proproiate 🙂

We started by gathering some empty wine bottles – Lisa and John have friend who have a campsite and gather wine bottles from their recycling to give to them to use. We soaked them in the bath (which I had to clean first! :shock:) to get all the labels off and give them a good clean.

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Then we made up sterilising solution and left them to soak in that while we went off to pick some raspberries.

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apparently I look like this when I pick raspberries – who knew?!

Then back to rinse the bottles. The level of water used and drained away in this exercise rather offended me. But I was in an easily offended mood anyway by having to wash the bath round in the first place…
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Next was bottling mead from 2009. As I claimed previous home brew experience and Lisa had a horror story of previous WWOOFers flooding her kitchen floor with wine I was nominated as bottom end of the hose while Ady was in charge of top end, so he got to ensure it stayed in the bucket and didn’t suck up sediment while I got to fill the bottles. Which meant by 1030am I had had several big mouthfuls of mead in order to start it moving from the bucket to the bottles – oh the hardship 😉

We bottled 14 bottles and had a half bottle left over which was put to one side to have with dinner tonight 🙂 Then we set up a production line of corking, labelling and sealing the labels
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That took us to midday-ish at which point Lisa declared we were having lunch early as Carina was going back to school this afternoon so we all ate together and Ady and I cleared up.

We have sort of set a precedent for always doing the washing up after lunch and dinner, which I don’t mind when we have been catered for but was slightly annoying yesterday when we actually did the cooking. It is also petty but irritating that we come in to find other washing up such as the kids breakfast and mid afternoon snack washing up piled there too now. I guess as they boil kettles to wash up it simply waits for a twice daily mammoth session and Lisa did thank Ady earlier today for all the washing up but it slightly grates on me. I was fairly pissed off about being asked to wash round their bath before we washed the wine bottles out this morning and there have been small but noticable incidents while we’re here of being ‘just WWOOFer’s which have put my back up. My issue I am sure rather than any deliberate slight and it is always a funny dynamic to have strangers living with you who are working for you but Davies observed today that here we are ‘WWOOFers rather than part of the family like we have been in other places’ so there is a definite feeling of divide.

Lisa was off out this afternoon though so she gave us some jobs to do -trimming round some beds that hadn’t been done with the strimmer or mower due to having water pipes and pots so needed doing with shears and picking strawberries / removing runners. All of which were minor jobs that we whizzed through and then lazed around.

We wandered down to Tescos for some milk and bread before dinner and then enjoyed an hour or so chatting to Lisa and John after dinner. Then Yannick their son came and asked Davies and Scarlett if they would play with him, which was nice as they have not really interacted with each other at all. He got Lisa to help him ask and she played with them too – some variation on hide and seek. We retired to the static for showers, some discussion about how our lives have changed which I recorded for the other blog but needs some more added to it and then some story before bed for Davies and Scarlett.

We have once again managed to not get to bed at any sort of sensible time due to playing with Ady’s phone and spending too long online. The lure of sofa and electricity proves strong…

Choices offered this morning were bottling honey or feeding plants (with wee dilution for the roots and seaweed extract for the leaves). I went for the honey bottling 😉 Actually Ady was quite happy to be volunteered for the feeding anyway as he’d not done that last week.

Davies came with me and Scarlett went with Ady. I’d been feeling like they had not got all they could from this host so had asked them to work more with us this week. Last week they spent a lot of time playing or keeping an eye on the ducks. I have a blog post in my head about them generally actually so I will save it and do it seperately.

Davies mostly took photos 🙂

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I had to skim the settled bits off the top of a bucket of honey that has been kept gently warmed for the last week to try and liquify it more. These are bits of wax, propolis, the odd bee leg or wing and bits of comb – all edible and infact what we’ve been eating the whole time we’ve been here but are not jarred for paying customers. Next the bucket went into a large container with a tap and then I filled jars. 34 jars in all :). Put lids on jars and then stickers on jars. A very enjoyable if rather sticky job. The honey pouring into the jars was very hypnotic, a bit like watching a lava lamp and of course it smelled heavenly 🙂

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Meanwhile Ady and Scarlett did the feeding in the polytunnel and then picked some raspberries for sale. I finished off the honey bottling and then Ady and I moved on to picking currants – black, white and red and learnt about tayberries and loganberries which I had heard the names of but didn’t know what they were, so was most surprised to spot what looked like double length raspberries!

Late lunch after we had destalked all the berries and put them into containers in the freezer (we did get a bowl to bring back for breakfast tomorrow though :)) which only left us with about an hour and a half of our afternoon shift.

We thinned carrots in the polytunnel first. Lisa nets them to protect from carrot fly, only ever pulls them when it’s raining (which it was doing here this afternoon, we missed the heatwave everywhere else although it was still quite muggy and could have done with a proper thunderstorm to clear the air) and fills the holes back in when carrots are pulled. Between covering all bases she seems to not have any carrot fly problems. We did loads of thinning – must have been well over 100 carrots, with at least three times that number still in there to come out at later stages. Lisa and I pulled, Ady took them over to Davies and Scarlett and they cut the leaves off to stop them growing and taking moisture from the carrots. Davies then graded them into comedy shapes, small or stunted and the straight, long and suitable for sale creating several piles.
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Which just left us enough time to thin out the grape vines which are growing in the polytunnel. Davies and Scarlett went to make us a cup of tea while Ady and I wobbled on stepladders with secateurs cutting off bunches of grapes.

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Which took us to finishing time 🙂 Lisa had asked us if we’d cook tonight and Ady had been planning a satay veg stirfry but when Lisa mentioned a butternut squash and the carrrots we’d been pulling up I remembered the winning Delia recipe Chris had recommended when we cooked for the Not Swingers last year and how delicious that was so we made a variation on that instead.

We used squash, potatoes and carrots for the veg as that was what we had, onions we pulled up last week and brown rice. For me it was slightly lacking depth of flavour as they didn’t have any cayenne or nutmeg for the cheese sauce and their organic stock was a bit tasteless so the rice didn’t have the richness I remembered from last time. I slightly fretted about the cheese sauce too as we used soya spread rather than butter, wholemeal flour rather than plain so it took a bit of whisking to blend but it all came together.

In the end it was a hit – Carena had seconds and Lisa had thirds – I reckon if I’d have cooked more it would have gone too! We washed up (we do after every lunch and dinner, TBH I thought it was a bit of a cheek to be washing up after having cooked really!) and then headed back to the static.

On the plus side we have Friday off 🙂 Lisa is going to an allotment meeting and will be out all day so said as it was our last day anyway (we’re leaving here on Saturday) we could take the day off – so hurrah!

Back at the static I read the kids a couple of chapters of story before they headed off to bed. Ady has now folllowed them and I am toying with another blogpost or getting an earlier night myself…

January 2004
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June 2011
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and somewhere at home I have one of Ady and I in August 1993!

Saturday Charity shop shopping in Bangor 🙂 We got up, breakfasted and then walked in. I reckon it was about 4 miles in to the actual city centre. Not a lovely walk, as roadside all the way, passing loads of big retail sheds but we did spot a lane leading off in an interesting fashion with a FOR SALE board mentioning 40 acres so we made a note of the estate agent.

In the town we looked at all the charity shops, picked up a few books, a couple of T shirts (one for Ady, one for me, one for Davies), a cuddly toy for Scarlett (she assures me she really did *need* another one ;)), Davies got a new sketch pad and pen from The Works, we got some cinder toffee to munch on, bought a couple of bags of chips to share for lunch, Ady upgraded his phone to a new HTC Desire S which he is very pleased with. We’d been debating not upgrading when his contract ran out but as he is on a pretty low monthly contract and we are both using most of our minute and text allowance at the moment staying in touch with family and friends we decided we may as well keep our contracts and so as he does love a new phone he upgraded. Mine isn’t due until September so I will wait and see whether I want to tie myself in to another 2 year contract or not nearer the time.

I got some dungarees for working in (Anna had a pair at Bryn Mawr and convinced me of the benefits of some sort of overalls for working in – no more ruined knees in my jeans (they all have mud / grass stains), no more pulling up falling down jeans all the time. Ady got a waterproof jacket as he didn’t have one and still has a coat damp from rain a week ago.

On the walk back we stopped at B&Q to get some storage boxes and Tesco to get food for dinner which meant the last mile of the walk was very laden down with boxes and bags – so aching arms and feet when we got in. Recovering from the walk coupled with Ady playing with his new phone meant it suddenly got very late and we didn’t eat dinner until 1130 (the kids had eaten earlier) so were not back at the van for bed until 1230am. I was really tired and the kids were too.

Sunday Nice to sleep til waking naturally, although it was slightly earlier than it may have been if the van had not been so hot! It was roasting in there – I think we’ll be sleeping with the vents open tonight.

I put the inside of the van back together(turning beds into seats and tables, closing up the kitchen end, putting everything in cupboards) ready to drive while Ady and the kids breakfasted and then Ady put the outside together (unplugged the hook up, wound up the levellers) and then we headed off to Anglesey. We drove to South Stack and had a wander round there, chatted to the ranger in the visitor tower and looked through binoculars at wildlife, had stuff pointed out to us and got various information before climbing up the hill and then down the steep cliff steps to try and spot puffins. I managed to spot some through the binoculars so the little group standing near us all got to follow my directions to spot them too 🙂

Davies saw them a bit further down but Scarlett didn’t manage to which we thought was going to be sad for her but she had another go later and managed to see probably the best example as she watched them on the ledge and then saw them fly off to dive, so she was really chuffed :). We also saw cormorants, guillemots, shearwaters, choughs, various gulls including kittiwakes – and a very panoramic and stunning view of the sea. Gorgeous chunk of landscape that. I’d told the kids to leave their consoles here today and spend the journey looking out of the window instead as they often while away the long drives on DS or PSP which is fine when they are mostly motorways but a shame when the scenery we are driving through is as amazing as it was today. This meant they saw loads and then when the road was a bit boring they both got out pens and paper and did drawings of Puffins – Scarlett had already got her spotter and bird books out to check details of the birds we saw today and tick loads of the things she saw off her lists :). I could almost be convinved by a table in a vehicle….

We left there and popped into a Morrisons for food supplies for tonight – Ady and I both looking like fat heroin addicts as the hogweed marks now look like trackmarks on the insides of our arms. We consoled ourselves that at least we looked like *healthy* druggies, not skinny ones who don’t eat!

We went next to LLan—-gogogoch, as we have photos of Ady and I stood on the station from nearly 18 years ago, and I think both kids at least once in the past, although neither of them could remember. We were talking today about them building memories of various places we have been and trying to get a mental map of the country with places they have stayed in. We do look at a map each time we travel and mark out interesting places so hopefully some of it is going in.

From there we drove to a lay by with a great view of the Menai and the Britannia bridges over the Menai Strait with Snowdon in the background which was all very beautiful. We decided to make the most of jhaving a campervan and made tea and coffee and saw on a wall drinking it which was very lovely. One of those perfect moments that will stay with us about this year :).

We drove over the Menai bridge and then back over it the other way just for fun, before going over the Britannia bridge again and back to the hosts. Lisa popped over to the static for a catch up chat about weekends which was nice – it’s felt like our first real weekend off at a host since we began really as we’ve actually been out, seen the local area, not worked or eaten with our hosts and just done our own thing, how I envisaged it would be when we first started.

I cooked dinner while Ady put the van back together, then we rang my Dad for a catch up chat, and proper Welsh saying of Llanfair….and to tell him about puffins. I read a couple of chapters of story to the kids and they went off to bed. Ady has already headed over there and I am waiting for the last few pictures to upload to flickr.

This morning after letting out the ducks we did some more sowing (carrots, rocket) and some transplating (cabbage, beetroot) and some weeding. I picked some strawberries and raspberries too.

That took us to lunchtime pretty much and then I hung some washing out – we asked if we could use the washing machine but Lisa (who is rather controlling) did stand over me while I loaded it 😆

Then Ady finished off some weeding – we have now done all the outside beds, so any further weeding will be in the polytunnel next week I guess. I was tasked with making lots of litres of bee syrup – a very strong sugar solution used to feed bees. They get a summer solution when new colonies are building up and an even stronger winter solution to keep them going over winter. I was making up 4kg of sugar to 3litres of water. I had a great routine going of boiling two kettles with 1.5l in each, opening and pouring the 4kg of sugar into the big fermentation bucket, adding the water once boiled, filling the kettles and getting them on again, stirring the solution until dissolved and then pouring into containers with a funnel. By the time I had come back in and opened and poured the sugar in again the kettles had boiled. I love jobs like that 🙂

Scarlett came and helped a bit, which did rather mess up my system but was worth it ;). By then it was nearly 330pm and Lisa went all spontaneous and said ‘oh it’s 330 and it’s Friday afternoon, just help Ady finish up weeding and then call it a day!’ 😆

It started to pour with rain soon afterwards and hasn’t stopped since. We had dinner – cheesy vegetable bake with potatoes, broccoli, carrots, peas – very nice and seconds for us which meant it was close to a decent portion ;). Ady got a lift with Lisa to Tescos for some meringues and cream to have with the strawberries and raspberries we were given. When he got back we had them and I rang Julie for a catch up chat – last time we talked about our news, this time we talked about theirs :).

We’ve had a late night in celebration of the fact we don’t have to get up in the morning and are now all heading back to the van together.

On Monday afternoon we did some strimming,
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by Tuesday evening both Ady and I had a series of itchy red marks on our necks and arms and assumed we’d been bitten by something, by last night they had started to blister and today they are still blistering and some have gone all weepy. It’s not dreadful, they are not sore or itchy any more and I think we have sufficiently few and sufficiently minor amounts to get away with them healing up and going away. But today when Ady went to do some more strimming Lisa said ‘oh be careful of this stuff, it’s hogweed and a previous WWOOFer had a nasty reaction to it, where the sap gets on your skin and makes it super sensitive to the sun so you get burns’. Ady remarked that that must be what I had then (his has not really blistered like mine has) and Lisa apologised for not warning us with the explanation that as she doesn’t ever do the strimming she had forgotten about it. I’m fairly cross about that really, I think it’s very irresponsible to know about a danger like that and subject someone to it without mentioning it. Googling has thrown up some real horror stories so I think we got off fairly lightly really.

So this morning was possibly the worst job you get at WWOOF hosts; cleaning out the animals. Here they only have chickens and ducks so it was scraping off the shit with a shovel, putting it in the compost heap and putting down fresh bedding in the duck house and the same in the chicken house. The chicken house also had the added delight of a load of stones the chickens had dug up with their scratching that needed to be used to fill some holes in the run. While Ady and I (mostly Ady in fairness ;)) did that Davies and Scarlett did some strawberry picking. Once we’d finished that Ady did some strimming (in long sleeves!) and I picked some peas and then did some feeding the tomatoes, pumpkins, peppers, peach and nectarine tree. Lisa was very cagily trying to ask me about whether previous hosts has used urine as a plant feed and what did I think about that idea. I said I was fine with it and she asked if I was up for some of that then, in the style of someone approaching me to join a cult. I did wonder if I was being invited to actually wee directly onto the beds myself so tenatively agreed and was shown the container full of wee (John’s) and the wee watering can, shown how to mix up a 10 to 1 dilution and feed the plants with it. I get all the best jobs, me 😉

I did wonder why I was set to work strimming killer weeds which resulted in blisters to my arms and neck with no prior asking but dealing with wee when I have had two children and therefore changed many hundreds of nappies might offend me…

Then it was lunch time 🙂

After lunch we did some weeding, planted out some squashes in the garden and in the polytunnel, broke up some cardboard boxes to mulch around some comfrey and then weeded a bed which was full of tomato plants which have self seeded from compost made from kitchen waste. Felt very odd and wrong to be pulling up tomatoes but Lisa could not be swayed by our suggestions of transplanting, selling them or even giving them away.

Then we sewed some swedes and some radishes and swapped over some protective netting for a lighter one with more growing space for the plants.

Dinner tonight was ‘Angelsey Eggs’ – a very nice hard boiled eggs base covered with mashed potatoes, leeks and cheese. Very delicious but not nearly enough. We had some interesting conversations over dinner about their experiences as WWOOF hosts and ours as WWOOFers though. Despite the lack of food and the whole hogweed incident I do like Lisa and John lots, they are interesting and have loads to teach us and seem to have fairly similar philosophies and ideas to us in many areas. This week has gone quick and I expect next week will do the same which is always the best sort of host really. We’ll definitely take away plenty of ideas from here.

Back at the static we had some cereal (kids) and Bombay mix (us) to tide us over 😉 The kids and Ady watched a film and I read a chapter of story to them before bed.

Horseshoe Pass
November 2011
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October 2003
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March 2004
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June 2011
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I liked the title so much I have littered the internet with it – twitter (both accounts), blogs (both blogs) and may start graffiti-ing it in places too – look out for a flashmob style sweep of the word in the Bangor area – I reckon I could re-write the lyrics to ‘Didn’t we have a lovely time the day we went to Bangor’ to accomodate it.

Today we started with a very new-Goddard breakfast which was delicious. We may never eat coco pops again 😉

Our first job was taking red and black currants off their stems and putting them into containers ready for freezing. We followed that with pulling up some onions and putting them in the polytunnel to dry.

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The kids were then on duck watch – there is one still escaping so the only real solution is to keep watching and work out how she is doing it. We suspect she is flying and are happy to teach Lisa and John how to clip their wings which is something they have never done before but we have had to do to our chickens over the years when they have got flighty. They had both collected a ‘pet’ snail each and were busy creating snail worlds out of rocks and garden detrius. Ady and I did some sowing of seeds and some planting on of various things in the greenhouse with Lisa and then back outside for some weeding of one of the raised beds. Once weeded we dug some trenches and sowed some carrot seeds. Lisa fills the trenches with seed compost to give the newly sewn seeds a fighting cahance. Judging by the success of the earlier sewing it seems to be a winning idea!

That about took us to lunchtime. I really like the lunches here – home baked bread, loads of home made chutneys, mustards, honey and spread, home grown salad leaves etc. In the middle of lunch Ian the tree pruning neighbour called in looking for John who was not here. He agreed to look at the peach, nectarine and fig trees in the polytunnel which Lisa was planning on having us thin as they are laden with fruit so Ady and scrambled along after them as our philosophy is to never miss a learning opportunity. Ian is a real character, very funny, eccentric and full of sarcastic asides. He’s invited us over for a look at his set up so we will have to sort that out as I reckon we could learn loads from an hour in his company.

This afternoon was mowing for Ady, some raspberry picking and then weeding for me. The kids continued on duck patrol.

We finished at 4pm and hung out in the static – we’re really appreciating the extra space to spread out in. We joined the hosts for dinner at 6pm and then I walked along to Tesco after dinner as we were out of loo rolls and felt odd about asking for more. Also the kids had requested apples and oranges and I quite liked the idea of some excerise as I’d sat down lots today and always enjoy an hour to myself here and there even if it is in Tescos.

I realised on the way back that it was about a year since we came up with this idea and a check back on the blog shows I blogged about the idea a year ago this very day!

We’ve had a really nice evening in the static, Scarlett had a shower, we listened to music, played on laptops, chatted, laughed, the kids put on a mime show, did some drawing…. just hung out really.

One of the very interesting things about WWOOFing is coming to realise that managing people is actually a very valuable skill. One which lots of people simply don’t possess. Being able to clearly explain what you want someone to do, giving the right level of guidance to ensure you have got the idea across without being patronising or dictatorial, giving the right level of autonomy to someone whilst ensuring the work is still actually done with the desired end result and then actually letting them to do it seems to be a bigger deal that we’d realised. That said, our current host Lisa is not bad at this at all, although she does have a habit of flitting from one job to the next and giving a long list of ‘things that need doing’ which always freaks Ady out as he feels like he should have completed all of them before she comes back whereas I assume she is almost thinking aloud and hoping between us we remember them all and it gives us a little choice to move between tasks as we wish. She is not working with us much which in some ways is a shame as it is always nice to be chatting and learning as we go – and have someone on hand for guidance when required but in another way is nice as we get to chat and move at our own pace.

This morning our first job was digging out some ragwort from various patches around the land. Ady and I had forks (although the ground here is so stony it is really hard to dig so I was pulling out by hand) and the kids had buckets for us to bung them in so they could transport them to the compost heap. The grass we cut yesterday was then piled on top and hopefully the heat of the composting grass will kill off any ragwort seeds to stop them spreading. That was all quite pleasant until it started to rain!

We were then shown a variety of tasks in the polytunnel – some weeding, some thinning peaches and nectarines, some pinching out tomatoes, some removing runners from strawberries and another outside job of grading some wood into two piles – one for firewood and another for building, then moving it to the relevant place. I don’t think we’ve had a host yet where carting wood around – either up or down a hill, hasn’t played a part!

I was really not in the mood for the wood so I did a little and then went to do some weeding in the polytunnel. Ady carried on with the wood and the kids came and did some weeding alongside me. We also moved a load of freezer stuff from one freezer to another – a slightly domestic type task for WWOOFers really but I suspect that happens a lot here as it is a fairly small growing operation and so when times are quiet I imagine WWOOFers are called on for various housework type tasks.

Then it was lunchtime – salad mostly from the garden, honey from their bees and home made bread, all very nice. They don’t seem to offer tea breaks here so this morning we broke for 15 minutes in our four hour long morning shift from 9am – 1pm and had a coffee ourselves. The afternoon shift is only 2 hours so that is fine but a mid morning cup of tea is essential in my opinion!

After lunch it was lovely and sunny and we spent a very nice couple of hours picking redcurrant and blackcurrants from the absolutely laden bushes. Very satisfying to have five full tubs of fruit at the end of that.

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We then headed off to Tescos, which is about a 15 minute walk away. We were all so retail therapy starved we spent about 90 minutes in there and walked up and down every single aisle 😆 I think we just needed to remind ourselves that our previous life did still exist if we wanted it!

We did look at our shopping on the conveyor belt and laugh at how much we had changed what we bought though – we were buying for breakfast and it was bran flakes, oat, dried fruit and yoghurt – all our favourite breakfast foods from the various hosts we’ve been to, along with some brown seeded bread to eat our hosts honey on. I think we’ll be making our own bread eventually but not practical in the van really.

We walked back and Lisa drove past us along the way so stopped to take our shopping for us. I rang my parents and they had collected the mifi and sent it on to Bryn Mawr so that is all in hand and should arrive with them tomorrow :). I also caught up with Julie later in the evening on the phone so all my social phonecalls are now made. I do have some paperwork to do for tax and other finances though which I really must get sorted this week thanks to a pile of letters Dad brought up with him last weekend.

Dinner was cabbage soup 😆 It was very nice cabbage soup and even Davies and Scarlett ate it all but it was just a bowl of cabbage soup, not even any bread. We did wonder if after we left they got out the real dinner for them to eat 😆 I think the truth is they can’t really afford to feed us, they have said that money is very tight and we are sorting our own breakfasts out. A bit of a cheek really as the deal with WWOOFing is all meals in exchange for work but they have given us a huge jar of honey which I know they would sell for over £10, fresh fruit every day and we have hook up and use of the whole static now (which I am currently sitting spread out on the sofa in as the others have gone to bed) so there is a touch of luxury to our stay here which compensates. Also they are interesting people and have lots to teach us about beekeeping and growing. I think they are slightly fazed by us as a family and not quite sure what to make of us.

Back in the van the kids watched a dvd on the laptop while I talked to Julie on the phone and we all had showers. We are thinking we will offer to cater for ourselves at the weekend as the static has a kitchen we can cook in and then we get a real break from being dictated to about mealtimes and can eat whatever we want without intruding on their family too much – the house is very tiny so we don’t really go any further in than the conservatory where we eat anyway.

We have caught a glimpse at the proposed job list for us which has interesting things like bottling mead, some other honey related stuff alongside garden tasks and fruit picking so all sounds pretty good. John also said it was a shame we were not here for a week longer as we could have attended a beekeeping training day he is running here the following weekend.