To Everything There Is A Season

Six whole months ago I joined the Pilsdon community. The Earth has spun halfway round the Sun in the meantime. Spring has sprung, Summer has been summoned and Autumn is beginning to Fall.  An entirely new person has since been ushered into life in the form of baby River. Thirteen entirely new piglets have also been welcomed to planet Earth although sadly their mother had to be taken to the abattoir yesterday as she had developed a malignant tumour on her udder. Twelve lambs have been born, lived their lives, been dispatched and are now in the freezers. One bullock was slaughtered in May and has since been consumed, four remain out in the fields looking over their shoulders nervously.  The vegetable garden has blossomed, bloomed, fruited and in large part been harvested and filled our collective stomach.

I Had a Little Drink About Six Months Ago

Me in my pre-Pilsdon days

When I describe what life is like here to my friends back in the city they generally seem quite envious, up to the point that I mention that it’s an alcohol-free zone. They then tend to react with a mix of shock, pity and admiration, asking me how I’ve managed to survive for more than a few days and shaking their heads at the absurdity of them even imagining placing themselves in my wellies.

 

Our House, In the Middle of the Countryside

In the past week there have been no less than two momentous occasions in which people gathered to commemorate and celebrate certain Pilsdon residents moving into their new homes. 

Snooker Loopy, Nuts Are We

Before I joined Pilsdon I spent a trial week here in mid-February, much of which I spent working with a nun. She had decided to turn one of the manor’s rooms into The Craft Room, populating it with various looms, spinning wheels, sewing machines and knitting machines that dotted the place, but discovered that several of them were buried amongst an incredible jumble of furniture that had been stacked into the sports hall, completely filling the back half of it. So the task mutated into emptying the sports hall of the entire assortment of heavy items of furniture, and in so doing making it ready for renovation.

Lamb To The Slaughter

On Tuesday six of our twelve lambs were rounded up, herded into a trailer and driven forty minutes to an abattoir near Chard. They have had five months of life. When I arrived at Pilsdon in March they weren’t yet born. I’ve seen them take their first stumbling steps towards their mothers, I’ve watched them play, racing each other around the field, rolling around on their backs. One of them, Immi, had to be bottle-fed by hand four times a day for the first couple of months because he had been rejected by his mother as a runt, and was so small and frail he could have died at any point. Now it’s virtually impossible to distinguish him from the other lambs, all of whom are as big as their mothers. In fact the only easy way to tell a ewe from a lamb is that the ewes have been sheared so they actually look smaller than their offspring.

Camp Fire's Burning

Around and above us the light seeps away, the wide sky deepening to black.  A red moon hangs silently above the horizon. Stars begin to appear, first one or two, then tens, then suddenly hundreds. The ghostly blur of the Milky Way bisects the heavens. As the temperature drops we huddle a little closer to the camp fire and put on more layers. The younger children have been put to bed, and the teenagers who had been off somewhere else in the field now deign to join the adults, if only to be closer to the warmth.  Conversations murmur around the crackle of the fire. John decides it’s time for some music; he retrieves his guitar and my saxophone from the camper van and he begins to sing some soulful tunes while I improvise an accompaniment as best I can. 

A Day In The Life

I wake in time for the morning service at 7:30am. There are three of us, we share bread and non-alcoholic wine. After breakfast I head to the kitchen to make my first attempt at soft cheese which involves gently heating eight pints of milk until simmering, then taking off the heat and stirring whilst adding Jif lemon juice. Curds form on top which I place inside a muslin bag and hang from a hook over a bowl in the “egg room” next to the kitchen.  Tomorrow I will add chives, salt and pepper, then try to convince people to eat it.