APRIL: By just after April 1, Avalon’s 16th birthday the status quo ante on the home front had begun to restore itself and Tiny (Pole) Dancer and the mould infested bathroom in Hackney became a thing of the past. Easter Lunch was lovely, Tennis and a Glorious Roast with one of Inigo’s ski-catering chums, and the family, on one of the few nice evenings of the spring so far. Orlando started training with Child line and also netted himself an executive job where he will be heading for Barcelona in September. Just for a moment, I am delighted and thinking myself quite establishment and posh with Orlando in a great job, Inigo off to Exeter and Avalon to Westminster. However, at the coal face, with Orlando gone from Chillderness, it means I am on my own again with the wonderful but overwhelming welter of Chillderness bookings, because Katie, is simultaneously ill with a racking cough which doesn’t go away because she is a workaholic with two young children to drain her immune system. Plus the weather feccking cold, so no vitamin D to boost batteries. Tempers are short. Those who have avoided Covid have instead contracted a sense of humour failure.
So when David and Inigo finally manage to finish Llaregubb and run to Powys to try and meet Dawn’s deadline of the 27 April to drop off the pigs before her chemo treatment begins, it’s already 30 April, the day the first guest is due in. We arrive at Red Kite Estate, to find some wheels have fallen off the Red Kite Bus. We see more action on the fields than the battle field at Agin court.. Six months of rewilding Flash Gordon style and, I haven’t changed the world as quickly as I thought. The sheep empire has struck back and despite our, I feel, heroic efforts, to keep them out, having to earn a living elsewhere has meant the fencing has some congenital weaknesses. Besides those wily sheep have been coming into us for years. And there has been no help available from locals, notably usual suspects Joel and Martin. Most of the population down here do work in some kind of farming and Corona doesnt stop that. Agricultural work takes place in the winter/spring when the plants are dormant and the animals are about to give birth. So even Martin, the man who usually finishes the work you are going to ask him to do tomorrow and never lets me down was so busy that he didn’t finish off the nursery/piggery fence line by the previous Tuesday as he had promised. Worse still he didn’t tell me.
Between Tuesday and Friday, I got a stringful of anxious wattsap from Joel the tree planter, asking why the fence line hadn’t been finished. Joel and I were going to do a bit of a joint venture with a Chillderness - 9 Trees carbon offset nursery and in return he would plant some willows and alders and hazel whips to provide trees for us. It was a really charming project. However, he too had been overrun with work and not available for fencing even though we had asked him to do some fencing for us officially. The bare root {dormant plant}planting season also ends at the end of April and it had become unseasonably boiling hot and dry and everyone was racing to finish planting. His messages were that he was “desperately keen to plant his little christmas trees but at the same time worried about the sheep encroachment. WHEN was I going to finish the fence?”
Caught short I assured him it would happen before confronting Martin who mumbled a string of vague excuses about not enough fencing materials when he had gone up there, which didn’t explain at all why he hadn’t at least used the materials we had left. But he had moved his machine on Thursday morning to another job, and wouldn’t be back for two weeks. I sucked this up. I can’t afford to lose Martin as an ally. He is invaluable. He made all the roads and bridges and you can always rely on him to turn up despite grumbling in true Mid Walian fashion about the weather and about the absurdity of the request “what do you want to do that for” is what he says about pretty much everything.
I was very committed to the Carbon Off set nursery and also to Joel and I felt I didn’t want to let him down but we simply did not have enough hands. Although employing all of these people had become rather expensive, I felt obligated to find a solution. I had seen a face book post by Jacqui our chef friend saying she didn’t know where she was going but she had four days off. Because the Llareggub project was running late, I suggested a working holiday - Jacqui is a farm girl as well and married to a very practical, can I say slightly autistic and precise surveyor so it seemed an ideal combination of folk to set up a rustic, pig sty and Sam’s extraordinary speccing of a solar powered electric fence line which would also power a live streaming of the pigs. Yes, really. I felt old too. [see Hogwarts live on the Chillderness web site}
Im not sure when I became responsible for Joel’s fence line, I thought he was going to provide his own electric fenceline. I said that I would do a solid better one and pay for it but use it myself temporarily for the pig-initiation before they foraged for themselves. Somehow I don’t think he read that memo all the way through, hastily garbled as it was at the corner of the estate on the previous Monday . As I said, when David and Inigo turned up there was more action than Agincourt and that’s where it all went wrong.
Friday morning, Joel turned up , with a pile of baby Christmas trees he was going to plant for his Christmas income in the pig pen . I thought Joel would see that we were committed to his fence line but he just saw Mike and Jacqui making a pigsty in his nursery and putting fence stakes exactly where he wanted them. He went a bit mad saying that we had deliberately chosen the one acre of 81 acres for his trees and we had essentially sabotaged the plan. PLUS he wouldn’t be talked to to explain that it had just all been too much for everyone and we were slogging our guts out to make a safe, sheep free space and if we could just get the pigs there for the weekend, because Dawn’s chemo dictated she couldn’t really keep the hogs, we could then let them out with the new electric fence line whilst looking after the trees.
He remained convinced that it was a conspiracy which was upsetting and adding insult to injury basically said I had totally failed to keep the sheep out and put fence signs up to prevent the human element letting them in. I felt pretty hurt and glum and alone. Joel has been a real support over the rewilding ideas I have had but he has, of late just stopped communicating.I also felt glum because I feel a bit misunderstood and however much I explain myself he [ and everyone ] always think I am saying something different.
I am still not sure why he couldn’t triangulate an electric fence area from the solid fence we had created for him, save that the water would be a bit further away. I mean it is Wales and it does rain a lot.
His fallout caused me to fall into a bit of a depression, as I felt that was yet another promising relationship which had gone wrong. He has been a source of knowledge and support on the rewilding . But he made me feel a bit of a failure as he told us that as we hadn’t done “anything” and the sheep were damaging everything and he was going to take “his” trees elsewhere. I felt that my support system had been taken away. In hindsight, I think that the wheels had fallen off his personal bus and he couldn’t cope with the end of the season either. As David is not 100 percent behind my concept of rewilding, I am having a confidence crisis and getting nervous about whether we are doing the right thing by introducing the wild stock when we don’t even seem to be able to fence out the tame ones.
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