The car part has arrived- our isolation is over!

November 09, 2016

This is the broken-off piece of the 'butterfly'.

We've been waiting since the 2nd of November for a replacement part to arrive from Clacton-on-Sea.

Every hour of every day, we checked the post box.

Today, it arrived.

Kevin has carefully put it in place, and the car appears to work. Suddenly, we feel alive and free and happy! Our forced isolation on our increasingly icy mountain has been a lesson in understanding the hardships of those who lived up here in the past. We had clean water. We had electricity. We had the internet. We had some food. We had PG Tips tea bags, 300 of them. We were (are) privileged. But... I'm sorry to report that we did, at some points, begin to feel that we were in some way suffering. No, we weren't. What we were missing was cheese. And wine. And not being able to post letters. Neighbours and friends have kindly kept us stocked up with essentials such as milk and eggs, and this morning, friends came and drove us to the supermarket to purchase some essentials... wine. And an embarrassing amount of cheese. And toilet rolls.

The family who lived here for the three hundred years or so before we bought the farm had no toilet, bath or shower. There was one rudimentary water tap over a stone slab and a deep and dirty well. The only heating was the open fire (actually, we have no heating yet... but soon we will have something... hopefully), the only hot water they had was produced by boiling a kettle over the fire. There was a terrifyingly unsafe electricity supply that powered two light bulbs and a wibbly wobbly 'socket of death' in cottage #1. They shared the cottage with thousands of mice, rats and glis-glis. The food they grew had to be sensibly managed and stored so that it would feed them (and the rodents?) through the winters, which can be extremely harsh up here, sometimes reaching minus 20 degrees. We haven't properly harvested and stored our nuts, vegetables and fruits- there is so much, that it's difficult to manage! We feel quite ashamed of our lack of basic skills. We are determined to develop our farming skills year upon year.

During our isolation, we cracked on with the kitchen. It looks like nothing has changed, but we've worked solidly. We've built walls, plastered, re-pointed, wired, painted, waxed, made a mess, cleaned up, and there is still so much to do to make this a comfortable home.