Looking backwards and forwards

Hello from Day 15 of this new year.

I’m so excited to be back in the writing mood as I’m bursting with interesting possibilities for the near and longer term future but have allowed time for thoughtful reflections on time passed.

Many of the blogs I follow concluded with a review of their highlights from 2010. As most of my 2010 was spent away from being an active blog writer (and the last half of 2009 too) it may help me and you to chart a few of the things which occurred during the past 18 months and then I’ll be able to write about the present without feeling I ought to write about events which are long passed in detail.

Here goes…

August 2009
After months of due-diligence including extended visits we proceeded with our plans to join forces with other like minded people,packed up our beautiful 7 bedroomed rented house in Worcestershire and moved down to a newly formed community in north Cornwall. Actually,*I* initially moved down with the three littles to live temporarily in our touring caravan in a  field belonging to the intentional community as the cottage we had hoped to reside in was still being let as a holiday cottage.

Bealers stayed behind as was committed to a piece of work with a client in Malvern. We hilariously moved 4 weeks after I had major abdominal surgery and two weeks before the children started their new school. Our youngest was just 16 months. I omitted to tell Darren about a frightful incident between myself and one of the original founders of the community where I was shouted and screamed at close range. I didn’t tell him about what happened or how I sobbed non stop all night or how only two people came to see if I was OK afterwards.

November 2009
A project to build a straw bale communal office was completed so Bealers was now able to move down as he had a place to work. This brought our family back together after months of him having an exhausting 5hr drive between Malvern and Cornwall every weekend. This also meant that we had all our furniture and tools again. By this time we were living in the small,damp cottage on the farm. It was the largest house but was much smaller than the lovely houses we had rented before. We stored many of our belongings in various barns around the community and tried to integrate into our new neighbourhood.

Christmas 2009
After Christmas lunch we both simultaneously agreed that we were disliking so many aspects of life at the community that we had to tell them and start looking for a new place to live. We confided in our neighbours –the only people at the farm who shared our outlook on life and with whom we had a very natural and mutually helpful relationship with. Many good times had been spent sharing meals and wine,their child and our eldests were close friends since they all met each other,childcare swapping was straightforward and trusting,excursions ‘off site’to charity shops by both mums were frequent.

On telling these neighbours that we were going to be leaving they immediately said that if we weren’t going to stay then they weren’t either. So,on a blustery cliff top Boxing Day walk (with my bemused mother who was finding her first visit to our new home rather more interesting than she’d expected) we agreed that we would attempt to find two houses to rent next door to one another as we loved being each other’s neighbour. The search was to be focussed on Wales.

January 2010
Every moment of January was spent calling agents and scrutinising property websites. As the weeks dragged by we began to accept that we would not be neighbours for very much longer and may even have to return to our previous home areas so that the children could return to schools they were familiar with.

February 2010
One day in early February Darren and I returned from Wales with our tails between our legs after an exciting but ultimately fruitless dash to see a lovely sounding woodland that had been announced as being for sale the previous lunchtime. By the time we had got there,stomped round,discussed it and called the agent to make an offer we were too late and an offer on the land had already been accepted. We drove back to Cornwall where our amazing next door neighbours had kindly babysat the older children.

While we had been away the rest of the community had been courting a new family who were visiting to see whether they wanted to move to the community and naturally wanted to see the house we would be vacating. The potential new family asked us where we would be moving to (but not why we were thinking of leaving!) and when we explained that we had been looking in Wales for two properties next door to each other the couple said “Oh you might like to consider the place we thought we were going to be moving to if we hadn’t fallen in love with this community so much. In fact we have to make a difficult phone call tonight to the landlords of the place to explain that we won’t be taking their house after all –perhaps we could sweeten the pill by suggesting we may have found replacements…”

They proceeded to describe a 16th century 5 bedroomed Welsh timber framed long house and its nearby barn with seven acres of shared vegetable gardens,pond,small woodland,orchard and all near to a nice sounding,slightly alternative,market town. It sounded ideal and unbelievable that it not only existed but was actually vacant needing two sets of tenants.

After a few emails and phone calls Bealers and our friend Jude went to meet the landlords and to view the houses and returned saying that the landlords’set-up 2 miles away was AMAZING in that they have a very productive holding,another beautiful timber framed house and their own emerging community which functioned really well with over one hundred WWOOFers passing through each year. He’d paid the deposit there and then and returned with a little movie of him walking round the house for me to see on his phone.

Our neighbours,naturally didn’t want to commit to saying they would live in the barn without having visited it so a couple of weeks later,armed with garlic and broad beans to plant,we all went to see the place. Our favourite quote of the weekend was from one of us claiming that they’d just heard a really rare sound –the sound of hearty laughter coming from a vegetable patch.

March 2010
On March 22nd both families left Cornwall and arrived at our new micro  intentional community. It was a bonkers week as the barn was unfit for habitation so the main house saw all eight of us bunking down in front of a pathetic fire. I had intended to bring sleeping gear in my car as I knew our removal van was not due until the following day but as the neighbours left the Cornish farm in their self-hire Luton van I asked if they had room for my bags of bedding as had run out of room in my car. A series of rather unfortunate events meant that by the Severn Bridge their van had broken down and we picked up the child and mother in our car. Luckily just as we were rearranging my chattels to accommodate the new passengers (the father was staying with the van to await the AA services) we found room for the bedding. It was farcical and a comedy of many errors (kids being sick over all the bedding,chickens and rabbits in a car but no real homes for any of them on arrival,the AA van broke down and was forced to be towed back down the whole length of Wales only to return and the van be dropped off with the back door of the van stuck severely fast until our new farmer neighbour rescued it with his huge iron bar and some heavy duty hammering,oh and all this happened in heavy horizontal sleety rain) but somehow humours remained really high and we were all so very pleased to be in a new place.

Just a few weeks later we rescued twelve battery hens from the Battery Hen Welfare Trust who have kindly given us on average 10 beautiful yellow-yolked eggs each day.

Bealers and I took a nice office at the local town hall on a street which has a fabulous wholefood restaurant,two butchers,organic and non-organic greengrocers,a bakery,and outdoor pursuits equipment,some smashing charity shops,a healthy load of hardware stores,music shop,a Chinese herbal medicine practitioner,a health food shop,an incredible book shop,an arts and crafts centre,a library,a small cottage hospital,playgrounds,a couple of interesting antiques shops,a local credit union and a resource centre. Oh and it is very very very beautiful

The rest of the year went swiftly and apart from the big move have only made smaller achievements,but nevertheless I have:

• learned how to crochet
• finally learned to use my sewing machine (bought when I was expecting the twins and thought I would need a hobby to stave off boredom –needless to say it hasn’t been out much since their arrival 8 years ago)
• started to make some very interesting and excellent friends in the local community
• started a local Freecycle group as there wasn’t one
• have halfway completed a Permaculture Design Course (a rich source of new interesting friends)
• had a wonderful Clearview woodstove installed which meant we lived through 6 weeks of ice and snow-bound life without putting on the central (wood pellet fuelled) heating system
• attempted to purchase four more woodlands
• partway completed becoming a registered childminder
• made Christmas a homemade one by mainly giving gifts I’d made (food and fabric)
• moved the piano into the hallway and now play on it several times a week

Bealers also continued with his plan to gain more practical skills and passed his exams to get his chainsaw tree felling licence (or ‘ticket’),visited Ben Law to learn how to do roundwood timber framing and had Simon Fairlie teach him how to use a Scythe.

Planning ahead…

Previous posts to this Becoming Domestic blog have been on my transition from City based working mother to rural homemaker.

I am still very much on that journey and will continue to write about domestic life but all of my thoughts are now geared towards the necessary transition (personal and globally) from an resource-rich lifestyle to a simpler more resilient lifestyle where we are less dependent on the state and society’s instant gratification culture and have more time,better health,stronger community,increased practical skills,freer thinking offspring who are as prepared for an uncertain future in a depleted,chaotic world.

During this coming year Bealers and I hope to…

• help establish a new small rural housing co-op for us to make a permanent home
• remove our two older children from mainstream education and teach them all we can
• have a better attempt at growing vegetables at this altitude (1200ft) where we laughed when our landlady mentioned that the last frost is generally June (stopped laughing when our newly planted beans got killed by an unexpected cold snap during the last days of May!)
• continue to improve practical skills (sewing,spinning,knitting,crocheting and food preservation for me,woodworking,fixing things and sailing for B)
• learn to horse ride
• continue to build relationships in the wider local community
• complete my permaculture design course
• set up a child minding enterprise as contingency to our small family business falling on lean times
• continue to acquire useful manual tools

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