Down to the water.

Inspired by two special writers. Rachael, and Maggie.

Wasson?

It has been a year since I hammered at the keyboard with a Goldings post in mind. A year during which so much has happened, and yet for which we have little but memories to show.

World events are grave. I don’t have words to express my feelings, except to say that tears well up with each tale of strength, resilience, and love. You know from where.

Covid still threatens. It lays us low. Robs us of our income. Robs some of their lives. Although, somehow, it’s dismissed from most day to day lives.

And the hard up are about to get hit harder.

Against that backdrop, the ever changing beauty just beyond the caravan window shows how well the world will survive should humankind be at least diminished, or perhaps eliminated.

Change. The only constant.

Often I sit in the tattered old chair right where I sit today, staring in wonder at the valley that opens below us. Here change is constant, and yet the fabric of the land changes hardly at all. A visitor returning from one hundred years away would see many more houses, more trees too, but they’d recognise the valley and feel its draw.

The view might serve me a lifetime. 

The simple step from inside to out makes the real world feel so much closer.

Tin house.

It’s eighteen months since we began this caravan life. The tin house serves us well. 

It’s cold in winter, but the duvet is heavy and warm. 

The heat waves of August remind us of Bulgaria and Greece. The grass is scorched and crisp, there’s little relief from the mounting degrees.

The TV rarely gets a chance to warm up. I can’t remember switching it on this year. Minty’s tablet serves up her essential fix to help her wind down after living a long day with the old and infirm.

Outside.

But it’s outside where it’s all happening.

In the fields we planted over 4,000 trees in February and March 2021. A drought through the next six weeks, accompanied by drying winds, saw off many of the whips before they could get their roots down, but more than 60% survived.

The growth of those 60% is my daily obsession.

18 months on and some are still finding their way in the world, optimistic green leaves reaching up, but not yet a foot high. Others have soared. A few of the oaks, and several bird cherries, are already above my head. In The Flood the willows outstrip everything and have passed 3 metres.

Hollies are a favourite of the pesky rabbits. Who’d think any creature would want to eat holly? As soon as the long grasses died back the gnawing little bastards got to work on the fresh growth, and today I found bushes that were a foot high last week newly chewed to the ground.

Nearer to home. Nearer to the caravan. We scattered large bags of expensive wild flower seed. A sprinkling of rain brought the first germinated shoots. But then the sun blazed down merciless for weeks. Those green shoots withered and died. It wasn’t the end though, because that’s what wild is all about. By May there was a riot of white poppies of a hundred different sizes, followed by cornflowers like those Minty wove into her wedding hair 24 years ago.

A year later the display is completely different, not through our efforts, it just is. Biennials come to the fore. There were to be six echium reaching beyond even the well-established bushes. Two fell in high winds, leaving four to flower, hopefully to seed and lead to an echium forest in years to come. Teasels hit two metres high and are so pretty in their brief lilac flower, then architectural until wind, a scythe or the weight of too many goldfinches brings them down.

A thousand angelica of mixed variety support tiny finches who scrape aphids from the stems. 

A score of different grasses seed the wind and leave Minty deep in a hayfever fug of snot and breathlessness.

Our meagre attempts at managing our wilderness amount to taming a few paths through the grasses as we take the push mower for its weekly exercise. I should buy a ride-on beast, but I’m neither drawn to the expense, or the ownership of yet another noisy machine. 

Our friend Dom who is living his van life in one of our many corners has introduced me to his scythe. This fearsome tool from the middle ages may just be the way to go.

Building and the potential of home.

Some mad optimist in me had hoped that we might by now be back living in a house.

No chance.

Progress on Goldings is slower than slow.

On the odd occasion that the team are here and ready to work their enthusiasm is thwarted by the delivery times of the materials of their trade. Stuff that was once ordered today and delivered tomorrow now has a lead-time of several weeks after which you chase only to be fobbed off with another tale of labour shortages or the scourge of Covid.

Our foundations are extreme. Concrete and steel is supported and reinforced by more concrete and more steel. Oh, and there’s still steel to come, and probably more concrete too. 

I set out to create an ecologically sound building. I now understand that the only truly ecologically sound building is the one that doesn’t get built. That said, we’ll out perform pretty much everything around us, and if it stands for long enough it may yet earn the eco moniker.

Next up we’ll sink a massive 3000l rainwater tank that’ll feed outside taps, toilets and maybe showers too. There’s an African expression that really hits home regarding the west’s profligate waste of water that goes something like… “The West is so rich they shit in clean water.” Well at Goldings that water will come straight from the sky, and on the odd occasion when we choose to water bits of the garden it’ll be with rainwater, not water that has cost a fortune to process.

Down to the water.

On the subject of water. The summer of 2022 has been hot. 

For those old enough to remember nothing can beat the halcyon days of ’76, but for the rest, for the majority, then 2022 has been a scorcher. Already.

The sea at Priest’s Cove calls to me.  It called from Cot, Rinsey, Penberth and Housel Bay too.

The swimming this year is good, as good as I remember.

Getting hot.

My massive, expensive, powerful, Stihl brush cutter has failed, been repaired, and failed again.

My most eco friend Dom has introduced me to a quieter alternative from another age.

I am learning to scythe.

An hour in this heat, working through bracken, nettles and brambles, cutting with a huge blade on a stick. It works up a sweat. Quickly.

My reward is the water.

Priest’s Cove, or simply The Cape is a fair walk from Goldings, maybe 20 minutes. Or it’s a short drive. 

Dogs aren’t allowed onto the slipway so I tend to drive. 

I have a quick chat with Annie at the car park gate. I swim for a few hundred metres. Then I stank around the cove with Polly as a post-dip warm up.

August.

August. The water is perfect. I feel a slight shiver as I slide into the waves, and that’s it. From then on it’s just swimming in the best sea imaginable.

Often I venture further out than the others, but today there was a fellow intent on getting to the Brisons. All wetsuit and visibility float he might have been training for a Channel crossing, or perhaps the Cape Sports Day when lunatics and the super fit race back from the rocks that lie a kilometre out into the waves.

For all his distance he wasn’t in much longer than me. But it took him a lot longer to get into, and out, of that suit. I’d say my trunks were nearly dry before he even reached for his towel.

Rooftops.

Half way into August and the build has come down as low as it will go. 

Everything we touched was falling in. The barn was left hatless and exposed after a fire decades ago. There was little holding the stones together.

Much of the second floor of the barn has had to carefully removed only to be rebuilt identically, using the same stone. The cost is frightening. But all the work will result in a structurally sound and far better insulated space. Ready to face a couple of hundred more years.

To make building back up safer, and to tie the old walls, Nick and Colin have fitted the floor joists and a corrugated protective floor. 

I prefer to think that they were creating an ideal sleeping deck for my first night in our (not quite complete) house.

Using the Duvalet mattress pads from ArchieVan I had a simple comfortable bed set up in minutes, and slept a blissful night under the stars. Sitting here watching the sun go down, then climb a few hours later was one of the great moments of the year. Minty wasn’t keen – but I hope to convince her by the end of summer.

Next week the long overdue steel frame should arrive, and creation can start in earnest.

End of the drought.

Perhaps tomorrow the rains will come.

It’s forecast. We hope it’ll be true.

Rains in time for a last burst of summer growth, perhaps a return to green. And the guarantee that the trees will make it through their second year, each mounting year increasing their ultimate chance of success.

Taking shape.

Goldings is taking shape. This year it has looked wonderfully wild, and sported thousands of flowers, many a couple of metres high.

There are many more butterflies, birds, bees. 

We rarely see the scurrying creatures that dash through the grasses, but the ever present kestrels, buzzards, sparrow hawks and owls prove the feeding is there for those eagle eyed soaring raptors.

On the ground, foxes and badgers are common. Weasels less so, but exciting to occasionally spot. There’s hedgehogs on the lane, but they don’t venture this far. The badgers probably see to any that try.

Work.

Taxi for you sir? We’ll be on our way.