I had not been totally idle while I was staying with her as I had done a few small jobs around the house and I had done most of the domestic 'stuff' for several weeks after her accident. I also managed to get up to London for a week during half-term, when my sister came to 'Mum-sit', to help my brother and his partner re-decorate their hall, landing and stairs while their eight-year old daughter was away at her other grandparents. It was quite nice to be decorating again (and to boss my 'little' brother around, as I was designated Project Supervisor!) and we managed to finish it all within the week. We did think that it would take less time than it did, and I was hoping to do a bit of the touristy thing – visiting art galleries, museums, etc. However, we didn't finish until late afternoon on the Saturday and I was returning to Cheltenham on the Monday, so on Sunday we went up to Tate Britain and went to an exhibition called 'Looking at the View', which was all about landscapes. I'm not a great art lover, as I think I've mentioned before, but I did find many of the paintings very beautiful and inspiring – it was very difficult to comprehend that the John Constable painting that I was examining minutely was actually the original and not one of the endless prints!
On the Friday evening I was taken out to a Sushi restaurant in Greenwich – I've only ever tried 'supermarket sushi' before, so to have the real thing was very exciting – and absolutely delicious. I was at one serious disadvantage though, the only implements provided were chopsticks, and anyone who has ever seen me with chopsticks will know just how hopeless I am at using them! After a few failed attempts I gave up and just used my fingers! I was also glad that Rich and Jo explained how to use the Wasabi paste that accompanied the raw fish, as I had not had it before; well, in fact I had bought some Wasabi Broad Beans as a snack somewhere last year and nearly blew my head off – it's like the hottest horseradish sauce that you can imagine and really hits the back of your nose.
Having decided, some time ago, to be open to new experiences (as long as they were legal and not life-threatening) I also accompanied Jo and Rich to their friend's birthday party which was held in a city pub on the Saturday evening and took the form of a drum-and-bass party. Now drum and bass music is something that my son enjoys and is, basically, music with a very strong drum beat and bass line to it, and its loud – very loud! I actually quite enjoyed it and 'threw a few shapes' on the dance floor (I am assured that this is the correct terminology), we then travelled home on the last Docklands Light Railway train of the evening and I got to bed at about 1.00am – see, there's still life in the old dog!
However, the last two weeks have really made me question how much life there actually is in the old dog and, more importantly how much longer I can, or even want to, keep going with my itinerant life style.
My hosts at Stroud have an organic farm that is home to a small flock of about 35 sheep of mixed parentage, and a herd of beef cattle – about 60, in all, I think. At this time of year all of the cattle are housed in large barns that are divided into 6 pens; one with yearling steers(castrated males), one with yearling heifers(females), one with cows due to calve, one with cows and new-born calves, one with bigger steers, and one with a few cows and the stock bull. Every two or three days these pens need to be bedded up with fresh straw which involves a large bale of straw being picked up by the tractor and deposited over the pen front amongst the cattle. We then had to roll it (it takes three people to easily do this) into position so that the strings could be cut and then each portion of straw (commonly called a 'flap') has to be prised off the end and spread around. This would be hard work even with the pen empty, but when you have ten or so large cattle that are bored and want to play 'let's push the straw bale over' it can be very trying! The bull got extremely playful one day while we were bedding up and I made sure I kept the bale between him and me at all times.
Most of the sheep had lambed when I got there but the majority were still in the barn as the weather had been too awful to put them out. There were a few ewes and lambs in the orchard and they had a good shelter in one corner of the field that we bedded up with fresh straw every few days. The daily routine was: out by 7.00am armed with bottles of milk for the triplets. There were no 'orphan lambs' as such, but there were six sets of triplets that needed a bit of 'topping up' to help them along, and a couple of others that seemed to be struggling a bit to get going. Once the lambs were fed, we fed the ewes with pellets and large wheelbarrow loads of silage and then we could go in for breakfast, at about 8.30am. After breakfast we went back out to put out the four horses and three ponies that also live on the farm, and then we mucked out the six stables. When Barry and I had ponies that were stabled we bedded them on wood shavings and worked pretty much on the basis of removing as much of the poo as possible and some of the wet bedding and then topping up with clean shavings, only fully mucking out down to the concrete once a stable had been vacated for the year. However, at Stroud, some of the horses were bedded on straw and these had to be thoroughly mucked out every day; any dry straw being forked to one side and the rest removed, before clean straw was added and the beds 're-made'. Clean water had to be carried into each stable and fresh hay for the evening and then the yard in front of the stables had to be swept.
If there was time before coffee break we would bed up the sheep pens with fresh straw and fill haynets for the sheep that were in individual pens with their new-born lambs. After coffee-time we worked either in the front garden, trimming and pruning shrubs and trees mainly, or clearing up the debris left by the flail hedgecutter that had been used on the roadside hedges, or working in the market garden co-operative, until lunch at 1.00pm. We were then free until 5.00pm when we went back out, brought in the ponies, fed the lambs and fed the ewes – this took about 1.5 to 2 hours. At 10.00pm we went back out again and fed the lambs their last feed of the day, and re-filled the hayrack, if it needed it.
Working on a rota basis, someone had to check on the expectant ewes at 3.00am and the first time it was down to me, one of the ewes decided to give birth to triplets! There was a small caravan tucked into the barn next to the lambing pens, and the person on duty usually slept in there with their alarm set for 3.00am. I couldn't get to sleep very well as the sheep were quite noisy, and then a fox started barking somewhere up on the hill behind the barn, and a couple of tawny owls started calling to each other, as well – it is certainly not quiet in the countryside! I eventually fell asleep to be woken, what seemed like moments later, to the sound of a low-pitched bleating which I immediately recognised as a ewe bonding with her new-born lamb, so I leapt out of bed, threw my trousers on over my pyjamas and shot outside. It was just as well as the ewe had somehow managed to birth her lamb through the bars of the sheep hurdle so that she was one side and her lamb was the other! I quickly lifted him up and popped him back in with mum who proceeded to enthusiastically lick him dry. About a quarter of an hour later at 2.45am, she gave birth to another lamb and licked him dry, too, but she still seemed a bit distracted and uncomfortable so I decided to keep an eye on her for a bit. I busied myself by fetching the iodine and dipping the lambs navels and umbilical cords in it (this is to prevent infection entering their systems via this vulnerable point), and fetching her some more water, checking the other sheep and lambs, etc. Time passed but nothing much seemed to be happening although she was still restless and pawing the ground intermittently, so I decided to have a 'furkle' (this is a Somerset word, I believe, meaning to have a bit of a rummage about!), so caught the ewe and gently inserted two fingers into her birth canal – nothing; after another fifteen minutes I decided I really must check things out a bit more deeply and inserted my hand – way, way down I thought I could feel another fluid-filled sac and a foot, and at that point she started to have contractions again. Eventually, after another fifteen minutes or so, I was able to feel two feet and a nose and was able to pull the third lamb out into the world. Luckily, his delayed arrival had done him no harm and he was soon sneezing and shaking his head to clear out his tubes, while mum, looking slightly surprised at this third baby, proceeded to clean him up – he was an hour younger than his next sibling. By the time I had checked that all the babies were dry and had fed a little bit, it was 4.45am and I was in need of a cup of tea! I had an hour or so snoozing on the settee in the house before it was 6.45 and time to get up to do the 7.00am feeds and another day began!
I had not realised just how much my fitness levels had dropped off over my enforced lay-off and for the first ten days of the fortnight that I was there, I would almost crawl up the stairs after lunch to lie on my bed, because my back felt like it was broken, where I would promptly fall asleep for two hours! I was really struggling – my back ached continually, my ankle ached because I had to go back to wearing wellingtons because of the mud in the gateways, and my arthritic thumbs ached because I'd been using them so much with hauling silage, straw and sheep about! Of course, none of this was helped by the prevailing weather which was predominantly cold, wet and windy with occasional snow! I became quite frightened that my WWOOFing days were over and that I would have to seriously re-think what I was going to do with the rest of my working life but, suddenly, at the beginning of this week I realised that I didn't need to go and have a lie down and that, although tired, I was not exhausted.
So, here I am once more, heading south to Bristol and a farm sit over Easter and then southwards again to my beloved Cornwall until the end of April.
Onwards, and upwards, and never say die!! Super-WWOOFer rides again!
