MARTIN’S taking the time to enjoy his new pace of life, his lot with the livestock, and get- ting up with the larks for a bit of animal husbandry….
WORKING in publishing means, as I’ve mentioned before in this column, that you live in a kind of time-warp. I refer not to my tastes in fashion (tie-and-dye T-shirt, loons and an Afghan – timeless) but rather to the production period between writing something and it appearing in print. I’m actually writing this in November. 2007. Working on the Christmas issue of Reconnect in October, for example, played havoc with my efforts to live in the moment and addressing that was one of the many things I looked forward to in My New Life (living off-grid on a low-impact smallholding – do keep up).
Forget mind-altering drugs (if you’re using them you probably already have) – if you want to work in an alternative dimension, simply move to the middle of a field on a hill in Devon. Time, in the measured, set-the-alarm, oh-I’m- late-again, no-really-I’m-sure-you- said-next week, sense is redundant. But working with light and the factors that influence it (weather, seasons, the moon) becomes a crucial part of daily life.
The vital catalyst for us, the spark that ignites the blue touchpaper of each explosive day, is the presence of livestock. If you live on an arable, all-veggie smallholding and wake up to the sort of day that writers of cheesy ghost stories relish, you can dive deeper into the duvet and surface again later to see if things have improved. Or maybe find An Indoor Job if your work ethic is particularly aggressive. But if you keep livestock, they want feed and fresh water and maybe cleaning out. And then there’s a fence that needs repairing (the weather might well have played a part in creating that little chore), or maybe you have to move all your free-ranging poultry into totally unsuitable housing in some futile gesture against Asian flu. Don’t get me started.
Maybe you keep a dog, perhaps partly so you’re forced to get out there and exercise, even when the weather would otherwise keep you cosying up with Countdown. But those of us who keep livestock do so because… well, yes, because we want to ensure our meat is compassionately produced and because they (or their poop to be accurate) are a vital part of the low-impact horticultural model and yes, because we love them too – but surely there’s just a little masochism in the mix?
At the risk of alerting the Perversion Police, yes, we do enjoy it. If you yearn to make (or is that renew?) a stronger connection to the primal elements of living, you can’t then get all picky about which bits you fancy. Making a sacred connection to the earth and its unearthly power on a hot sunny day isn’t a spiritual experience – it’s sunbathing.
We do still prioritise jobs. If we’ve planned a juicy outdoor project, the digging of a pond for the imminent arrival of geese the size of small cars, for example, we might postpone things if the rain’s likely to fill it in faster than the struggling mini-digger can dig it out. We also have an ever-growing list of Inside Jobs – stuff we can do in the workshop, for example. Nothing to do with befriending staff at Hatton Gardens.
But the day-to-day animal and poultry welfare, like the show, must go on. And as I write this (actually in early March – of 2017), the weather is proving particularly challenging. Challenging to achieving anything outdoors, that is. In the connecting-with-the-elements stakes, it’s right up there.
All seasons in one day? We’ve passed from biting wind, through sleet and blustery showers to mellow, warm sunshine in little more than an hour. And living under a huuuuuge sky, as we now do, we see it all brewing in the distance, travelling up the valley and depositing itself over our heads – while the next wave of meteorological magic sweeps along behind it and the next appears like a hoard of threatening Zulus, over the horizon.
The ‘Livestock’ to which I refer currently consists of: alpacas (producers of wondrous wool, which is carded, spun and knitted on-site – and they’re awesome protectors of the…); poultry (nine rare and utility breeding groups), plus a few ducks and towards the end of last year, some turkeys (they were delicious, thank-you); three ewes (pure bred Dorset Downs and for sale – get in touch); and five orphan lambs (each the third and weakest of triplets and now being bottle-fed and growing into Super Lambs); plus a selection of dogs, including our own Martha, the Not Quite A Jack Russel (if you met her, you’d know).
But then we also have plans for those maaaaassive geese, some pigs (I love pigs) and some goats too. And none of them will have any respect whatsoever for dodgy weather.
Quick, call the Perversion Police…