Chaos and snow

Dear Gilly,

Three weeks since I last sat down to write and the time has just gone and with it taken all the little things I wanted to tell you...like the Escape of The Pigs - although we did talk about that, and the slodginess of the land and life after the frosts thawed. Oh how I wanted to bemoan mizzle, and the suck of glaucous mud on an overlarge wellie-boot. I wanted to have a womanly natter about the marvel of having Spouse who can make hundreds of litres of bio-diesel from used cooking fat (good thing) but how utterly foul is the fatty slime that is gaily slooshed around the back yard as he runs from bio-diesel shed to drain and back again (very bad thing). How one slithers about with this awfulness underfoot as one makes one's treacherous way to the chicken hut in the dark. One mustn't grumble, mind. No, no...

We are a family born mainly in February and this year are some Big Ones. Yesterday (1st Feb)was my mother's 70th, Thursday 5th - Rose's 20th and Monty's 7th (seventh birthdays being tremendously important), the 10th is Dave's father's 90th and the 11th is my grandmother's 95th. My Pa is coming to stay with us so that he can see my grandmother on her birthday. We had my mother's party here yesterday - 15 of us crammed into the little sitting room. On Thursday Rose will come home from Nottingham for her joint birthday with Monty and on that same day Dave will demolish the kitchen and take down the wall between the kitchen and the 'shepherd's hut'. Nevertheless we will have a tea party; dust on cupcakes and cucumber sandwiches. On Sunday we will clear a space in the debris to rustle up a celebratory roast dinner for Dave's father's 90th. I imagine it will be a surreal affair; candles and rubble as if a bomb has just fallen and we're carrying on regardless. These days I seem to be holding my breath as if under water and yet I am rushing hither and thither trying to keep up with expectations. In my saner moments I think I might have gone a little mad, and when I'm not loathing living in such interminable chaos, I rather love it because when I'm sane I see that there is no point in trying to fight it when every day we move the entire contents of one room into another and the next day back again.

It is exciting however; making this our home. But after nearly a year of living out of boxes and bin liners, surrounded by other people's taste from another era, I'm worried I might miss our scruffy time-warp existence just a little bit. Then again, to give things a home, to impose some order, to unpack belongings that have been put away for a year...three years even (since our previous house move), will be very exciting. And I have missed these things, so I will not be de-cluttering, I will be re-discovering.

Today I woke up really early, turned on The Credit Crunch (a.k.a the Today programme) and heard about the Chaos before I saw it. So I got out of bed and looked out onto a blue-white landscape: the UK brought to a stand still by snow.

Surprise, surprise! How exciting! How dreary it would be if we Brits had the foresight to have chains hanging in our garages to snow-proof our car tyres so that people could go about their daily business like the rest of the sometimes snowed-upon world. How glorious that all the schools closed down when the snow was just an inch deep. Trains stopped running, so Rose couldn't go back to Nottingham and so, surrounded by chaos inside and out, what choice did I have but to go outside and make a huge snowman with all my children? I do love the snow. I love England and the English in the snow, because we are always so thrown by it and so childishly excited by it.

I had to go and take special care of the animals, to make sure they had fresh straw for warmth and that their water troughs didn't freeze over and to find receptacles for keeping their food dry - easier done with chickens than with pigs. It is nowhere near as cold as the last time I wrote when the piglet died. The other three were absolutely fine and we didn't have to give them penicillin. But it is a dilemma...what do you do if your hitherto 'pure' animal contracts a contagious ailment that could jeopardize the health or lives of the others? Medicate or isolate? Or what?

What keeps me awake at night as February creeps on are seeds. Zillions of them in enticing green and white packets from Chase Organics. Each tiny seed needs tender loving care and knowledge of its likes and dislikes. Get this right and each tiny dot of a seed has the potential to turn in to a triffid of sorts. That means potentially zillions of triffids with gazillions of bugs and caterpillars finding homes there! It seems like a lot of work to me. However, the bounty will be wonderful...

With all this work in mind i should perhaps go and lay out my potatoes for chitting and while I'm doing that I will be thinking about ways of setting up a modern day Land-Army group (a bit like a book group). I think it would be enjoyable and more productive to sometimes do all this sowing, tending and harvesting with other like-minded local people. My idea is that no money exchanges hands but everyone gives a little time on each others smallholdings or allotments, friends are made and things get done that would be daunting for one person but are easy for several.

Ah, now Dave has returned with a bottle of wine. We're planning menus for the Tin Drums tonight. I think I will refer to those seed packets...after all that is the point of us being here.

Much love,

Vicky x