The Advent(ure) Game

The incredible never-ending Pilsdon raspberry plants

By a jaw-dropping coincidence there are the same number of people living at Pilsdon as there are days in Advent, which has prompted a kind and generous soul to offer to the community a type of Advent calendar in the Aga room. It is a sequence of 24 individually wrapped chocolates, carefully balanced upright on Scrabble letter holders, each inscribed with a date and a name.

Mine is the 19th so I have another whole nine days to wait before I can rip off the wrapper and devour it. If anyone is unable to contain their patience and snaffle theirs before the assigned date, it will be immediately obvious by the gap in the chocolates (and a “before” photo to capture the order of names). It’s been suggested that you could slide the chocolate out of the wrapper and replace it with a similar sized piece of wood. Probably everyone else has done that already and I’m the only one yet to eat mine.  More fool them I say.  The anticipation is everything.

Not a Christmas decoration but an actual robin in the Common Room

Advent is all about anticipation. And at Pilsdon we are waiting eagerly not only for Christmas but also for the arrival this Sunday of Barry and Norma* with their two young children to join us as part of the community.  Until now they have been living in the US but Pilsdon has drawn them all the way across the Atlantic. Preparations are ongoing to give their flat a full make-over before their arrival - a fresh coat of paint all over, minor fixes here and there, and the kitchen completely ripped out and replaced. I had to drive the minibus to Chard’s B&Q because it was the only vehicle long enough to take the two 3-metre-long kitchen surfaces.  It will be great to have kids around here again, filling the Common Room floor with toys and generally causing an exuberant mess. The other exciting thing is that Barry is big into roasting his own coffee beans (he actually worked for a bean-roasting company in the States) so I am expecting to be smelling and hopefully sampling some top-notch coffee at elevenses.

The mighty fallen oak

Last winter’s storms were severe enough to blow over one of Pilsdon's old oak trees that line one of the hedged boundaries. Thankfully it fell into our field rather than onto the lane so there was no real urgency in doing something about it, and it took until this summer sometime for the chainsawing to begin. The main trunk is still where it fell but many of its branches are now in large chunks scattered around it. Obviously something more pressing had then taken priority because the grass then had time to grow over everything, so when I and a couple of others came to continue the work this week the first thing to do was pull up all the long tangled and matted grass - and there is an awful lot of it. 

I'm a lumberjack and I'm OK...

The branches were then sorted into three piles - twiggy bits, medium-thickness pieces and large chunks. The twiggy pile we had great fun turning into a bonfire, the middle pile has been hand-sawn into similar lengths for storage in the woodshed, and I have begun making my way through the bigger logs with Pilsdon’s powerful Husqvarna chainsaw, resulting in lots of short segments which will be split into pieces with an axe and left for a year or so to dry out. The jury’s still out on what to do with the main trunk. The simplest thing would be to saw it up for firewood, but perhaps a cannier idea would be to make some beautiful oaken objects from it and try to sell them.  Oak chopping boards anyone?

Update on my planning permission issue : The National Park Authority has replied to say they don’t accept that I am a seasonal agricultural worker and that I therefore have three options - apply for residential planning permission for the 8 months I spend there (which they point out conflicts with their Local Development Plan), stop living on the land, or continue and potentially face formal action. They also want me to apply for planning permission for the polytunnel and greenhouse.  

I believe I also have a couple of other options - apply for a lawful development certificate to argue my case that I am a seasonal agricultural worker or apply for year-round residential planning permission under the One Planet Development low-impact-living planning law or apply for . Alternatively I could simply carry on, and if I get an enforcement notice then I could try to appeal it. Various pros and cons to consider now...

* Not their actual names