Small blast (pop?) from the past

While digging out photographic kit the other day,  I realised that I still had a film in my old SLR camera and that I had no idea what photos were on it. So I took the last 4 photos in the garden and of the roofs of local houses and put the film in for processing. It took less than a week and arrived by an email link, which was very modern.

I was quite pleased to find that it had some photos taken at the graduation for my MSc at Oxford Brookes in 2007, September I think. So here they are. 

Joy

Joy Irving 1951 – 2019

Joy was born in December 1951 in Holbeach in Lincs to Joyce and Fred, suspiciously close to her parent’s wedding earlier that year!

She narrowly escaped being named Noel because of the closeness of her birth to Christmas and was stuck with Eileen because her dad had an early girlfriend with that name. Her childhood was notable for various assaults on her annoying little brother David, including one with the point of a pair of scissors. By dint of her mum’s nagging, Joy was elevated to Spalding High School, avoiding the rather dismal Secondary Modern. At grammar school, she acquired a love of science – mostly chemistry, a dislike of PE teachers and team games and sports of all kinds, rebelling to the extent that she went to the headmistress and told her that all this sport stuff was getting in the way of her A-level studies. Her interest in science was probably helped by watching the explosion when her friend tossed a lump of potassium into water and by chasing blobs of real mercury around the work bench….

Joy emerged from school with quite a lot of A-levels, but also with some mental problems, which caused her to spend a time in the ‘nuthouse’, a jolly place in the country where she and other misfit girls tried to regain mental equilibrium, while having fun and plaguing the staff…. She frequently marvelled at the unlimited access she was given to a psychiatrist at the time compared with the miserly limits doled out through the NHS now. She always considered it was her duty to be upfront about her mental problems to reduce the stigma around such illness.

Her A-levels were enough to take her to Aberystwyth University to study agricultural botany. However, being that far away from home freaked her out more than somewhat and she managed less than a year before she dropped out, again with mental problems.

Back home, she spent a while in the lab at Geest’s fruit processing plant, of which her best memory was of tasting her first mango…. It also put her off big business, too, to the extent that she decided to join the tax men in the Inland Revenue!

Somewhere around this time, she saw Colin who had long hair and brightly-coloured trousers, and became her first husband, and they set up house together in a housing association flat. Colin is a musician who played in folk bands and organised a folk club so their flat frequently had musicians sleeping on the floor.  He introduced her to strange music from such as the Incredible String Band, Pink Floyd and more normal stuff like Gerry Rafferty, Kate Bush…

They scrimped and saved to put down a deposit on a house, bought some very posh sofas which are still with us!

Joy, being a very clever person, got promoted in the Inland Revenue, first to Peterborough and was moved to London so spent some months travelling to and fro – this meant getting up very early and was never going to last for her! She moved back to Peterborough and spent some years getting lost in eastern England prodding farmers and others into paying their employees’ tax and National Insurance. She also separated from Colin at this time, in a curious divorce which left them apart but still friends.

This was when I met her, in a pub at a sort of singles’ club gathering, so attractive with lots of curly hair and very chatty, very stylish. A weird sort of lightning courtship ensued, during which I, Bob, had a chest infection and Joy came to talk to me while I suffered… I said she was chatty, didn’t I? At the time, I was restless in my job, got the urge to work abroad and found a contract in Papua New Guinea. There was, however, a catch, that I didn’t want to leave my new love behind and PNG wasn’t willing to let me take a mere girlfriend with me, so we got married!

Joy didn’t enjoy New Guinea. It was hot, sticky and mosquito-ridden and becoming pregnant did not help. So she returned home and I followed home soon afterwards.

Back in the UK, she managed to coax a slightly reluctant Rupert out into the world and drag us across country to live in Faringdon, and then, feeling that we had missed out, I took up an offer of work in Namibia.

We spent 4 and a half years there.

We travelled all over with Joy happy to thrust our tiny family – first just Rupert, then with extra added Tamsin - out into the desert roads to see enormous dunes, rock cavings and paintings, variously in battered Landrovers and then a rusty VW van. Joy loved lying on the gravelly desert floor searching for tiny semi-precious stones. She loved the peace of the desert at night. She was also very fond of drinking iced coffee in the town café where she would give the waitresses big tips to make sure she still got served quickly in the tourist season!

In Namibia, she finally completed her Magnum Opus,  The Open University Degree! She had started this 8? years before, when she was still with Colin, completed her studies with a tiny Tamsin sleeping on her knee and sat her last exam in my company’s training officer’s kitchen beside a washing machine while it worked… A real marathon, not a sprint!

When we returned to the UK and after we settled the sprogs into nursery and school, Joy had the urge to study again, perhaps with the aim of working abroad again. After taking a bit of a run at it with a maths course and a geology module at Oxford Brookes, she launched into an MSc on mining geology. This was a bit of a struggle for us all, especially as Tams was 4 and Rupe was 8, but they put up with Mum coming home every other weekend and Dad’s rough and ready care!! While Joy dealt very well with the Master’s, it did reveal or confirm what we already probably knew – that starting out in mining geology in foreign parts was a ‘man thing’ and a challenge for a ‘lady’. Also our small persons needed some stability at sensible schools. So Joy went looking for other jobs and found what seems to have been her spiritual home, the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, where she spent 18 years and even returned 1 day a week as a volunteer. Perhaps her colleagues can tell us more about Joy’s sojourn there.

After she was inducted into the Museum, it was Joy who stayed still and the rest of the family who moved around…. It was Joy’s idea that we should despatch our treasures, large and small, to board at Millfield Prep School to avoid the boredom of a second year with the same teacher at their primary school. Rupe went reluctantly but enjoyed it immensely, while Tams was eager to go, but loathed it due to the competitive consumerism of the other (richer) girls! Both however enjoyed the music  teaching and even the sport, and emerged more confident from the experience.

The cost of school fees meant life was quite quiet for 6 years between 1991 and 1997, enlivened by our move to Cirencester in 1994, so that Rupe could go to a really good state school after Millfield. The move was chaotic and the new house was fairly dreadful so some years were spent on revamping the ground floor to meet Joy’s Grand Design. In the process, Joy built quite a relationship with our master carpenter, Ed Boote, persuading him into building progressively more efficient windows. More years were spent decorating afterwards, with Joy putting great thought and care into it all, especially the Art Deco shower room attached to our bedroom. Much cursing and masking tape was employed in outlining doors and windows….

After the children finished their stints at Millfield, Joy was able to indulge us in family holidays, starting with a comparatively modest narrow boat trip – in an electric narrowboat, which gave us a week of peaceful quarter hours punctuated by panics going through bridges and locks because of its low power. This trip was followed by various epic journeys to France, Spain and Italy, epic because our principles did not allow us to fly, which meant quite long drives inevitably leading to our searching in the dark for obscure addresses. On a couple of occasions, we put our car on a motor rail service, which meant we got there more quickly, but just as knackered because of the noisy sleeper train. Joy persuaded us into long walks up mountains, long walks around Pompeii and Herculaneum, long walks to obscure but quaint villages… She enjoyed the company of our now grown-up children on these holidays with time to talk.

Over the period of the 1990’s and early noughties, I think Joy managed to simultaneously struggle with the boring bits of her job, with her level of OCD preventing her performing the way her management wanted and also to develop those parts which she saw as important for the long term conservation of the more vulnerable specimens in ‘her’ part of the OUMNH collections. She and I developed a database to assist with the control of her work and this proved so useful that she was still using it until she was forced to cease volunteering. She also slogged through the process of getting promoted or “regraded” which gave her some pleasure and a tiny increase in salary!

When I was made redundant in 2004 and started to study ‘green building’ with the Centre for Alternative Technology, this sparked an interest in Joy, who took on board a lot of the stuff that I was studying and changed tack in her decorating to use lower impact paints and materials and start contemplating ways in we could improve the performance of our house.

In 2006, Joy was diagnosed with breast cancer, which seem to be fairly swiftly dealt with, but needed two operations and both chemotherapy and radiotherapy treatment. Despite this, she was able to carry on working at the Museum between treatments.  As result of her diagnosis, she became involved in the Breakthrough Breast Cancer charity and the two of us attended their showing of a horrifying film about the effects of pollution on the Inuit and the seals that form their diet. After the film, Caroline Lucas, then the leader of the Green Party, made an impassioned speech because of which we jointly had an epiphany and decided to join the Greens.

In one of the early mailings that we got from that Party, there was a plea for someone to take over the Treasurership of the party’s South West Region and Joy decided that she could and would do this job…. So for 5 years, she tended their rather limited finances, storing up cash to fund the European Election campaign in 2014. Having finished her term of office as the official Treasurer, she was then asked to take over as treasurer for the European Election Campaign, spending lots of the money that she’d been saving up! It must have worked, because we got our first South West MEP from that campaign!

In the 2000’s, we got an urge to make our lives more communal, to find and join an ‘intentional communities’, in our case, one which jointly owns property and runs it for the benefit of its members, perhaps eating together, growing veg and fruit and keeping animals, maintaining communal assets, depending on their attitudes. Joy and I spent quite a few weekends visiting and working at some of these and a long time agonising over which would suit. This all came to nothing  as it seemed that we didn’t like the communities that liked us and, worse still, the communities that we liked, didn’t like us. It was still a source of regret to us for years after.

In 2010, Joy decided to take early retirement from the Museum, partly due to her finding the drive to Oxford tiring as she was now mostly doing that on her own, but also because Oxford University was running an incentive for this. However, being a sucker for punishment, she continued working one day a week there as a volunteer, feeling that she still had unfinished work to do and also to keep up the friendships that she had made. The unfinished work kept her busy for years afterwards analysing all the data she had collected in her ‘normal’ working time and even as she went into hospital for the last time, she was worrying about completing a paper written with a colleague.

In 2014, we went a bit mad and bought a very small cottage, called Y Ddôl, in mid-Wales, complete with small woodland, right at the end of a rocky road in the Vale of Rheidol, just below Devil’s Bridge.  Y Ddôl is off-grid, getting power from photo-voltaic panels, (some) hot water from a different sort of solar panel and water from a spring in our wood below. It has wood-burning stoves  for cooking, hot water and heating. Joy loved managing all this – keeping the batteries up, the water supply full and the wood stores replenished, required organising. The wood business concerned us as the house required a lot of heating and was desperately draughty. Also parts of the roof were distinctly restless. When we tried to get builders to fix it, we were told “your house is falling down” and they recommended vast amounts of work. So Joy and I set about writing specifications for all the changes, in her trademark vast levels of detail, and set the builders to work. This meant that Y Ddôl was uninhabitable for a long time, about 15 months in all, and took a lot of cleaning to become habitable. We then managed to visit for some weeks over last summer, which gave us a chance to excel at hacking down the vast briars that had sprung up during our long absence. Joy took great pleasure in discovering woodpiles and compost bins that had been lost beneath them since the Great Rebuild!

In 2015, Joy went back to the doctors with back pains, which were first diagnosed as a crushed vertebra, then as osteoporosis, then as the spread of the cancer to her bones, and then it was further discovered to have spread to her liver. Two further chemotherapy sessions kept the disease at bay through 2016, 17 and 18, but after that it was no longer effective.

Throughout, Joy appeared to maintain a scientific level of detachment from her condition, keeping little graphs of her blood test values. She bore all the indignities and irritations of treatment with a mixture of humour and fatalism and maintained all her standards, routines and fitness almost to the end.

---

Was she in the nuthouse before Aber or afterwards?

2015

41 Albion Street, Stratton,

Cirencester,

Gloucs.

GL7 2HT

Nov. / Dec. 2015

Greetings to one and all!

As the Rainy Season (squidge .. squidge .. squelch ..) blows in with a vengeance, and the lull-before-a-storm October perfection of mists and mellow fruitfulness gives way to the low-flying foggy murk of endless grim drip dripping wintriness, do you ever ponder whether it was a wise move for Homo sapiens to have left Africa?  Whilst us pasty-faced creatures hide under our duvets for the duration, crawling out only to snuffle, cough and help the bacterial / viral populations to take over the world, there are others waiting … damp woolly creatures huddling in the countryside … plotting … ever plotting … to (yes) Take Over The World!  Well … maybe Gloucester … or at least Aldsworth … “Curses!  Damn that lack of opposable thumb!” … “Um .. (yawn) .. must just nibble a bit more grass first  .. anyone fancy a pint?”  Moral : be wary of soggy, disgruntled, indecisive-looking woolly individuals propping up the bar this Christmas.

Whilst those Cotswold creatures may prevaricate; in Wales, the revolution has already begun!  For we have (gulp) … seen the signs!  Heed this cautionary tale, O best beloveds, for this is The Case of the Disappearing Farmer.  Last weekend, whilst idly staring out of the bathroom window across the meadow to the forest, squinting through the mid-morning haze of what was shaping up to be an actual sunny day (in Wales!), an unnatural white mist unfurled purposefully from out of the forest, swirling ever closer in a thin stream towards the cottage.  ‘How odd!’ mused I.  At around the same time, the early-morning consciousness detected a low rumbling sound coming from the direction of the field-gate.  “Ah, it’s the farmer … ”, we muttered to each other knowingly, as the vibrations of a quad-bike shook the cottage’s thin walls as it passed.  But why was he here?  Brows knitted in puzzlement, as the cows had been vacated from the field a few weeks previously.  After a second or two our eyes returned to our respective windows.  But where was he?  In a trice, there were no vibrations, no sound at all, and no sign of either quad-bike or farmer!  And crucially, there’s no other way out of the field!  The strange swirling mist had also disappeared.  A mystery indeed!  But never fear, for Joy is on the case (possibly avec deerstalker, definitely sans meerschaum … cough! … splutter!).  As suspected, it had to be evil rogue woolly escapees from up on the hill what done it!  That unnatural white swirling mist - this had to have been the smoke from their camp-fire.  And they have the motive (revenge for unmet demands … warm barn … lots of apples … no more lamb casseroles … cash to supply their gambolling (!) habit … a need for a quad-bike (???) …well, how else do you take over the world?).  So, now we know, Douglas Adams was wrong – it was not the white mice in control after all … 

From this tale of mystery and odd happenings, O best beloveds, you may have guessed that we have acquired this little cottage in Wales, in the middle of a meadow, surrounded by forest ‘… awooooooo!’  What was that?  She sensed eyes watching, blood was pounding through her ears, her temples, her chest … Her pace quickened .. was that a rustle in the undergrowth?  An evil cackle, perhaps?  She calmed herself with the knowledge that wolves had died out in Britain by the 18^th century.  So, maybe an owl then?  Wildlife is all its rawness is all around, and it’s so different from being surrounded by the comfort blanket of urban existence … and then there’s the quiet … at times, discomfiting.  So this is Y Ddôl (Welsh for ‘in the meadow’), a wattle and daub cottage built about 20 years ago by someone who’d tried to get planning permission for the ruin on the site, failed, and then built ‘an animal shelter’ for his self-sufficiency small-holding business, which required him to live on site, but in a caravan.  The ‘animal shelter’ was converted into a home, and eventually retrospectively passed the planning application.  It is entirely off-grid, which means that we’re constantly aware of how much energy we’re using … ours as well as solar panel generated!  Chopping wood is a constant at this time of year, as well as planning what wood to cut for two years down the line.  Back up Plans B and C are necessary in case the technology fails, e.g., always have spare gas cylinders for everything, and petrol for the generator - it’s a long way to Aberystwyth … well … 12 miles … and the track is rough and being snowed in is a possibility.  Apart from that, it’s great!  Annoying, but uplifting!  Being surrounded by forest is amazing!  Seven acres are ours, by the side of the Rheidol river, and the rest is ‘sort of’ community-owned, actually by a Trust, which means that anyone can come and saw up any fallen trees with a chain saw to take home for their own use, which we have done, as it’s so much easier for us to get to than our own forest!  The ‘garden’ is a bit wild, is slightly less than half an acre, and is definitely hell-bent on the world domination thing.  The briars are busily knitting themselves into an impenetrable tangled pattern, whilst setting ankle traps for any mammalian life-form in the vicinity; blow-in mini- (so far) beech trees are setting up a second line of resistance (resistant to machetes, that is); and the self-seeded baby oaks marching in from the Trust-owned forest are successfully competing with the solar panels for whatever passes for sunlight.  We won’t stand a chance (sob!) … the telephone cable will be snipped by the evil vine … we’ll be trapped in a time-warp, until … in a hundred years, a handsome prince will come to rescue us … or maybe … just maybe … the rogue woolly creatures camping in the forest will ride to the rescue on the quad-bike (yay!).

We bought Y Ddôl in a moment of weakness when both of us were heavily involved with the European Election Campaign in 2014.  We’d seen the place the previous year, but we’d procrastinated on whether to take the process any further, until the point where any decision had been taken out of our hands.  So a year later, out of the blue came this e-mail from the estate agent appealing to my inner romantic with the tempting line ‘You remember that little cottage that you loved so much? ….’  Well, how could I resist?  This time, I was taken in by the blue sunny sky (in Wales? in April?), the bluebells carpeting the woodland, the little steam train and the constant roaring waterfall on the other side of the valley, the rushing rapids in the river, the wide open sweep of the meadow and the trees beyond …. That was it!  I had to have it!!  Little did we realise then what the evil vines were plotting … or how the cottage would retaliate for five long months of neglect …

Living off-grid requires a steep learning curve.  One day last February we arrived rather gung-ho at Y Ddôl, unlocked the door, and ….. (curses!) …. couldn’t get in!  Joy manfully (personfully?) placed her shoulder to the door, and heaved.  Nothing.  It was time for the boot.  Again nothing.  Then suddenly … bam! .. creeeeeak! .. whoosh! .. Joy and associated baggage flew through into the hallway.  Two seconds later, the all-pervasive cold and damp had penetrated even unto the long-john layer.  The inside temperature registered 6°C!  This was coolth the like of which Joy had not been exposed to since the dawn of central heating .. or Piet’s house in Portugal (see last year’s missive).  However, never fear folks, for we had our trusty matches to hand … we’d soon have a roaring fire going in the Rayburn in next to no time.  The manual was quickly perused, instructions were followed and …. (cough! cough! hack! splutter!) … despite slamming all possible doors, thick blue-black smoke was pouring from more orifices than we realised was possible in a Rayburn.  “Quick, open a window!”  “Oh ****ing hell!  Shut that window, it’s freezing!”  The air in the room increasingly turned blue … at this stage, not entirely the fault of the smuts … with particulate levels that would fail any emissions test, as, with eyes tingling, and with tears streaming down our grimy faces, we approached The Beginner’s Guide to Placating the Rayburn once again.  Surely, a whole box of matches and half a gas-lighter’s worth of fuel, together with a mountain of ex-newsprint and dry kindling should be sufficient to appease the beast?  But no, it was demanding something  … other .. (gulp)!  What had we missed?  The Rayburn glared balefully at us from under its newly-acquired grimy creosote layer.  We lit the gas heater.  It had won … for now.  A miserable cold night beckoned … even a hot-water bottle was little comfort in a smoke-filled room in a smut-filled bed, pinned down with as many clothes as we could muster.  Remember back in the days of yore how difficult it was to heave oneself out of bed in the morning?  Now just re-imagine this, and shudder, dear friends … the coffee freezing in your cup … no hot water … and … and .. (wince)…. no toast!!  Never had the heater in the car seemed so inviting, as we sped off down the road to Cirencester ….. and warmth! 

However, as the feet thawed out, the Irving resolve hardened ... the Rayburn would be subdued.  It was time to call (no, not ghost busters) .. the chimney sweep!  Questions.  Questions.  What did we not do?  What does a Rayburn desire (.. within reason)?  Is it dead?  Can we resurrect it?  As he worked, it was revealed that, no, the chimney was not full of birds’ nests, dead birds, witches’ knickers, or even creosote.  Indeed it was as clean as a whistle.  So what was its problem?  Ennui?  An existential crisis?  A hatred of non-metallic life-forms?  Actually very simple.  The poor thing was suffering from neglect.  Within the main body of the beast, there was this one vital grill which was so totally clogged with soot, we couldn’t actually see a single hole within it!  Since this had been slowly building up deposits over some time, it was obvious that the previous occupants also hadn’t noticed this obscure, but vital little cleaning job!  Oh, the embarrassment!  But hadn’t we read the manual?  Where was the reference to this crucial little piece of hardware?  Eventually, in some obscure little section, we found the briefest of references (sigh) ... manual writers, eh?

To say that Y Ddôl is idiosyncratic would be an understatement.  House manuals and useful e-mail addresses / telephone numbers come as part of the package, since getting to grips with the technology can be challenging, in more ways than one!  Luckily, the solar panels work well ... even on light grey days (yay!).  Just as well, as at this time of the year, there’s only about four hours of sun (!) before it sinks below the mountain (click! .. “who turned out the lights?”).  Meanwhile, back to feeding the Rayburn and its compadre .. the rocket stove sofa!  This is a ‘sort of’ off-grid version of central heating, in that it enables you to think about the possibility of creeping out from under the duvet in the morning, as opposed to actively avoiding it!  After having stoked up the earthen mass for about six hours in the evening, feeding it long thin (no fatter than your arm) branches or off-cuts of wood, it will then deign to emit the odd bit of heat overnight to keep the chill off the place.  This process is obviously more efficient if you keep up the burning night after night, as then the mass positively glows!  Mmmm .... warm bum!  Cold hands clamped around the rapidly cooling coffee mug .... but definitely warm bum!

As spring turned to summer and that Welsh soft greenness turned to ... more Welsh soft greenness, we realised that we had to get to grips with (gulp) .... power tools!  Even though there was sunshine (yes, even in Wales), and we had finally managed to replace the interesting (!) home bodged-together, though currently non-working, 12-volt pump for the solar hot-water panel with a similar water pump from a VW car, this was not enough to produce sufficient hot water (at least, not this summer), so we had to resort to burning the rapidly-diminishing precious stash of 2-year-old logs left from the previous occupants.  We had inherited this petrol-driven chainsaw, which had been sitting in the shed, semi-forgotten, since we had acquired Y Ddôl, and that now (gulp) we realised .... it was time ... !  The intrepid Irvings approached the shed .. the door swung open ... were we expected?  A frisson of anxiety passed between us.  We eyed the beastie nervously.  We eyed each other.  Were we ready for this?  Despite having read The Manual of All Things Chainsaw, nothing had prepared us for the reality of the moment ... alone with .. The Chainsaw!  After much dithering (erm ... rationalising ..) and handling of said item, we decided on a tactical retreat from Chainsaw Fortress .... but we’d be back (um .. sometime .. possibly ... maybe ..)!  We needed a Plan B.  Our secret weapon was a cute light-weight cordless chainsaw .... even Joy could manage one of these!  Confidence is everything .. ha!  There was no stopping her ... small branches ... bigger branches ... small trees ... where next?  Thinks : must finish cutting up this tree .. curses! .. battery must be running low .. Extra deep thinks: erm .. actually, it’s not really designed for anything greater than 25-30 cm. diameter ... oh, bugger ... too late ... back to the Chainsaw Shop for a free sharpening under guarantee .. so soon (oops!).  Hazy thinks : must curb crazed mania for chainsaws .. (cackle!).  Meanwhile, slightly nervous husband chews fingernail(s) ... and not just because the big beastie awaits! 

Back in the real world, Tamsin suddenly announced in September that she was coming to see us for a whole fortnight en route from Portugal to ‘a new life in Guadeloupe’.  Guadeloupe?  Why Guadeloupe?  Apparently, she really doesn’t want to go through another cold winter in Portugal.  You might think that the Algarve is considerably warmer than this rained-soaked little island, and you’d be right .. most of the time.  However, even if you have a roof over your head, this often lacks central heating, and so it’s easy to see how one could feel colder than we do here ... and Tamsin was at first living in an unheated borrowed van followed by a cramped unheated little room.  After this, I’d want to go somewhere warmer!  Leaving was ... almost straightforward ... in that she managed to sell most of her (few) possessions.  However, she couldn’t carry everything, so apparently, she made an arrangement with the next occupant of her rented rooms that she could stash her trumpet and a harmonica (amongst other things) in a cupboard, until they could be collected by her Israeli friend, Yuval, on his way through the following week from visiting his parents in Israel.  When Yuval turned up to collect everything, then the crazy woman at first denied any knowledge, and then finally admitted that she’d thrown everything out, as she’d mistaken it for rubbish!  Since this was quite valuable stuff, the real story is likely to be that she’d sold it.  Tamsin also wanted to give some of her (ex) possessions to another friend, and apparently when her friend turned up at the little flat, she was given the same story! 

So, she arrived with an almost-three-year-old Manué, who babbled away using language that we almost managed to understand ... though translations were often necessary as Portuguese mixed with English mixed with ‘baby’ are hard to decipher.  Next time it’ll be French, but with a Creole twist ... unless she departs for South America (sigh) ... but more on that story later.  Luckily, the weather for late September / early October was amazingly warm ... I say luckily because Tamsin had given away most of Manué’s wet-weather / warm clothing in anticipation of the hoped-for heat which was to come.  After a week of lazy warm days, and walking at the Manué speed of 0.1 m.p.h.(on a good day), it’s surprising how different becomes the mental map of your neighbourhood, as you resurrect that mother-and-toddler perspective on those small details of the street scene that have been semi-buried for a few decades.  This usually involves knowing where you are in relation to ... free food (various fruit and nut trees) .. children with scooters (latest Manué toy craze) .. barking dogs (scary) .. Man with Angle-Grinder (fascinating male role model) .. sheep (latest Manué animal craze) ... ah, a boy after my own heart (sigh) .... oh, and of course ... play-parks (preferably inhabited by the ever-patient Uncle Rupert!).  The enduring legacy of this whirlwind visitation is that we now know exactly where the best foraging is to be had ... and have discovered .. The Field of The Crazy Sheep!  Up on a windswept Cotswold hill above (!) Cirencester, with the most glorious view of the old Stratton mill, lives the sheep addicted to ... salt.  In the corner of the field, menacingly chewing on a blade of grass and eyeing up the opposition was this mean-looking critter (cue : banjo music .. twang!).  Nothing and no-one would get past this feisty lady.  Spitting out the blade of grass, she got down to business ... the salt lick.  Mmm ... it tasted good.  Suddenly one brave ewe made her move.  The feisty one glared at her .. meanly ... and then rushed in to head-butt.  The brave one sneaked in a couple of licks, but was rebuffed.  The other sheep turned away.  The feisty mean one had held on to the object of her desire ... her salt lick.  No one would take this away from her.  Half an hour of constant licking later, and with her desire for salt showing no signs of abating, we had visions of this little tiny shrivelled and wrinkly prune-like creature lying upside down with her feet in the air, clutching her four stomachs and groaning ‘water! .. water! ..’ (translated from : ‘baa! .. baa! ..’).  Hmm .. mini salted prune-like sheep in packets anyone?

No more time for musings ... chop! chop! .. wakey! wakey! .. only five days to go!  Poor Yuval ... he stepped off the ‘plane from Portugal into the waiting car, which sped off into the night towards every single bloke’s nightmare ... the meeting with as many relatives as one can muster in as short as possible a time ... and he wasn’t even Tamsin’s boyfriend!  Luckily he survived ... though us crumbly types nearly crumbled, as we slogged up and down motorways, cursed, dodged lorries, cursed, were diverted, became lost, cursed, became found again (halleluja!) ... until finally ... finally ... z .. zz .. zzzzzz .. the crumblies crumbled into little piles of crumbs.  But wait!  Revival was at hand!  Legend has it that a few drops of the magic brown liquid known as .. ‘TEA’ ... will do the trick (drip! drip! .. fizz! .. glug! glug! .. creak!).  So what does that Popeye know?  Spinach? .. pah!    zThere is a species of superbly well-designed indoor play-park, known in Cirencester as ‘MagicLand’, where Rupert, Jess, Yuval and Tamsin took Manué once the weather had started to become a bit more gloomy.  We hadn’t realised that it was a franchise until we visited my Mum and took Manué to a differently-named indoor play-park, and found that it was kitted out in exactly the same manner.  However, there was one obvious difference ... commercialisation.  Here in the relatively-rich Cotswolds, the café sold good quality food, with veggie options .. fruit, fruit juices, whole-grain bars, and the sweets were discretely displayed.  Just outside of Spalding, we were shocked to find how ‘in your face’ was the whole consumer experience.  Not only was it a fruit / fruit juice desert, but customers weren’t allowed to bring in their own!  Everything was meat-based and sweets / Coke was all that they could conceive of a child wishing to eat / drink!  What were you were supposed to do if you wanted to bring up your child healthily?  Luckily, there was a helpful person on the desk who subversively hid us out of sight while we ate our own stuff ... vegans? .. vegetarians? ... you mean you don’t eat meat??  It was such a different world, and one wonders which came first : the demands for such low-standard fare from their customers or the lower expectations of the franchise operators.  Why is it assumed that poorer people don’t care about what they’re eating, or where it comes from?  (Sigh).

So Tamsin, Yuval and Manué departed for Guadeloupe via Paris, and are trying to find their kind of ‘community’, which I sincerely hope that they do, otherwise, there’s talk of going to South America.  Now we know that there are eco-villages in Colombia, but that’s a mighty dangerous place ... and as for the rest ... well .. travellers beware!  Since they were going to the Caribbean for the heat, it’s ironic that they ended up WWOOFing on a farm in the mountains, where it was .. shall we say .. a little chilly at night ... and Yuval had given away all of his jumpers!  Tamsin was determined to travel lightly and had left most of Manué’s jerseys behind as well!  Hmm .. perhaps a little more research?  Despite finding the farm in the WWOOF on-line list of authorised organic farms, it turned out that the farm wasn’t geared up to cope with WWOOFers until January (due to a family illness), but allowed them to stay until they could find somewhere to rent.  So now they’re ensconced in an ex holiday cottage, with basic facilities and a garden, which gradually becomes the jungle, and crucially a short walk to the sea, which means ... warmth! (actually  .. sweatiness .. we’ve lived in Papua new Guinea ..).  Tamsin has just discovered the down-side to living in tropical islands ... it’s hard to dry your clothes (which then go mouldy .. yuk!) since the humidity is so high .. because .. it rains a lot!  Another rain-soaked little island .. only stickier!  One of the up-sides is that there’s a hydro-thermal spring, fed from the volcano, flowing into a natural pool on the beach, where you can take a bath, and locals do .. it’s free hot water!  Another bonus, is that Tamsin and Yuval can use their ex neighbours’ washing machine and broad-band (yay!).  The reason being that all services can take so long to connect in Guadeloupe, that, even though the neighbours moved out just after Tamsin arrived (no connection!), they keep returning to use the broad-band and washing machine until such facilities are up and running in their new house!  Tamsin seems to have discovered the odd friend or two for Manué, and has become friends with a musician and instrument maker, whereupon the two of them have put on ‘a concert’ at a local ‘white’ market, i.e., it didn’t appear to be a market where locals normally go to shop.  So far, so good ... though we’re steering clear of the topic of South America. 

Rupert’s life since graduation doesn’t seem to have changed much, except that since his girlfriend Jess moved into a shared house with friends in August, we see even less of him than when he was a student!  Suddenly he has all the advantages of living with someone without actually living with them!  What a perfect life of unchallenged existence!  So, how has he impinged upon our lives this year?  Mostly as brightly-coloured blurs.  “Just need a change of clothes .. byee!”; “O parents ... can I borrow your car .. mine’s a bit dead .. again .. and we’re playing this gig and I need to move stuff .. yes? ... ta ! .. byeee!”; “I’m just going to sleep .. got a night-shift in a couple of hours ... byee!”.  Which pretty much sums up Rupert’s life in a nutshell.  He’s also a pretty cool Uncle ... Manué thinks so, anyway .. And he has now bought a van to move his band gear to gigs (yay!) .. though it’s not quite legal yet, as it was imported from S. Ireland (sshhh!).

Bob is still doing his 3-day-(in theory)a-week job at Oxford Brookes as a (ahem) ‘Research Associate’, otherwise known as an up-market slave.  And just when we’d both decided to give up on all treasurerships of the SW Green Party .. guess what? ... he’s now Treasurer for Gloucestershire FoE, (... no! no! please don’t make me! ...).  As for myself, Joy-to-the-World, I’m still volunteering at the OUMNH, one day a week, when I’m not trying to organise repairs and insulation for Y Ddôl from afar ... or indeed near at hand (blub! blub! blub! ... and another wellie-boot sinks without trace in the mire ... erm .. garden).  

   

And now, O Best Beloveds, a story will be told which has been unfolding since the year’s beginning .. yeah .. and probably even a longer time since.  One day, as I was slogging it out to Jane Fonda (only 30 years since her exercise regime was popular .. I don’t get out much!), I felt a crunch whilst doing a shoulder stand, felt some pain, and as is normal, went to the osteopath (osteopath reaction : “are you crazy .. at your age!”), pain went away.  After another six months of failing to heed the osteopath’s advice ... another crunch in exactly the same place .. “.. aarggh! .. can’t breathe! .. ow! ..ow! ..ow!! ..”.  Now this was a bit hard-core, so perhaps a visit to the doctor?  The X-ray machine showed a partially collapsed T5 vertebra, and something ... fuzzy and indeterminate .. (how did that mini shrivelled salt-addicted sheep get into the X-ray department?).  MRI and  bone density scans followed in quick succession; osteoporosis was diagnosed, and the faces and actions of the MRI staff confirmed that the evil fuzzy thing was still an evil fuzzy thing ... though not a word was said (shhh!).  At this stage, O Gentle Readers (end of August), you’d think that some sort of treatment would be imminent ... at least for the osteoporosis, but no ... the stage was set for a bit of a farcical muddle,  involving my doctor going on holiday, an obfuscating locum sowing the seeds of confusion with consequent delays, and assumptions about who knew what .. or not.  A whole month later .. finally ... I get to see a consultant! (yay!) ... who tells  me nothing that I didn’t already know, but who is, crucially, the only person who can order the next phase of scans.  The next couple of weeks saw me ‘hotter’ than a caesium-filled N. Wales sheep after the Chernobyl fall-out, as CT scan followed bone scan followed the imbibing of various ‘interesting’ substances labelled ‘Drink Me’ (or words to this effect).  No shrinking or becoming bigger ... so not that sort of mind-altering, then?  Zzzapp!! ... (drat .. another brain cell ... ).  A month passed.  The bone scan highlighted a few extra mini evil fuzzy things (boo!).  Another month passed.  The CT soft-tissue scan showed only the original evil fuzzy thing (yay! and double yay!).  ‘I’m not going to be poisoned’ .. ‘I get to keep my hair!’ mused I inwardly, though excitedly and somewhat relieved, having known what the treatment options would be for the previous two months.  “Hmm .. that’s good.” was what I actually uttered (consultant probably thinking : ‘a bit of a cool customer, this one ...’).  Now at last, thanks to the aromatase inhibitor, those cunning little rogue breast cancer cells will be starved of their daily fix of oestrogen (“Shrivel and die, O evil ones!”) ... assuming that the evil fuzzy thing, sitting in its command centre at the T5 vertebra plotting (yes, you’ve guessed) to Take Over The World, is what we think it is.  Or maybe it isn’t ...  but that’s another story yet to be told, O Best Beloveds.   

                

The parental home has now become just a storage facility and distribution hub for one child ‘en route’ between one existential crisis and the next, or one for whom an existential crisis might be a good thing, since he appears to have ‘found himself’ too early .. life being just one giant comfort blanket.  I wonder ... could it be that adulthood only truly arrives when you accept responsibility for (i.e., when you have somewhere to stash) all of the accoutrements of your previous lives?  Hmm ... we could be twiddling our thumbs for a while yet! 

So now Christmas is a-coming .. less than a week to go ... (ah, the tyranny of dates) ... time to wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Lots of love and Best Wishes from Joy, Bob, Rupert, Tamsin and Manué

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2017 and 2018

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  41 Albion Street,

                                                                                                   Stratton,

                                                                                                   Cirencester,

                                                                                                   Gloucs.

                                                                                                   GL7 2HT

Christmas 2017 & 2018

Dear Readers,

The (almost) annual migration of the greater spotted Tamsin to ever hotter climes has now taken place, serendipitously avoiding both the vicissitudes of weather and political ineptitude.  Neat!  Of course, it is possible that come the end of March, a giant red hand will be held aloft against all migratory species from now on, until all have died of exhaustion in trying to complete the inevitable brick-sized form, or been blown off-course by the chill winds and icy attitudes of this insulated and isolated Little England (sigh).  Even the sheep have mostly all migrated to Wales, having seen the writing on the wall … (clever creatures, these sheep).  We propose sneaking in the odd sheep whenever there’s a cabinet reshuffle … no-one would notice, despite the extra wooliness … baa! baa! beah!  Just another normal day in Parliament …   

Why no letter or Christmas Greetings last year?  Well, t’was an annoying series of bad luck episodes, such that I was beginning to think ‘Why me, God?’, and I didn’t think you’d want to hear from an incredibly grumpy old lady.  However, this year, I’ve changed my mind, and decided to subject you all to the full force of my crazed brain cell … haha!

2017

By May, Joab and the gang had finally finished re-roofing, strengthening, and wrapping an insulating blanket of hempcrete, cork and lime around Y Ddôl, our cottage in Wales.  However, this didn’t mean that it was actually habitable!  Electricians did their bit to ‘improve’ the electrics, i.e., converting all the lighting to 12-volt to make more efficient use of the electricity, especially in the winter, when electricity is in very short supply (the house being very much off-grid, and reliant on batteries for electricity).  Bodge-jobbers and plumbers (the same thing in our case!) took an eternity to finish a job that was kind of crucial to enable us to have hot water, even though we owed them lots of money!  Trust us to find a very rich plumber.  There was no point in ‘phoning during school holidays, as he was always at his cottage in France!  Another few months passed, and after being leaned on by Brian (officially carpenter and joiner, who was our ‘de facto’ project manager), the aforementioned plumber finally came home from France long enough to dig out a length of Rayburn chimney pipe that would connect to our section of pipe in order to increase its length to meet Building Regulations.  However … yes, you’ve guessed … nothing ever runs smoothly at Y Ddôl … the plumber was afraid of heights, and poor old Brian had to fit it, and all the connecting pipes for the solar vacuum panel, while Neil, the plumber, did the inside pipework.  But at least the Rayburn could be lit!  Another little milestone reached … would we live long enough to reach the end?  Will there be an end?  Grand Designs it certainly ain’t!

Whilst all this was going on, I was slowly being poisoned yet again, with various evil concoctions (hubble, bubble, toil and trouble … etc.), with even more evil side effects, in an effort to keep the tumour cells in check (biff! baff! boff!).  Before the dose was reduced, my brain cell was so frazzled that I couldn’t remember anything Bob had said even half a minute before, or make any connection between thoughts and muscles in my mouth, such that I kept having to change what I wanted to say in order to communicate (now that is extreme chemo-brain!).  And with Parkinson-like tremors, barely able to hold a cup, drinking was somewhat challenging, as was doing up buttons – anything that involved fine motor control was beyond me!  With different drugs, and more tolerable side effects, things gradually returned to normal …. until Tamsin and Manué arrived …..  the day before The Great Snow Storm of December 10^th!

A couple of weeks before, and the day before we were due to visit for the first time since the previous year, Brian and his daughter Polly, had attempted to make Y Ddôl habitable again, by cleaning from top to bottom, and leaving us his industrial-sized vacuum cleaner and mop ‘in case we needed them’.  An understatement! 

We approached the house in slight trepidation.  Photos we had-a-plenty, but what would it be really like?  Outside .. gasps of awe and wonder at the workmanship.  Inside … lime dust hung in the air and covered every surface that Brian and Polly hadn’t managed to clean; the flagstones weren’t recognizable, despite their heroic attempts at hoovering and mopping; iron and steel were corroded due to the deadly combination of lime and exposure to the elements for a winter.  ‘Aargh! my lungs are clogging up with particles! … I’m gonna die!’ … (cough! wheeze! thud!).  Well, yes, but perhaps not quite that imminently.  ‘Hmm … this lever on the Rayburn is jammed … what happens if I ….’  (clunk! tinkle! tinkle!)  ‘Oh, ****! … the little door flap just fell off!’  ‘Now how will we control the burning … we’ll freeze to death … we’re doomed!’  Visions of house filling up with black smuts … again.  We sensed that the clean-up operation was going to occupy us for months to come …

And then our other house suddenly filled up with childish accoutrements … and people … and our peaceful life became anything but normal (sigh).  We’d definitely turned into a couple of old fogies … well, mostly me (snarl!). 

Tamsin had left the warm environment (depending on where you are) of La Palma specifically to attend her cousin Karen and Simon’s wedding.  Now we know that this was really important to her, because she hates the cold, and this was December!  As we woke up the following day, The Great Snow Storm was upon us.  Would we make it to Stratford-upon-Avon?  Should we even try?  Any other day, no.  But this was a wedding, and Tamsin had flown in specially.  We couldn’t give up at the first hurdle.  So, piling into our trusty 4x4, the Irvings bravely battled the elements along sensibly empty roads, until … ‘whoaaaa! … where’s the road gone?’ … (bump! bump! bumpety-bump! crunch! crash!).  Time slowed.  I watched as a tree came slowly towards me, crumpling the bonnet of the car on my side.  Time speeded up again.  The car crashed over a fallen tree and everything stopped.  My spine went crazy.  Each individual vertebra seemed to be jolted out of position and clicked back together again, accompanied by heat travelling from the bottom upwards – a very strange sensation!  Meanwhile in the back of the car, poor little Manué was hit above the eyebrow by either Tamsin’s arm or a flying food container.  What to do now?  There was no way we could travel to the wedding … or was there? 

Before long a Landrover turned up, and then just as we were deciding who to sacrifice to the wolves (probably Bob), another car arrived, having made it all the way from London to the white-out wilderness of Gloucestershire.  Hurrah, Bob was saved!  After a few games of Musical Chairs and tutting over the poor dead car, we all managed to find a seat, and trundled back, very gingerly at 15 miles per hour, to Cirencester.  And then … Rupert rode to the rescue!  Serendipitously he was late leaving, as usual, still at the practise room packing his drums into the van for his gig.  Yes, Rupert was playing in a band who were the evening’s entertainment at the wedding.  We just had to make it through! 

And thanks to Rupert, we did!  Just in time to appear on the wedding photos!  Everyone had an amazing time, dressing up and dancing to ‘The Curious Little Big Band’.  Miles, the singer, was such a good entertainer, that very few people could resist his charms and stay seated.  It was such an exhilarating evening!  However, having danced like crazies until we felt even more crumbly than normal (us oldies … ha!), a slow realization began to dawn that we wouldn’t see anything resembling a bed until 3 a.m. (nooooooo!!! … zzz … zzz  …), while we waited for the disassembling and packing away of the drum kit.  Since Tamsin and Bob had only managed 3 a.m. the previous evening, thanks to Tamsin’s cheap flight from La Palma to Gatwick, this was doubly hard on them, especially as Manué had by this time been outside and become super-excited by the snow …. until he realized how cold it could be …

After this, there was no way that Manué could be persuaded to go outside.  When you’re used to running around outside in a t-shirt, or perhaps a sweatshirt at most, why would you want to wrap up in a ton of clothing just to feel comfortable, let alone actually enjoy playing?  However, this did mean lots of highly expensive visits to the indoor play-park and swimming pool, which we managed to make slightly more economically bearable by persuading Manué and the powers to be that he really was only four years old!  Thank goodness he’s quite a small boy!  

Ten days after the crash, just when all (all?) we were worried about was how to get from A to B, another totally unforeseen problem hove into view.  I stared into the bathroom mirror.  ‘Aarghh! … what are all these itchy, painful, weeping, red and yellow pustules?’  My brain cell rushed through a few possible options … an allergic reaction? … the plague? … alien take-over?  Well … it sort of depends how you define alien take-over, since it turned out to be shingles.  The chicken-pox virus had been lurking as a sleeper in my nerves for almost 60 years, awaiting its call to take over its world, i.e., Joy! (cackle!).  The shock of the crash, together with my already chemo-compromised immune system, prodded the virus into action (yawn! … what! …), which then ambled along the nerve fibres to the skin to try to infect anything that brushed past … and it hurt like hell!

Such bad luck!  Just as Tamsin was home for Christmas for the first time for years!  Ah, well, apart from Joy falling apart, Christmas with all the family united was fun … and somewhat different, in that we had a very non-materialistic Christmas, apart from socks and chocs … and Manué burning his way through what appeared to be the world’s supply of sparklers on the Christmas pud!  In spite of all this incineration, perhaps Manué wasn’t the reason for the apparent shortage of sparklers on Guy Fawkes Night one year hence (well, maybe only in our household …).  On the Eve before Christmas, while everyone slept, someone was hard at work (no, not Santa’s elves on last minute overtime …).  On Christmas morning many tiny Christmassy drawings and cut-outs, with little messages and hand-made vegan sweetmeats all tied up with string, (very ‘Sound of Music’), appeared before our eyes.  Tamsin had been very busy, and we loved her for it.  Tamsin could (almost) persuade us to be raw-food vegans, so good are her food creations, but I don’t think the old pension could stretch to buying the necessary ingredients!

And so to ….   

2018

Tamsin flew back to La Palma and Davor, her friend and on-off partner in foraged raw food living, and the house returned to its normal tip-like condition, despite the return of toys to the attic.  The ‘treatment’ finally came to an end, the evil ones were being eliminated, and I hadn’t felt this good for well over a year!

After the ‘Beast from the East’ finally departed, we determined to spend as much time as possible at our house in Wales, Y Ddôl, amongst the mountains.  After our enforced absence, the brambles had taken over completely, and as we hacked at the dense undergrowth, we were beginning to feel like the Prince rediscovering Sleeping Beauty!  Whilst pondering the problem of the sinking satellite dish (drying soil), a light-bulb clicked on somewhere in the inner recesses of Bob’s brain … ‘wasn’t there a patio behind the shed?’  We wielded the machetes, and fought with several metres of bramble spines (ow! ow! ow!), until suddenly, ‘Wow! … the patio … it’s really here!’.  So used to the complete bramble coverage were we, that we’d almost forgotten of its existence!  The satellite dish was very happy in its new home, and we were very happy with the long-awaited internet connection … though the odd noble fir in the wood does look ominously close to the satellite’s line of site.  More future tree maintenance (sigh) …

Having wall-to-wall (or should that be mountain-to-mountain) sunshine in the valley, at least allowed us the opportunity to check out which solar panels at the upper end of the ‘garden’ were being obscured by rogue hedge trees gone wild (easy to deal with), and worryingly those which were being shaded by Coed Cadw trees from above.  Since Coed Cadw weren’t happy for us to go on their land to hack the branches back, and it was going to be a specialized task that involved much swinging in the trees, juggling small and large chainsaws (gulp!), we had to be pretty sneaky!  We knew that the Coed Cadw ranger wasn’t going to be in the area until September, so we ensured that the tree surgeons did the job well before then.  They were so good at their job, in that they went back to the trees’ natural growth points, rather than just lopping off branches, that if you didn’t know they’d been there, you’d never guess.  I think we’re now safe (phew) … fingers crossed!  Now we have a few extra branches for logs, and a massive pile of branch chippings from the impressive giant shredder that they arrived with.  Hmm … could create a path, perhaps …    

In the unaccustomed 30° C heat, jungle fever took over our frazzled brains, despite the shelter of the old oak tree.  What other rediscoveries might we uncover?  ‘Shouldn’t there be apple trees hereabouts?’  A scan through squinted eyes peered into the middle distance.  Long thin upright whips bearing a bountiful crop of enticing red apples swayed slightly above the three-metre briar thicket, rearing up and over the path threateningly.  But nothing would deter Joy the Intrepid, as she sought to rediscover ‘the orchard’ (well, three trees), not to mention the rest of the ‘garden’, especially when such a prize awaits … eyes glaze over … saliva dripping (yeuk!) … all thoughts obliterated …‘must … have … apples …’  Just think how a sheep would feel in an orchard with the fruit dangling just out of reach … oh, the torture!  But at the sound of a snip, as the apple falls … quick as a flash before it hits the ground … so speedy!  Needs must when you're that desperate! 

Hack! snip! cut! (briars ruthlessly attacked), scratch! shred! bleed! (Joy ruthlessly attacked).  But eventually ... we found the trees and the water tank … but no Sleeping Beauty.  The apple trees appear to be 'Cornish Aromatic', 'Blenheim Orange' and 'Ashmeads Kernel' - wonderful traditional varieties.  ‘We’ve won the battle – yay!’  Oh, the excitement! (we don’t get out much) … maybe it may even be possible to come back from checking the water level without twisting an ankle, or getting Velcro’d to the vegetation … help!

But this is only the beginning – we have a war to win!  ‘Ha! you’ll be lucky’, think the evil lurking briars … ‘we have time on our side’ (much evil cackling)!  As Bob attempted to cut down a stray goat willow, and the odd out-of-control hedge tree, beech (?), the intrepid Joy hacked her way through the jungle, whilst at the same time trying not to crush the many milk-cap fungi springing up everywhere.  Despite the diverting tactics being employed by the resident agitated robin, two more long-forgotten compost bins, and two semi-remembered wood stores eventually revealed themselves … eureka!  I guess this must have been the Irvings’ ‘Sleeping Beauty’ moment – oh, Joy! (no pun intended).  What a voyage of discovery … though perhaps not quite on a par with uncovering the odd Mayan temple in the jungles of Central America.      

As the living 3-metre-high briars transmogrified into giant 3-metre-high briar ‘hay’ stacks, by using rakes as pitchforks, never had our crumbly townsfolk muscles been given such a workout.  On the other hand, workouts at gyms don’t usually cause flesh wounds.  To complete the scene all that was needed now was a guy on top, and have a giant bonfire!  However, it seemed a tad friendlier to the local wildlife if we gave them a home for the winter instead.  And the valley was tinder dry …  

     

On a day that was particularly hot, and us pale beings could only shelter inside, we noticed that the woodland at the end of the field was filling with a little smoke … a hotel barbecue at Devil’s Bridge? … a forest fire?  Crucially there were no flames.  We kept our eye on the situation, but it didn’t seem to become any worse.  We discovered on the internet that there had been a grass fire that had eventually burned itself out, and we thought no more of it.  However, a couple of days later, as we travelled back to Cirencester, we had a profound shock.  There was a massive fire on the other side of the valley, which threatened the little village of Aberffrwd.  Where a few days previously there has been lush green woodland, now vast swathes of the mountain-side had been transformed into mile after mile of smouldering blackened skeletal trees covered in a fog of rippling white smoke being carried along the valley by the gentle breeze.  Excitingly for us accidental tragedy tourists, a helicopter with a water scoop appeared periodically to drop its load on the smouldering forest to dampen down the burning.  Unfortunately, flames had broken out at a place further up the mountain, and so it was a bit hit-and-miss.  Luckily, the reservoir wasn’t too far away, and we were rather transfixed by the sight of the helicopter not-quite-landing on the water, whilst scooping up another load, then circling its target, emptying the scoop’s contents as it went.  Obviously mesmerized, we never noticed whatever other activity was going on, until a large buzzing thing circled our heads several times.  Could have been a giant hornet.  No, it was a baby drone.  Wow, we’d never seen one ‘in the flesh’, so to speak … too much excitement!  We decided that it must be BBC Wales, getting in some aerial shots, and therefore it was probably time to leave.  The rumour was that the little steam train that travelled between Aberystwyth and Devil’s Bridge several times a day was the cause of the fire, but the company never admitted it.  However, it was a strange co-incidence that the fire was all above the railway line, where the sparks fly, and not below …   

As the fields of Welsh soft green turned to Portuguese parched amber, and underdressed roasting Brits came to terms with completing the traffic-light analogy, everything ground to a halt … except the insects!  The farmer took to bringing water daily for the six young bull calves in the field, until eventually they ran out of food.  One day we arrived to an empty field, and we feared the worse.  Luckily, the creepy cluster flies saw no good reason to hang around just for us.  However, giant hornets still roamed the countryside searching for fresh victims.  Strangely, they seemed to be sexist, and only went for the nearest male.  Moral : always stand by your male, when confronted by giant hornets … (?)  Bees took up living space behind the bargeboards under the eaves of the house, and could be heard eerily humming in the heat of the day to keep cool … crazy hot place to build a nest, we thought.  Perhaps the heat was turning all creatures crazy, as Bob thought he had found a wasps’ nest in our ‘known’ compost heap … but later in the summer it wasn’t there … puzzling, as wasps don’t leave until Autumn.  Had they left early … or … had Bob’s brain cells turned too red and blotchy in the sun?   

When it wasn't too ravingly hot, and someone from Joab’s gang finally braved the evil giant hornets to do a spot of lime-infilling for us, where the new green oak posts had shrunk away from the lime coating, we eventually managed to lime-paint the house.  It’s now dark to light salmon-pink and many shades in between, depending on the underlying texture of the wall.  Not sure that was the intended colour, but it would seem that the lime coating the cork insulation takes up water from the lime-paint differently from the lime coating the hempcrete insulation … no we don’t get it either!  We’re calling it delightfully characterful.

At the same time, we decided to ‘sort out’ the solar thermal system.  We had wondered why it was that our solar thermal panel always seemed to be over-heating, whilst never actually producing any hot water!  Our thermal panel ought to have been producing loads of hot water (you’d think!), but according to Marcus, the solar thermal engineer, ‘it had been completely plumbed in wrongly’.  There are two types of solar thermal panel, and the plumber had only learned about one of these, it would seem (sigh).  Apart from the usual ‘we’re English, moaning about the weather is part of our national psyche’ reason, we prayed for cooler, well, non-sunny but dry, weather, otherwise Marcus might have fallen off the roof with heat exhaustion … and he was our only hope, being remote and off-grid!  Having worked out ‘a plan’ for our quirky situation, he spent two days enabling it, but couldn’t test it because it was … yes, you’ve guessed … raining!  Oh, the irony!  We do now have hot water … but only on really sunny days, and only enough for one and a half persons, just as Marcus foretold.  Life off-grid, eh?  It certainly brings it home to you just how much radiant energy is necessary to heat a tank full of hot water using a panel of vacuum tubes – about 6 hours’ worth of uninterrupted sunshine!  Next cunning plan – to divert some of the electricity produced from the photovoltaic array up the hill into the immersion heater.  And then … we won’t have to toss coins to see who gets to shower (yay!).

Late summer turned to Autumn.  The Irvings had fought the long fight with the briars, suffered many wounds in the process, but spurred on by the bountiful crop of delicious blackberries … oh, worth any amount of pain … tut! tut!  Joy, you masochist.  Even the apple tree that normally never produces fruit, ‘Ashmeads Kernel’ decided that the summer had been hot enough for it and took its chances.  Maybe it felt threatened by the long neglect .. never again to produce its tasty apple (sniff).  Many apples too had been scoffed, and many fungi had been … er … rejected.  Once, as we were going down the lane, we chanced upon an amazing sight – a group of classic poisonous red Fly Agaric red fungi with white spots!  We’d never seen these for real before, and they were much larger than I imagined them.  One could almost imagine the caterpillar sitting on the largest one smoking his hookah!  No, we didn’t find any magic mushrooms – honest!  Now Y Ddôl has been left to suicidal bats (we were always ejecting them … never found where they were coming in), multitudinous spiders, and Brian, the carpenter, who’s supposed to be building a staircase at some point.  I really miss the place … filling up with smuts in the winter (cough! wheeze!), the ever-encroaching mud, the ankle-biting draughts down at flagstone level, the enervating semi-tropical heat in the crog-loft, chopping up logs, re-arranging the wood store yet again (don’t ask!), and even chopping down the odd semi-dead tree in the forest … all part of the rich tapestry of life off-grid with no central heating! 

The season of cheap flights arrived, and with it Tamsin and Manué, en route from the less-than-utopian La Palma, via a bit of parental luxury (such as a mattress), to the promise of Costa Rica.  La Palma is full of escapees from the harsh northern European climate (political, as well as the weather), trying many alternative lifestyles, but they all live in the mountains where land is cheaper, and the weather cooler, ironically!  And this year, while normally cold, damp little Britain roasted, La Palma was cooler and it actually rained in the summer (hmm … wonder what the Spanish is for ‘quelle horreur!’), due to the vagaries of the jet stream and global warming.  This was the last straw for Tamsin … she needed guaranteed warmth all year round!  Costa Rica started to impinge upon her consciousness as a possibility, which soon became a definite after her friend plus child decided to join this raw food vegan community on the east coast and felt very welcome.  She was having doubts about spending another cool winter in La Palma, at the less-than-welcoming Pacha Mama almost-community, with its lack of aims, changing dynamic, as folks came and went, and too much smoking and drinking.  So when she split up for good with Davor (partly because he found Manué really difficult), who did much to help her find foraged food on the island, and failing to find anyone else with whom to share her foraging lifestyle, she decided to pack up her summer camp idyll in the beautiful forested caldera (UNESCO Biosphere Reserve), and head for possibilities new … again …

Our month of living in a confined space with a frustrated Manué was … interesting (!).  For a Thomas the Tank Engine obsessed little boy, it was a shame that he had to leave all of his engines, and associated accoutrements behind on La Palma with his friends.  This made all of his extra track here somewhat redundant.  Unsurprisingly, this did not go down too well with Manué.  When the weather was OK, we did manage to distract him with long bike-rides through sheep fields and playing Pooh Sticks in the river at Baunton (local posh village), but mostly, he’d have been much happier if he’d been here in the 30° heat of summer, in the buff!  This month-long tantrum-filled endurance test culminated in four (!) trips to the dentist just to fill two holes (sigh).  Apparently, Manué had endured a bad experience with a dentist on La Palma, and was so traumatized by the whole experience that, even though his teeth hurt, wild horses couldn’t have dragged him through the door!  Tamsin was almost reduced to tears trying to reason with him, whilst trying to unpeel each little finger from the door handle.  On the second occasion, he promised to at least go into the dentists, and play with the toys, but absolutely refused to go into Jonathan’s treatment room because ‘it smells funny’.  However, Jonathan chatted very patiently with Manu, and managed to persuade him one more step along the way, to come in again, where he promised to check out his teeth in the ante-room, amongst all the toys, even giving Manu his own little dentists mirror to play with, as well as lots of bribery in the way of stickers!  Manué was impressed!  We were impressed!  And then Jonathan unveiled his master-stroke … the DVD player above the dentist’s chair!  Manu was hooked … yes, he would definitely allow Jonathan to fill his teeth next time, if he could watch any film he liked, and could have more stickers.  Deal done!  And amazingly, Jonathan wouldn’t accept any payment!  Jonathan, being an anti-fracking activist, would, however, accept in lieu of payment, the delivery of lots of anti-fracking posters around town, which Tamsin and Bob were happy to do.  Tamsin was over the moon, as this is absolutely the way that she loves to operate.  She prefers to exchange skills rather than monetary transactions.  In La Palma, she gave an English lesson to the daughter of the previous dentist who treated Manu … hmm … perhaps it doesn’t always work out? 

Tamsin does have some amazing language skills – we’ve seen her in action at Gatwick, sorting out problems for a Spanish family, who didn’t speak much English, with officials at Gatwick, who of course, knew no Spanish (sigh).  Apparently, she did a lot of this sort of thing with tourists in La Palma.  Since she has ‘alternative’ friends from many European countries, and has lived in a fair few, she apparently is fairly fluent in Spanish, Portuguese, German, Dutch and Italian, even a little Danish.  Very useful.  Even Manu discovered that speaking another language can pay off.  Whilst at a local food market here in Cirencester, he heard Italian being spoken on the gelato stall, and promptly announced that he could speak Italian.  After a little conversation with the stall-holder, he was rewarded with a free ice-cream!  Actually, according to Tamsin, he’s been known to correct her Italian grammar!  At that age, children just seem to absorb languages like a sponge, especially when playing with friends, as they’re just so desperate to fit in.  I remember listening to Rupert speaking with his street friends, when we lived in Namibia.  They were chatting to each other in a wonderful mish-mash of English, German, and Afrikaans!  Of course, they all spoke the different languages, but not well enough to use one language with everyone, so they’d made up this pidgin language – very inventive!

And so, on November 10^th, Costa Rica awaited the arrival of the intrepid explorers after the true meaning of how to live a good life.  After two flights (via Orlando) to San José, the capital, a knackering four-hour bus journey, and no sleep (at least for Tamsin), Tamsin and Manué were made to feel very welcome by all who met them at the bus stop in the local town, Cahuita, even giving them the best bedroom for the night to recover!  I think this overwhelmed her, and she took it as an auspicious sign that all would be well.  Manué has celebrated his 6th birthday with his new friends, and has even taken to occasionally eating salads!  It’s amazing what kids will eat if they want to fit in with their friends!  I'm imagining everyone on the beach with a warm sea and warm sun ... ah, what a life!  In reality, the humidity, mosquitos and potential dengue fever might take the edge off Paradise somewhat!  Tamsin really has got down to basics, as washing clothes is a bit of a chore, with nothing ever drying properly, so she's mostly taken to wandering around naked instead.  She seems to have become involved in writing the rules that will govern the community, and has been down to the community’s several hectares of cleared jungle to plant some fruit trees and see the ‘lie of the land’, so to speak.  There are aspects of modern life which she sees as an intrusion, such as everyone owning their own cars, and there are some downright silly suggestions as to how to continue to ford the large river that cuts off their land from the road when it floods, i.e., filling it full of large boulders!  Ha!  As Tamsin pointed out, the full force of a river in flood at 3 metres higher than usual will sweep away any number of large boulders!  It would appear that there are a few naiive folks among this community.  Hey, ho!  Tamsin may need all the communication skills she can muster.  As she says, for quality of life, she would have stayed in La Palma, if she could have found people who wanted her to stay.  However, these people in Costa Rica have welcomed her, and for the time being, she’ll see how things pan out.                 

Rupert’s life, by contrast, is pretty much ordered, though in a chaotic sort of a way, i.e., his calendar fills up with paid gigs, rehearsals, work shifts, and teaching drums, but is subject to crazy changes of plan at short notice, often down to failure to co-ordinate brain with calendar (… where? … what? … why? … ).  Jess, his girlfriend, is very long-suffering, as some days they only see each other for evening meal, or sometimes not even that, as Rupert embarks on yet another night shift accompanying disabled Tom to a night-club, mini-festival or gig.  Nice work if you can get it!  Jess works in retail, and this can mean starting as early as 7 a.m., or finishing at 7 p.m. depending on the day.  Neither work ‘regular’ hours.  Amazing that they ever see each other at all, especially at this time of year, when Jess is busily working on artistic commissions for Christmas presents in her ‘spare’ time, and Rupert’s bands all have Christmas gigs!  Welcome to the ‘gig’ economy (groan …)! 

The alien (to us!) concepts of sport and keeping fit appear to have taken over whatever passes for ‘free time’ in Rupert’s life.  As he points out, one needs to keep fit to play the drums, and the cycling just sort of developed from that.  The hardest challenge appears to be finding good outdoor gear supporting ‘Fair Trade’!  Then there was the ‘Tough Mudder’ challenge – not what you’d think of as ‘normal’ Rupertly activity.  This involves putting yourself (as part of a team) through all sorts of sometimes painful, almost impossible, obstacle challenges in as short a time as possible, whilst relying on your friends (in this case Amber and Antoine, Tom’s brother) to drag each other over and under however many metre-high barriers are in the way of that long, hot shower at the finish.  Think of those hated school obstacle courses, only infinitely worse, but run by ‘The Demon Headmaster’!  Lying face down in mud whilst trying to avoid being whiplashed by dancing electricity cables conjures up an interesting image!  And it is deliberately very, very muddy!

Gig-wise, Rupe seems to have been on a year-long ‘tour’ with ‘Jenny Darren & the Lady Killers’. She reached the first round of ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ until one of the tabloids apparently uncovered something from Jenny’s past that didn’t fit their expectation of what a rock’ n roll granny should be (!), but which had the effect of getting her voted off the show.  However, this did create a flurry of excitement for a while!  ‘Dealer’, meanwhile, has a faithful Belgian fan, who always comes to their gigs in England, as long as they’re within a certain radius of the ferry port, so that he can slip into work the following morning (presumably with very dark sunglasses).  ‘Ow!’ … (pfizz!) … oh, a little pile of dust … where’s that Igor when you need him?  Now that’s one helluva fan!  And thus came about the Belgium, Germany and France festival mini-tour in the summer.  Fame at last  … yay!  Dealer’s name is at least getting known in Europe … whoohoo!    

Meanwhile, the rest of us lead rather prosaic lives (well, mostly me).  Bob is definitely getting into this retirement thing.  Mostly, he’s into environmental activism … Green Party, People’s Vote, anti-fracking, Friends of the Earth … However, earlier in the year, he started going to T’ai Chi classes, which seems to involve learning lots of complicated moves, which follow on from each other, and executed with grace, poise and good balance (!).  (Arghh! … cognitive dissonance … the words Bob, grace and poise in the same sentence do not compute … ).  The process of learning complex moves helps with sustaining mental and physical abilities, without actually stressing you out, or making you sweat profusely!  Now that sounds like my sort of exercise!  Unfortunately, the guy running it became ill, and the lessons stopped.  Then Bob discovered ‘The Men’s Shed’.  As the title would suggest, this is an all-day club for blokes who like making things.  You just turn up and use the tools that are there, and meet other like-minded folks.  Odd projects happen there.  For instance, a trebuchet … yes, someone was constructing an actual working scaled-down version of a Roman trebuchet!  What a whacky, but fun idea to have come up with!  After many tweaks and alterations, it was finally ready to … um … pound the garden wall?  Hmm … maybe it could be adapted for tennis practice …

It was mid-August, a hot day down at Y Ddôl, and Joy the Intrepid was feeling rather tired after the many skirmishes with the evil briars.  Suddenly, a wave of nausea took over … was it the water? (the filter hadn’t been changed for … um … two years) … could it be too many blackberries (the briars’ revenge)?  After about a week, the problem subsided, though never entirely went away.  For 7 months, I had been feeling on top of the world, so maybe the briar-killing ought to cease for a while, to allow us oldies to gather our strength for the next onslaught.  Meanwhile, it was scan time again.  The results were a bit grim, or rather v. grim.  More poisoning … noooo!  Just when my hair had grown back and was looking good … curses!  Those sneaky tumour cells had developed cunning plans and clever tricks in order to sabotage our containment plan. The cancer had out-evolved the ability of the Tamoxifen to contain it.  So now, my life revolves around twice-weekly visits to the hospital, interminable waiting, long slow poisonings, and feeling like death warmed up.  Hmm … reminds me of life in a Victorian melodrama, where the heroine is slowly being fed arsenic by her wicked uncle in order to obtain her fortune … except the fortune bit … haven’t got one of those!

The good news is that I’ve finally finished the paper on our joint pyrite decay project in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History that had been started three years ago with Phil Hadland, who also used to work at the Museum – yay!  I’ve sent it off to ‘Geological Curator’, and I’m hoping that they will accept it for publication, as they are producing an issue totally devoted to things pyrite sometime in late Spring 2019.  Fingers crossed!  With a bit of luck, there won’t be too many alterations, or I can’t guarantee that the old blitzed brain will be able to cope … what’s pyrite? … what’s a paper? …

I’m so sorry that this letter is so late (due to the above circumstances) … but on the bright side, it is still officially Yuletide … though possibly a little late for Christmas as we know it, Jim.  So, we’ll wish you all a Happy Yule instead!  Unless you’re in Iceland, where the evil Yule Cat may get you …

Lots and lots of love and best wishes from Joy, Bob, Rupert, Tamsin and Manué

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