A lot to smile about

Life is good :)

In the mornings Dragon and Star let out and feed the animals here at Middlewick - chickens, ducks, goats, pigs, all under the watchful eye of Maggie the dog. Watching them with animals, up to their ankles in mud, in their element. This is so their natural habitat!

We have some fabulous friends here in Glastonbury and it's been great to spend time with them these last few weeks, catching up on each others lives, laughing, drinking, bouncing ideas off each other. Amazing to think that this time last year we didn't even know Jill and Johnny and it was a chance encounter being in the right time at the right place as WWOOFers that brought us together, now we're on our third visit!

We've been lucky to spend lots of time with amazing friends in the last month too - helping us through some tough times, loving us for who we are and just being fantastic. In the very rare dark time I hug the knowledge of my amazing times to me and it keeps me warm and fuzzy.

My Mate Mich - one of Star's extra Mummies

January - crisp, clear, sunny walks with a pub at the other end!

with friends on the beach - life probably doesn't get much better

cooking round a fire on a Friday night in January - rules are for the rest of the world!

 

The Barts - they've caught up with us so many times on our adventure they are practically WWOOFers too!

We have a plan, actually that should be A Plan. We're back in Sussex for a couple of weeks to catch up with family and friends - and very excited about meeting one of our blog followers IRL for the first time :). We'll be getting our house de-tenanted and on the market too. Then we're off back up to Scotland again - the calling of the isles is very strong, particularly given all these reports of the Northern Lights! We have our croft interview, some catching up with friends, a bit more WWOOFing, some getting to know the rest of the community on the Isle of Rum and a Crofting course. Busy, busy, busy!

We've also lined up some more WWOOFing for March and April, this time down on the south coast where we're hoping to make some more new friends, pick up some more new skills and enjoy what is clearly the best suited lifestyle to us again while we wait for our house to sell.

January Part 2

January is also a month for looking forward :)

This year, much like last year we are standing at the cusp of another life changing year. Last night Ady asked me if I was more or less nervous about the possible stuff ahead of us this year than I was last year. My reply was 'more'. More nervous, more excited, more aware of a feeling of 'forever' about it. Last year was the feeling that life was going to be an adventure. This year I have a feeling adventure will be our life.

We're back in limbo to an extent again - sort of WWOOFing here in Glastonbury, although because our hosts are now firm friends and we are that bit more experienced there is less of the learning aspect to being here. Next week we're travelling back to Sussex and will in a rather surreal twist spend a few nights 'camped' in our house. Our tenants are due to leave and we will need to get the place ready to go on the market. We have some stuff in the garage and in the loft, our chickens are there and from reports we have had from the agent and my Dad who did a landlord visit the place will need quite some licking back into shape before it is ready to call in the estate agent. We're planning a week or so based there to get that sorted before heading back up to Scotland for our Rum interview.

For now we'll work on the assumption that we will be successful and Croft 2 will be ours - we do have plans B and C in reserve but fingers crossed we don't need to call them into action. That leaves us with a few 'out of our hands' factors to get past which always makes me feel slightly wobbly - if we are offered the croft, if our house sells... in the meantime we are left homeless and penniless. We can't afford to actually live back in our house with all the bills that entails, we can just about cover the mortgage for a couple of months while it stands empty on the market. Our best option is to head off WWOOFing again really - either down in Sussex near our house, ready to deal with packing up our old life, or up in Scotland ready to start getting stuck into our new one.

We're scaring ourselves silly just now trying to price up house builds, moving costs and setting up a whole life again. The thing is we know that when we actually get out there and do it we can take on anything - I'm off to listen to Elvis singing 'little less conversation, a little more action' - it's where we need to be right now...

Here's how the others are feeling :

Ady: I was pleased to finish WWOOFing and come out of Willow at the end of last year as it was getting tough going into winter living in a van. I do miss the van though and when we visited her at Christmas I felt really sad to drive away from her. Coming back to Sussex was a bit of an anti climax really, we felt like we'd changed so much but everyone else was still living their same lives. I don't feel the same now about our next stage as I did at the beginning of last year. I was so scared we would stuggle with the level of hard work, that the van wouldn't make the journey, that we were all but destined to fail. It turned out that everything we set out to do we managed though and although I am nervous about the challenges ahead this time I have confidence that we *can* do anything we try. I do feel we have been back in conventional life for too long - we are shopping in supermarkets, watching TV, relying on home comforts. I have my moments of feeling terrified about Rum alongside really looking forward to it. I worry about fitting into the community, building a house, whether our business plan will actually be feasible. I am ready to just make it happen now, the anticipation is so difficult - I want to get there, succeed, or fail and work out how to try again.


Dragon: I'm looking forward to Rum for all sorts of different reasons - building a house,  fishing, bird watching, learning to ride a bike, having a home and keeping animals, having my own bedroom I can decorate how I like, having machinery and growing stuff, finding inspiration for my painting and drawings. This stage makes me feel a bit wobbly, I don't 100% know what is going to happen next and I'll feel better once we've been to the interview, whether we get accepted or not at least we will know for certain what is going to happen next. I hope I enjoy it all.

Star: It scares me a bit that we no real idea what's going to happen next. I think it will be so cool to live on an island, I'm excited about the wildlife - birds, animals, the scenery. I'm looking forward to taking some great photographs on Rum. This feels bigger than when we went WWOOFing because we are selling our house and moving somewhere else - more scary and more exciting.

Ah, January.

A time for looking back - I always take some time out in January to look back over the previous year. It's my birthday on 6th and along with facing up to being another year older I like to recap on what has happened in the twelve months gone by,  to celebrate the victories, learn from the mistakes and congratulate myself on staying put on the planet while it circled all the way around the sun again. Last January we were packing up our lives ready to set off on adventure. Willow was sitting on our driveway, a To Let sign was on display in our front garden, our resignation letters were ready to print off and hand in, a full diary of names and addresses of hosts we had yet to meet stretched infront of us. We were filled with anticipation, nerves and the knowledge that whatever else might happen in the coming year it wouldn't be normal. conventional or like anything else we'd ever experienced. 2011 was an amazing year, exceeding expectations, broadening horizons, opening eyes, stretching boundaries, increasingly knowledge, whetting appetites, living, learning, laughing, loving.

A photo a month from our wonderful year:

January - on the beach in Sussex with friends

February - our Bye Then party, being presented with the most generous gifts

March - our first host, we slept in our tent, it was minus four at night!

April - Devon. It's the photos that don't go as planned that make me smile the most when I look back at them!

May - Somerset. Ady has his 47th birthday and celebrates with stick fighting with Dragon!

June - North Wales. Remote mountainside host with broken down Willow. I learn how to carve a spoon

July - Durham. It looks like a prize marrow, infact it is the worlds largest courgette!

August - Yorkshire. We went underground!

September - John O Groats - we made it all the way to the top!

October - Scotland, wild camping. In a round of playing games Dragon creates one called 'the long and confusing game' making use of dice, playing cards, toy cars and a very complicated set of rules.

November - Isle of Eigg. We spent two weeks looking across the sea at Rum before heading there to see it in more detail. From a distance it looked like it could be home, from close up it looked even more likely.

December - Peak District. At a youth hostel for a group holiday with friends.

I also look ahead, spend some time thinking about the coming year and what I'd like to achieve. What hopes and dreams and wishes I have and what I can do to make them happen.

Winter WWOOFing

Six weeks 'off' was long enough! Despite Christmas, New Year, Birthdays (Star's and mine!), holiday and various trips to stay with friends, catching up with family and a round of doctors, dentists, opticians and other such appointments we were starting to feel lazy, fat and stale. Too much time spent slumped on sofas, eating, drinking and watching TV, too little time spent outside being productive and active.

So we're back in Glastonbury again for a couple of weeks, staying at Middlewick which is now far more than just a holiday cottage complex - it's a smallholding! Complete with chickens, ducks, goats, cat, dog, horses and after helping to create a new home for them on our first day here today, pigs are due to arrive too!

We've been lifting, carrying, cleaning, wearing our wellies and getting muddy. Our arms ache and we've had lungfuls of fresh air and exercise. Dragon and Star spent the morning climbing the Tor with Maggie, the resident dog here, meeting up with some of the other guests for a chat at the top where they told them all about our family and our adventures and charmed them sufficiently to be brought cakes :). They spent the afternoon building a den down by the river. Proper education :) Socialising, adventuring, exercising, problem solving, co-operation and teamwork, entertaining and amusing themselves, striking out independantly and generally having a ball. This evening we went swimming.

We've just learnt we have been offered an interview for the croft on Rum, so our What Happens Next plans are ticking along nicely. Plenty more to plot and plan for that and even more exciting times ahead but for now the sun is shining and it's fabulous to be outside working in it again :).

Still in the commercial break

The silence here is very indicative of how we're feeling. We've been mostly staying with my parents, punctuated with shorter stays with various other family and friends. It's lovely to catch up with people, to sit on sofas, have baths, cook in kitchens, sleep in beds, have access to all our belongings (although remember we did declutter to a fairly extreme degree this time last year so 'all our belongings' is still a fairly small heap!), plug things in whenever we feel like it, be able to 'pop' to the supermarket open all hours across the road.

But it's also fairly stifling. There I said it!

We find the constant hum of traffic noisy, smelly, distracting and disturbing. The constant drone of the television with it's endless rounds of repeats and rubbish and adverts bleak and depressing. The waste of time and money and food caused by that very supermarket punting out cheap food at all hours which is supposed to free people of time and money.

I am not sitting in judgement of the way our family and friends live their lives. For the first 30 odd years (for me, 40 odd for Ady) we lived ours just the same and we felt fulfilled and happy almost all of the time. But now the four of us are hankering after those days we spent this year engaged in collecting and chopping firewood, sowing, harvesting or preserving foods, baking bread, fishing for our tea, looking out of our window and seeing the sun rise and set, or the rain tip from the sky and our beautiful world going by.

In lots of ways although we are finding elements of this period a challenge that reassures us that our future plans are right. That we won't be missing these aspects of our old life once we don't have access to them any more. That the simpler lifestyle we spent so much of this year living and enjoying is indeed the right one for us. Hand on heart we can all say that we didn't hanker after Sussex or central heating, or 24 hour Tescos or pre-packaged pasta sauce or indeed any of the things we are kissing goodbye to when we embark on the next step of our journey. It's been a good test to have access to all these things again just to see how we felt about them.

We visited Willow on Christmas Eve, just a fleeting pop in to collect something we'd left in one of the cupboards. It felt like a real wrench to lock the door and drive away from her again though. As lovely as spending time with family is I think all four of us would have been very happy to wake up in Willow on Christmas morning and have a go at cooking a turkey in our little oven.

So as 2011 draws to a close we are able to know for sure that we have had an amazing adventure this year and are more than ready to set off on the next one, knowing for certain that we simply don't belong here any more.

Part Two

Sorry for the silence. It's been a constant round of catching up with family and friends, doing festive stuff and also putting the first touches to our What Happens Next plans.

I'll talk about that a bit more once we actually know whether our hopes are to be realised as for now that is out of our hands with other people making the next decision. I'll update as soon as we know what our next move is to be but for now I'd like to share a newspaper story that appeared about us in the Scotsman, which will also spill the beans about what we'd really love to be our next move.
http://www.scotsman.com/news/environment/woof_family_hope_to_head_for_rum_1_2008815

‘Woof’ family hope to head for Rum

The family who want to live on Rum

Published on Thursday 15 December 2011 11:59

THEY went in search of the Good Life and believe they have found it on a remote Scottish island.
After nine months of travelling the country in a 30-year-old campervan, working on farms and crofts, the  family from Sussex are ready to put down roots and have set their hearts on becoming nearly a tenth of the population of Rum.
Ady, 47, his wife Nic, 38, and children Dragon, 11 and Star, nine, have applied for one of the first crofts created on the island after living an “off grid” lifestyle, travelling across the UK in an activity known as WWOOFing (Willing Workers On Organic Farms), using a network of hosts to facilitate placements on organic farms.
The family recently visited Skye and the community-owned island of Eigg where they learned islanders on Rum were offering new croftland to help increase the population and stimulate the economy.
The Goddards are now among those whose applications will be considered by tomorrow’s closing date with potential crofters due to be interviewed in January or February.
The crofts have also attracted inquiries from Edinburgh and even the Czech Republic, as well as existing islanders, despite being little more than rough ground at present.
Nic, who previously worked in retail management and marketing, said: “I believe everything we have been doing over the last year has been leading up to this.
“It’s down to the people of Rum whether we are successful with our application, but we feel we are right for the island.”
“Over the last ten years we have been moving away from conventional life towards self sufficiency. We had ideas of an idyllic life but we wanted to see for ourselves what it would be like so we could go into it with our eyes open.
“Undoubtedly there is a lot of work to be done building the croft, but there is a certain attraction starting something from scratch.”
She said the family also like the idea of being part of a population that makes its own decisions. While most of Rum is owned by Scottish Natural Heritage, the village of Kinloch is run by the Isle of Rum Community Trust on behalf of the 38-strong population.
She added: “We have learnt so much this year about living off the land. We know what the important things are to consider when looking at land, what crops are worth growing, which animals are worth keeping. We have practical skills such as fencing, building, growing. We have vastly extended our knowledge base on animal keeping, harvesting, tending to livestock and crops.
“We have learnt so much about alternative building methods, green energy, off grid living, low impact lifestyles.”
The two crofts on offer are located to the west of Kinloch and the trust admits they will both require a “significant amount of work” to improve he area beyond rough grazing.
Vikki Trelfer, Rum’s development officer, said the trust has a vision for the island as a vibrant and viable community for people of all ages and a sustainable and diverse economy.
She said new residents with children would help to keep the school open. At present there is only one P7 pupil in the school, one three-year-old in the nursery, and two children under three, while three teenagers go to secondary school in Mallaig.
“New residents will bring different skills and expertise to assist development of the community on Rum. Also, there are a number of opportunities for providing visitor services on the island in the private sector,” she said.
“Rum needs people with skills and drive to take advantage of its huge potential as a major visitor destination.”
The only other croft has already been let to Rum residents.

Interlude

Feel free to play your own hold music!

We're currently staying mostly at my parents house back in Sussex. I say mostly because although we've been back in Sussex for a couple of weeks we have had various overnight stays with other family and friends scattered around and this coming week we're off again for 10 days.

It's lovely to catch up with family and friends properly, to take some time to look back at photos of our adventure and start to turn some of the stories of our adventures into memories and anecdotes, looking back fondly on even the challenging bits. It's nice to have electricity at the flick of a switch, hot water whenever we want it, access to a washing machine, a bath, our own bed and most of our possessions which have been stored here for us.

It's also incredibly stifling and in many ways far more challenging than WWOOFing, staying with hosts or living in a campervan. Which is no reflection on my parents or indeed where they live, but a very telling indicator of how much we have changed. It was a concern of ours that once we returned to a 'normal' setting we would not want to leave it again, that the things we were so adamant we had not missed would infact remind us of how wonderful they were and make us feel we'd never want to leave again.

Instead we are reminded daily of how much freer and happier we felt during this year. How much we loved the lack of traffic and people and bustle. How the convenience of a supermarket does not make up for the fact trees were chopped down to build the carpark. That the downside of a sofa and a TV is feeling unfit and unhealthy slumped on one infront of the other. All four of us are missing the lifestyle we led this year and are enjoying this period as a brief reminder of what we left behind and why it's just not right for us any more.

It feels rather strange not to be working in some capacity - either as paid employees or as WWOOFers but we have certainly been busy. We had so many things to catch up on: Doctors, dentists, opticians, blood donor appointments all round for routine medical maintenance. We had to empty out Willow, give her a really good clean, declare her SORN and leave her put to bed for now, resting on a friend's land until such time as she is called back into service again. We bought my car back out of retirement and had to do the reverse exercise with that; Tax, insurance, MOT, bit of mechanical attention from the time off road and get used to driving something smaller and with gears again. We had various financial things to put in order and paperwork to file. Finally we have given our tenants their two month notice and had an estate agent visit the house to value it and begin the proceedings for putting it on the market.

It's a strange sort of limbo period, not helped by it being so close to Christmas which is always chaotic and frantic for everyone anyway. For us, it is a time of biding our time, finalising our plans for what happens next and working on a new set of dreams and hopes and ideas. All very exciting and hopefully soon to be shared on here but for now, maybe listen to a bit of festive music while we're on hold.