And Finally...

Meet Jerry. Or is it Geri?

I've got time to squeeze in one final post from Pilsdon before I drive up to Wales. Quite a lot has happened this last week. If it didn't go on the internet, how will we know it ever happened?

1) A beautiful doe-eyed female calf has been born. Cuckoo gave birth to her on Sunday, bang on time as per our calculations. She has been named Primrose, or Rosie for short. Mother and calf are still currently sharing a separate stable equipped with a heat lamp to keep the precious newborn warm. We've started milking Cuckoo again twice a day but letting Rosie take what milk she wants between times. It won't be too long though before the two are separated, which has to happen so we can control the amount of milk the calf gets (and make sure we get some too!)

The logpile is almost all gone. Sadly I didn't have quite enough time to complete it!

2) A whole bunch of piglets haven't been born. Saffron the sow was expected to farrow the very same day as Cuckoo was to calve, and people got up in the middle of the night to check on her, but here we are five days later and they remain obstinately inside her. What's probably happened is the due date was based on the wrong conception date - Saffron was with a boar for about two months, and would have come on heat more than once during that time. If so, it could be another two or three weeks before they pop out.

3) The human portion of our community has shrunk all of a sudden. Two people have made planned departures into alternative accommodation, with another due to leave very soon. One other chap took it upon himself to leave without notice, telling nobody. In all probability it was the drive to drink alcohol which propelled him. Unfortunately he was already on his last chance, having done the same previously, so he won't be allowed to return as a residential guest (the option will be open to come for a weekend stay as a wayfarer). And another man who was finding community life difficult will be leaving once he's found somewhere else. With me leaving later this afternoon the community will have to adjust to being smaller than normal - at least until some new folks join.

I sowed my first seeds last Friday... onions. Here they are a week later! 

4) It's also beginning to get slightly smellier. There is currently a ban on showers and laundry, and a “if it's yellow let it mellow” rule applies to toilet flushing. This rather worrying state of affairs is due to a malfunctioning sewerage system. Pilsdon had it installed last year to replace the overloaded reed bed system (we're not on mains sewerage). It's down in the lowest paddock far from the house, and has begun to overflow into the grass. My understanding is that somehow groundwater is leaking into it, forcing the pump to go into overdrive, but then shorting the electrics and bringing the whole thing to a halt. The engineers are here right now to work out how to fix it.

5) More positively, we have cats! Two of them to be precise, a ginger tom and his tabby sister, both about a year old. They've been bought from an animal rescue charity and are the sweetest little critters. After a lengthy democratic process where proposed names were submitted and voted on, they have now been blessed with the names Tom and Jerry.  They have yet to be allowed out but are having a great time exploring the manor house and we hope are already sniffing out any mice. Keeping them off the dining tables and out of the kitchen is the current challenge.

So farewell Pilsdon, it's been a great winter yet again. Thank you for all your generosity of spirit and of cake! May your sewers be fixed soon and your year be blessed with an abundance of peace, hope, joy, and broad beans.

Starting A New Korea

I drove a trailerful of chairs back to Pilsdon this week. Never a dull moment.

If I were asked what I'd like to see changed at Pilsdon Community, after lodging requests for a sauna, a recording studio and a hundred-foot helter-skelter, I'd probably plump for a greater cultural and racial diversity. Of all the thirty-ish adults currently in residence there are three Americans and the rest are British (with the possible exception of a completely naturalised South African). We are all white. English is the only language spoken.

Now I don't know exactly why this is the case but of course we are deep in rural Dorset, not the metropolis of my former life where pretty much the whole world is represented. Quite a few Pilsdon's residents come from the local area which has a predominantly white population. At least we had a Polish wayfarer come for the weekend recently which made a nice change.

So we were slightly unprepared for the short visit this week of ten South Koreans, straight from Heathrow. I and a few others had at least learnt the word for “hello”. We knew they were from a Christian community called Bargn Nuri in South Korea. We knew they were visiting other communities in the UK after us. We knew that they must have some English to be able to contact us by email in the first place. Apart from that, we knew nothing. It was all very exciting.

They arrived about 11pm on Tuesday night, the coach having struggled up the tiny lanes to reach us. They had had a two day journey to get to us. The four men stayed awake to eat sandwiches whilst the women went straight to bed. It transpired that most were high school students, aged 15-18 years old, accompanied by two teachers, a man and a woman, who had very good English. The students' command of English was more variable, understandably.

The next day dawned frosty and bright. We had saved up the big job of cleaning out all the dirty straw that had accumulated in the two main cowsheds, so we all got to work with wheelbarrows and forks, all of the Koreans and some of the Pilsdonites. They were impeccably polite, friendly and good-natured. None of the teenagers had a strop or refused to work. Despite being tired from their long journey they saw the mucky task through to completion, and then jumped at the chance to do some wood-chopping with our axes. They are apparently well used to this, having wood-fired central heating themselves.

In the evening we sat round in the Common Room and they sang some of their community songs for us and we reciprocated with one or two solo songs. I tinkled on the piano, a couple of them played guitar. Then we got into a sharing of what makes our respective communities tick, what the vision is, how we operate, and so on. They have four rural communities and one urban, in Seoul itself. Education is central. They do farm work, growing crops and saving seed, and they study. The two go hand in hand. The young people are being trained for leadership. As for grand vision, they have nothing less than the unification of North and South Korea.

The next morning they overwhelmed us with beautiful handmade gifts - a straw-woven mat and a head-balancer for water jugs, a calendar hand-drawn by local farmers, bags of locally-harvested pine nuts, delicious brown tea leaves, and other delicacies. And then they were off, joining up with the other ten of their crew who had been at Hilfield Friary, and headed for Schumacher College near Totnes. Also on their itinerary is a Jesus Army community and a Bruderhof community, then they'll be popping over to France to visit Taize, and on all the way to Berlin.


We waved heartfelt goodbyes. “Ann-yeong!” we called. (Handily, it's the same as “hello”.) Even though they had stayed for just 36 hours they had made a deep impression on us. Maybe one day we'll take them up on their invitation to pay a visit to them in (a united?) Korea!

PS This is my last post for a while here, as I'm moving back to Wales next week. Keep an eye out on mattswanoffgrid for updates. Thanks for reading!

PPS Sorry for the lack of photos but maybe 2017 is the year everyone will realise they just prefer words to pictures.

28 Jan update: A couple of people have pointed out that Pilsdon has had many residents of different ethnic origins in the past so how I've described Pilsdon above is only what it's like right now. 

Considering A Change Of Lifestyle?

Sheep leave sheep-shaped patches of unfrozen grass

Some moments from my week:

Out behind the East Wing in the bright sunshine, standing on a growing pile of sawdust, chainsawing up three-metre lengths of timber whilst Gary* and Trudy swing their axes and split the sawn pieces. I notice Maria standing nearby and switch off the saw. She's in the middle of preparing lunch. I'll be making supper later on. “I've picked an awful lot of spinach”, she says, “I can use it all, but wondered if you need it for supper?” “Yes I'll throw it in the hotpot, that'll be great” I say. She smiles and heads back to the kitchen. I put the ear protectors back on and turn on the saw.

The front of the manor house

Maria has organised a group trip to the opticians. At 8:30am seven of us pile into the minibus and I drive us the narrow winding six miles to Bridport. It feels like a little holiday, a jaunt out when we would normally be doing some kind of work around the community. Our eye tests are staggered throughout the morning. It's busy in there but the Specsavers staff are very friendly. Four of us, me included, choose frames and order new spectacles. It's more fun choosing new glasses with friends who can tell us what they think, than doing it alone. Some squeeze in a bit of shopping around town too, for themselves or for people back home who've asked for something (normally tobacco-related). We get back in time for lunch.

The blue sticker doesn't help.

Watching the US Presidential Inauguration ceremony on the big screen in the Activity Room with Cameron, an American. He is appalled by the prospect of this new president of his. His English-born wife Maria has dual citizenship having got her Green Card whilst she lived out there. He is planning to get the British equivalent, a long and expensive process. They came from the States with their young children a couple of years ago to become members of Pilsdon Community.

My girlfriend made this beautiful sign 

Teaching the Israeli card game Yaniv to a group of about eight people one evening in the Common Room. Most evenings there is some kind of activity in there - cards, Scrabble, Bananagrams. This particular game I learned from my girlfriend who got it from her brother who had learned it when travelling in India from some Israelis. People caught on quickly and enjoyed it. Sandra took a bit longer as due to her substantial hearing loss, she didn't hear the rules. She is a lovely woman in her seventies who comes to stay for a week or two every so often. She treats us to a seemingly-unlimited store of excellent stories, all personal anecdotes. We miss her when she goes.

Something had been forgotten in the Aga and crisped into these spectacular carbon formations

I could go on. The whole week is made up of this type of thing. Living here is not like living anywhere else. You can be alone in a room, others might drift in and suddenly you might find yourself in a conversation about the Korean war or how to measure the distance between your pupils. Time passes quickly as one enjoyable and diverse task leads to another and to another. Unbelievably I only have two weeks before I head back to Wales.

If you are tempted to find out for yourself what it's like to live here and have the opportunity to do so, there are currently vacancies for both Volunteers (like me) and Community Members who take on joint responsibility with the Warden for the place. Take a look at the website, check out my past blogposts, have a prayerful think about it, and arrange to come for a short visit. It comes with the highest recommendation. From me.

* all names changed as usual

Friday The Thirteenth

A few seed potatoes purchased at Potato Day in Bridport which I have begun to "chit"

Before dawn this morning of Friday 13th I inched the truck gently across the ice sheets that had formed on the concrete yard. Towed behind me in the large trailer were three pigs nestled in a thick carpet of straw where they had spent the night. This new day was certainly an inauspicious one for them. Our destination : the local abattoir.

I also had two humans but they chose to sit in with me in the truck. We hadn't been to this slaughterhouse before. Pilsdon normally uses one up by Chard Junction but that was booked up way into February and our pigs had reached the right weight. Any more and they'd be putting on too much fat.

This large veg bed we are slowly covering in semi-rotted manure/straw combo

An over-reliance on Google Maps led us to shoot straight past the abattoir as it had the nerve to be on the right not the left side of the lane. A mile or two further down we found a place that a large trailer could be reversed into, and we came right back. The pigs had had an extra few minutes of life, not that they were likely to be savouring them, bouncing around in an unlit box.


So we drove down into the complex which had parked vehicles everywhere but no people. The full moon sat just above the western horizon whilst the eastern sky glimmered. A lone man directed us to a ramp which I reversed the trailer up to. We were seemingly the only customers around. Where were the slaughter-people? Nobody in the little white office. No one in the large hall that the ramp led to, full of little fenced pens. We shouted our hello's to no avail.

A fellow volunteer wields her axe

Disconsolate we wandered outside again, to find a man approaching up the ramp. “Have you not met anyone?” he asked, mysteriously. “No”, we replied. His call brought someone else along. No more information was forthcoming though. “Tell us what to do” we pleaded and were told we could release the pigs. So release them we did, they came out and up the ramp slowly, grunting, a little unsteady from car-sickness. They were shoo'ed up into the echoing chamber, the door was shut and I was left to close up the trailer.


Cameron* went off to find someone to sign his official piece of paper recording the movement of the pigs from A to B. He was gone a long time, evidently because of an absence of any employees to deal with him. Eventually he returned with tales of witnessing live sheep being hauled up by a mechanical grabber two stories high by their hind leg, off to their deaths. Abattoirs are not fun places, especially on Friday 13th.


The bodies of our three pigs will be ready for collection on Monday, when we'll take them to a butcher in Dorchester to be miraculously converted into hundreds of sausages and rashers of bacon. People at Pilsdon who had fed and loved these pigs while they were alive, giving them scratches on their necks, even giving them names, do not seem to be squeamish about feeding themselves from their flesh. They were well looked after and led a pretty enjoyable, if short, life. I wish though that they could be slaughtered at home rather than taken to an unfamiliar and unpleasant place to die. Time to research mobile slaughterhouses that come to your farm...

And the pile is getting smaller. Honest it is!

* name changed

Hedging Your Bets

What a wonderful substance is wood. Its source is a host of diverse living organisms which take root where they can and grow silently into beautiful and graceful structures, many times larger than us, soaking up our carbon dioxide emissions, releasing oxygen, providing us with shelter when it rains and shade when it shines. A myriad other beings, insects, birds and mammals also find their sustenance and homes within these natural edifices that we call trees.

The many broadleaved varieties that are native to these shores have a kind of zest for life not shared by their conifer cousins, in that if you hack one down but neglect to pull all its roots out of the earth, it will grow back! Not as a single big trunk of course, but with lots of small shoots rising from the stump that given enough time will each become a big trunk. Hazel and willow are particularly renowned for producing wonderfully straight rods that can be snipped off and used for any purpose you can think of. (My runner bean frames are partly made from my own hazel rods, as well as salvaged wild bamboo).

A hedge is just a row of small trees planted close together, their branches growing into one another to form an impenetrable barrier. You need to keep on top of it or it'll grow into an unmanageable mess quite quickly. I've occasionally been delayed when driving down narrow country lanes by a very slow tractor wielding a hedge-cutting attachment like a demented claw, savagely shearing back the hedge on one side.

A more natural and environmental approach is, of course, to “lay” it by hand. Not just hands - you need a saw or bilhook too. A broadleaved hedge produces new growth at various points, each one a small sapling which given enough years will become a proper tree in its own right. To lay a hedge is to hack the base of each of these small trees, a three-quarters cut diagonally downwards, then bending it over completely horizontally. Provided its tip is kept slightly higher than the cut, the sap will still rise and it will continue to live.

Do this with all the new growth, weaving them amongst each other as they're laid horizontal, stuffing back in anything that has been cut off completely, and you have yourself a well-laid hedge, pleasing to the eye.

How do I know this? Because yesterday we were laying the hedge next to Pilsdon's church, my first experience of hedge-laying. It took a small group of us all morning to do a third of it but in our defence we were nearly all complete beginners, it was covered in brambles and hadn't been laid for at least four years so there were some thick saplings in there! The satisfaction was worth all our scratches.

In With The New

My January task: take a chainsaw to this huge pile of wood

A new year dawns.

Here at Pilsdon we welcomed in 2017 in our usual manner. A candle-lit three course meal for everyone at 8pm. A quiz in the Common Room led by our Warden (my team won with precious little help from me) then the floor was open for homegrown entertainment - songs, sketches, poems, even a masterful yo-yo show in which Cameron* amazed us all by attempting to depict the Eiffel tower and the Union Jack by creating cats-cradle-style pictures with the thread. I was on piano duties.

At midnight we went outside, shared a large bowl of warm cherry punch and cheered as we launched three rather spectacular rockets one by one. Cameron and I were responsible for setting them off from our chosen launchpad out on the front lawn. Just before midnight I walked straight into one of the picnic benches in the darkness so 2016's parting gift to me, as if Brexit and Trump and a stinking cold weren't enough, was a throbbing knee.

The evening ended with clearing up and a short “Compline” service in the chapel.

It's fair to say that for a lot of us there's a certain amount of trepidation about 2017 as the big electoral decisions made in the UK and US start to play out. In my own life too there's a healthy slice of uncertainty about the future to deal with. But I have a lot to be thankful for and each day this year I hope to be constantly learning - how best to love other people, how to trust in God, and how to grow a decent head of broccoli.

So let's wave 2016 goodbye and put on a brave face for whatever this new year might bring. Let's make positive changes in our lives when and where we can (once I'm back in Wales I'm going to try to stop eating and drinking dairy products due to their massive impact on the environment). Pursue your passions. Seek justice for the oppressed, give to the needy, stand up for what's right, you know the drill. Let's make this year one to remember for the right reasons!


*name changed

This is what I do over Christmas

O Little Town Of Pilsdon

The view on the way up to our reservoir for its fortnightly maintenance visit

Advent is reaching its climax. Pilsdon's fourth Advent candle has been lit in the church. The Christmas trees are up in the Common Room and in the church. We have been decorating them all today, twinkling lights, baubles, stars and the like are everywhere. As I type this I can hear the holly-hunting expedition returning from the hedgerows.

Last Sunday's carol service filled the church as usual, lit by the flickering candles suspended above everyone's heads on three large double-ringed candle-holders, each attached to the high ceiling by slender cables. It can be counted a successful evening if none of the candles falls off or drips a splodge of wax onto a worshipper's head. 

The Broadoak choir sang with much gusto and rich harmony, both the regular congregational carols and the set pieces, some of which I accompanied on piano. “Shepherd's Pipe Carol” was one such, a fiendish piece by John Rutter, requiring me to practice my part daily for the last several weeks to get it up to performance standard, more or less. Three other Pilsdonites were in the choir, of whom two were complete choir-novices who found it a steep learning curve but very much rewarding in the end.

Our two grapevines received their winter pruning on Wednesday

Some people have already left the community temporarily for their Christmas break with families and friends, as I too will be doing today (back next Thursday.) Sadly two residents have recently left without warning, the temptation of alcohol proving too much. More new faces are appearing every day as wayfarers appear by foot, bike and taxi, to spend their Christmas with us. Plans are in place to house a lot of extra people in various rooms around the site. The large meals to come are organised with military precision. I shall be back in time to help cook the New Year's Eve banquet (I've had a sneak peak at next week's rota!)

Completed our leaf mould container and shoved a load of leaves in to rot down for a couple of years

In what seems to have been a particularly bad-news year, Pilsdon Community continues to offer a small piece of good news buried in a corner of West Dorset, a place of welcome, sanctuary, healing and hope as it has been since 1958. May it inspire many others to stand up against the tide of intolerance and hatred with compassion and love. 

I wish you all a peaceful and joyful Christmas season!