I apologise for the lack of a blog in the last five weeks – for the first three weeks living off-grid, I had internet connection via my dongle but had to conserve my battery because I could only charge up once or twice a week, and the last two weeks my host's WiFi hub refused to connect me to the internet and my mobile dongle thought I was abroad and wanted to charge me extra! Since when has South Northants been 'abroad'?
I have just spent a very interesting and enjoyable three weeks next to the Oxfordshire Canal, a few miles north of Banbury. I had briefly visited my host one very wet morning two years ago when I was staying with another WWOOF host nearby, so felt able to extend my normal fortnight with a new host to a three week stay.
Top Lock Cottage is all that is left of a little cluster of houses that originally stood next to the canal at this point. I thought, at first, that it would have been a lock keeper's cottage but it was originally a forge and joinery workshop, where all the hardware for the canal was manufactured, and stands on the opposite side of the canal to the site where a couple of cottages and stabling for the canal horses were demolished in the '60s. It was never built for use as a house and consequently is only of single brick construction. Phoebe, who has lived there for six years, has had a couple of the walls insulated as it was perishingly cold in the winter!
When I arrived I had to carefully think of what was 'essential' to take from my car, and then we loaded it all into a wheelbarrow and pushed it up the tow path. (Apparently, you can always tell the 'live-aboards' from the hire boats by the presence of the ubiquitous wheelbarrow strapped somewhere on the roof!) I began to regret the size of my bag on that walk up the path, especially as I then had to carry it across the narrow lock gate without falling in!
Living off-grid is a very different experience, too. The lighting in the house is all 12 volt, run off a series of storage batteries (they are old milk-float batteries) that are charged by a small wind turbine situated at the end of the garden. Luckily (in a way) this part of Oxfordshire is quite windy so the turbine works most of the time and we never ran out of 'juice'. Eventually, Phoebe is hoping to install a PV panel on her roof to supplement the wind turbine as she would like to run her fridge on electricity. At the moment the fridge is run on Calor gas, but this is becoming increasingly expensive, the fridge uses quite a lot and all the large cylinders have to be delivered, across the fields, by the farmer and then manhandled (or in this case, womanhandled) down the entire length of the garden, using sack trucks, and they are very heavy and unwieldy. Cooking is also done using the bottled gas and there is a gas water heater for hot water in the kitchen sink. Obviously, once the cold weather sets in and the Rayburn is alight, the cooking can be done on that, but we only lit it a couple of times in the evening when I was there. The Rayburn will also heat the hot water in the tank and radiators. At the moment the water for the bathroom is heated using a generator and this is only fired up a couple of times a week to enable Phoebe to have 240V power to run a washing machine and her computer. This is certainly a challenging way to live and not for the faint hearted – I admire Phoebe tremendously for sticking with it and carrying on alone after her husband died five years ago. Having said all this I have probably given the impression that we lived a Spartan existence, but the cottage is delightful and very snug, and was no hardship at all – just a different experience.
Phoebe works as a furniture restorer and has a workshop in the nearby village of Claydon where she went on several days a week, she also works one day a week on an organic vegetable farm a few miles away, so on several days I worked in the garden alone except for my constant companions, Flame and Cromarty, Phoebe's two remaining hens. The canal was still quite busy with several boats going up and down through the series of five locks that make up the Claydon run, so every few minutes I could have a conversation with complete strangers! As it takes a while to negotiate a lock some of these conversations resembled the sort that you have on train platforms while you're waiting for the train to depart and end up being excruciating, but other people were more naturally chatty and then their passage through the lock seemed all too short.
One Saturday some of her work colleagues from the farm came to give us a hand in the garden, so that we could try and advance some of the more major projects, such as moving the greenhouse. During the day we managed to lay most of a brick base for the greenhouse to move onto, as it was being re-sited from its original position (on a brick base) in the middle of the wall, to a corner position where it could take advantage of two warm brick walls, be more sheltered and free up some space. Other people mended door latches, gutters and set up a water butt as well as cutting up some logs, and the in the evening we had supper sitting round a fire in the firepit in the garden, chatting and drinking wine. A very sociable occasion and a good idea if you have a large project on the go.
The next day I continued with the brick base and then managed to 'walk' the greenhouse into its new position (don't worry, I haven't suddenly developed superpowers – it was only glazed with Perspex sheets, not glass, so wasn't very heavy) so that Phoebe could see it when she came home. We then decided that it would be a very good idea to join the two bits of hard standing together to create a brick patio-cum-potting up area. Luckily there was no shortage of bricks for this project as there had been several workshops on the site that had been demolished so there were bricks everywhere! Of course, as with all jobs, they throw up other jobs that need doing, or make more sense to do, before the main one, so I also did a lot of weeding and had to move some of the raspberry canes, before I could complete the patio.
On another day, we painted the caravan at the end of the garden. This caravan was 'free to a good home' at the side of the road, and although it looked a little jaded from the outside, was weatherproof and clean on the inside and is intended for use as additional WWOOFer accommodation in the summer months, if needed. When I first got there it stuck out a bit like a sore thumb as it was white and could be easily seen from the canal and also a bit from the village, so we painted it green with a grey roof so that, hopefully, it will blend in a bit. We did get a bit carried away on the side facing across the canal though, as we made stencils from Fablon in the shape of a sprig of ivy for the side panel next to the door, several flower shapes for the door and along the top edge, and then some cardboard shapes of two people dancing! Apparently, it was all round the village within a day of us completing the project!
Another large project was to create some raised beds for vegetable growing next year, so Phoebe and I set to to weed the area which was covered with nettles, thistles, docks and burdocks. I was a bit concerned when she brought out a pickaxe as part of her range of gardening tools – but have you ever seen the length of a burdock root? We dug big pits all over the place and even then didn't manage to get all the root out! Over the course of a few days I constructed two raised beds about twelve feet long and four feet wide using a variety of bits of timber that I found in the barn, and then filled them with a mixture of soil, compost and farmyard manure (Phoebe and a friend had barrowed fourteen bags of well-rotted manure along the tow path and then carried them across the lock gate!). I then covered them with sheets of cardboard so that, hopefully, they will be all ready to go next spring. The final job that Phoebe and I did together was to erect two posts and wire and replant the displaced raspberry canes in their new position.
It wasn't all work and no play however, as I went to a charity fashion show in Witney where all the clothes were from charity shops and were for sale, together with rails of other clothes and shoes, etc. I also went to an auction room where Phoebe was doing some on-site restoration on a bed prior to the sale. This was quite a high end auction house and I had a lovely mooch about looking at all the lots – it was a bit like being in a museum. There were some beautiful pieces of furniture – Chinese cabinets inlaid with ivory and mother-of-pearl, Arts and Crafts dining chairs with rush seats, beautifully carved corner cupboards and clothes chests, etc. There were also suits of armour, swords and muskets many from the Civil War as this area was right in the thick of it and the best lot of the day as far as I was concerned – a charcoal and pastel 'Study of a Grey Horse' by Millais!
On the Saturday following this visit we attended a very different auction sale in a church hall in a nearby village where most of the lots were knocked down for £2 and the highest price of the day was £100 for a limited edition print of a leaping deer! However, it did make me realise that you could probably have almost fully furnished a small house, if you were just starting out, for about £300!!
On one of my days off it was threatening rain so I went to Compton Verney House, on the road from Banbury to Stratford-on-Avon, which has been converted into a very pleasant art gallery housing some interesting permanent collections and also hosting other exhibitions that change every few months. I'm not a great art enthusiast normally, but I managed to spend nearly all day there and had a lovely time. They have a permanent collection of British Folk Art which included all sorts of things such as inn signs and trade signs that hung outside shops, children's toys, useful tools and everyday objects and also a large collection of paintings depicting scenes from battles and also from everyday life. There was also a cafe/restaurant serving full meals and a coffee shop that did snacks too. If you ever find yourself in the area it's £5 for entry to the grounds (laid out by Capability Brown) and permanent collections and £12 if you want to view the additional exhibition, too. Unfortunately, as it was heaving down with rain all day I did not see much of the grounds as I ran from the car park to the house (a distance of several hundred yards) but the glimpse that I had would bear further investigation.
I also helped Phoebe man the vegetable stall in Deddington one Saturday morning, attended a performance of three one-act comedies (Phoebe was acting in one of them) and had a short cruise on her friend Jason's narrowboat taking in three locks and a stretch of canal where I got to steer, rounded off with tea and toasted teacakes in the snug living room with the logburner throwing out loads of heat in the corner. I hadn't set foot on a moving narrowboat (I don't count the one that Jeni and I stayed on last year, as it was moored) since my one-and-only canal boat holiday twenty-odd years ago! However, this may all change as I helped a coal carrier and its butty boat through the locks one day (I didn't have anything better to do at the time) and it turns out that they are a charitable organisation who are a bit short of active members to crew the boats on their coal runs that they do twice a year to raise funds, so........... perhaps I'll try that next year!
After my three weeks at Top Lock I moved five miles down the road to Culworth where I WWOOFed two years ago. The lady who lives here has about two acres of land – one acre is a paddock with small duck pond, and the other is in the form of gardens at the back and front of the property. There is a lot of clearing up to do in the autumn garden so I spent most of the two weeks cutting back shrubs and herbaceous borders, weeding and spreading compost. The weather was quite kind while I was there and there were only two afternoons when rain stopped play and I had to amuse myself indoors reading, knitting and doing endless Sudoku and Codewords! Juliet is obsessed with all things Spanish and her bookshelves only seemed to contain books that had something to do with Spain. When I was there two years ago I re-read the Chris Stewart trilogy (Driving over Lemons, Parrot in the Pepper Tree; Almond Blossom Appreciation Society) all about moving to Spain. This time I read 'Its Not about the Tapas' by Polly Evans, a travelogue, and 'Getting to Manana' by Miranda Innes, all about moving to Spain – bit of a theme going on there, I thought. I don't think I need to read any more Spanish-themed books for a while!
Juliet has five ducks (there were eight two years ago) and five hens but was looking to increase her flock so, one afternoon we drove over to a garden centre at Towcester that sells hens too, and bought three young, blue, hybrid hens to add to the flock. They are very pretty birds but have obviously been raised in a barn as they are very reluctant to come out of the hen house, let alone out of the run to free-range with the others. I expect they'll get the idea in a day or two and then they won't want to come in! I've got quite used to looking out for inquisitive chickens over the last five weeks as they love to come and look for grubs and worms just where I'm about to plunge my fork! Although I must admit that I do enjoy their company.
On the Sunday that I was there, it was Banbury Canal Day so we both went along to see what it was all about. The canal basin was teeming with stalls, people and boats – the Cheese Boat was there, as was the faintly scary boat selling slush puppies and candy floss – it was painted in black and white zebra stripes, with an Astroturf roof! But, look as I might, I could not find The Fudge Boat that I am assured really exists and sells its wares up and down the canals. Luckily I did locate some fudge in the throng of market stalls and treated myself to some Ginger Fudge as a special treat! On the opposite side of the canal there were a couple of music venues and a lovely craft market. My new acquaintance, Jason, had his boat moored in a prime location selling his beautiful driftwood mirrors, but he said that he didn't think there was the money about in Banbury to buy such a luxury item.
On another evening we drove to Chipping Norton to the theatre where we saw a production screened live from the National Theatre in London. This is something called National Theatre Live and it is transmitted live to venues all over the world. The play was called 'The Last of the Hausmanns' and starred Julie Walters and Rory Kinnear and was very funny and well-acted. The theatre in Chipping Norton is small but perfectly formed and includes a bar and a small art gallery – it had originally been a non-conformist chapel, I believe.
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