All change on the vehicle front

The Tollgate Tearooms just outside Bath on A46

I was home from Shropshire for less than a week when we decided to go and stay with Mum for Easter (we did ask her if that was OK...eventually!). Jeni had been intending to go for the weekend anyway but her car developed some problems that were just too expensive to make it worthwhile to carry out, so I agreed to pick her up on Good Friday morning at about 10.00am. I was ready to go much earlier than I'd expected so turned up 10 minutes early to find Jeni frantically washing up, trying to pack and have breakfast all at the same time. A small germ of an idea had already been forming in my brain and this started to grow as I witnessed her less-than-adequate breakfast – we would (finally) stop at the Tollgate Tearooms on the way to Cheltenham and have coffee and a snack.

It was an absolutely glorious day with bright sunshine and a clear blue sky, so the countryside looked at its best as we drove along and the view from the Tearooms was spectacular; out across Bristol, across the Severn and into Wales, where you could see the mountains. I am so glad that we stopped – the place is beautiful and all the staff were friendly and helpful. It turned out that they had closed for a refit and for a new gas main to be laid, thinking it would be for two weeks, but it turned into two months! We decided on coffee and a toasted teacake each – when the teacakes arrived they were larger than your average tea plate, so we could probably have shared one! If you ever find yourself in the area they are well worth a visit as they do lunches and afternoon teas, as well. Fortified, we returned to the car only to find a huge queue of traffic stretching as far as the eye could see! After about ten minutes of crawling along the reason became clear – everyone had decided to go to Dyrham Park on such a glorious day. The queue from the other direction stretched all the way back to the motorway junction, round the roundabout and down the slip road – really annoying if you were trying to get to Bath!

We got to Cheltenham in time for lunch and Dave arrived from Stevenage, too. As the weather forecast was dire for the rest of the Easter weekend, we went for a little stroll in the sunshine in the afternoon, but the wind was chilly. All the gardens are beginning to look colourful, particularly Mum's as it really is a Spring garden (her favourite season) with daffodils, tulips, hyacinths, hellebores and primroses, plus some flowering shrubs. The little magnolia stellata was trying its best to flower but looked a bit bedraggled after the rain and wind on Easter Saturday.

Over the weekend I came to a decision and offered Jeni my trusty Peugeot to take the place of her VW Lupo. This then catapulted Dave and me into a search of Autotrader to try and find a replacement vehicle. I finally decided on a Honda Jazz at a garage in Yeovil so, on Easter Monday I went down to have a look at it, took it for a short test drive and bought it! It's very low mileage for its age but the thing that really sold it to me was the fact that the back seats fold down completely flat in one simple movement! They needed to service and MOT it so I couldn't pick it up until Thursday afternoon, and on Friday morning I was on my way across the Mendips to farm sit for my friends at Dundry. It seems a bit strange to be driving a different car – I keep looking for my lovely blue Peugeot, but I suppose I shall get used to it eventually.

The new motor

I was at Dundry for a week looking after 4 dogs, 5 cats, 25 sheep, 4 geese, 9 ducks, 4 quail and untold numbers of chickens! In actual fact, after the morning flurry of feeding and letting out, there wasn't too much to do until the evening when it was shutting up time and egg collection. There is one cockerel who likes to play me up; last year he was in a pen on his own and was always really difficult to get into the house, and now he is out with his girlies he's just as bad. He will also have a go at me if I try to go into the run with him, so I always left that pen until last, in the hope that it would be dusk by the time I got to him and he would have gone to bed. Even this didn't work, as he would still be lurking outside the house even when all the hens had gone in to roost, so I had to resort to the large keep net that Sally has for catching any escaped birds, which he hates, and then he would retreat (backwards) into the hen house so that I could close the door. I'd been warned that the gander was a bit touchy at the moment as well as the geese had started laying and he was very protective but, compared to that cockerel, he was an absolute angel!

I had a very unpleasant task that I had to perform while I was farm-sitting. It was inevitable that, at some point over the years, one of the chickens would become very ill and need culling. I found a hen that was egg-bound (she was trying to lay a huge egg that had got stuck) but her efforts to lay had caused a massive prolapse so that, even when I'd managed to remove the eggs (there were two, one behind the other), things didn't return to normal. In sheep, if they have a prolapse you can gently push it back in and put on a harness that keeps everything in place, but I couldn't think of a way to make a harness for a chicken that wouldn't slip off, as a sheep is basically a rectangle with handy anchorage points at all four corners and a chicken is a triangle, with the point at the bottom – but I did try! In the end I had to admit defeat and rang Sally's poultry friend, who will always come and despatch any sick birds. Unfortunately he was on holiday in Cornwall, so I knew I would have to do it myself. Gulp! I have never killed a chicken, although I know, in theory, how to do it so I looked it up on Google and there were such horrific stories on there that I felt quite sick and decided to just do it as best I could. I won't go into the gory details, suffice to say that I did it and I hope it's a long time before I have to do it again.

While I was there I managed to catch up with Bryony, the WWOOF host who introduced me to Geoff and Sally in the first place. It's been a while since I saw her and visited her farm. The forest garden that I worked in has really started to mature, she also practices natural bee keeping and often holds courses at the farm, as well as having an orchard that supplies apples to Thatchers Cider. I have made a note in my diary that she holds WWOOF weekends in October to help with the apple harvest, as I may be around to help then.

On Sunday I handed back the reins to Geoff and Sally and returned home, where I unpacked my car, repacked it, slept one night in my own bed and set off the next morning for Cornwall! I just don't seem able to settle down!

From the sublime to the ridiculous! Goose, hen, bantam and quail eggs