Calling in reinforcements called Harry
on Sep 10, 2009This farm is beyond us. We can't cope with it all on our own given all the other plates spinning above our heads, so we call in youthful reinforcements.The latest volunteer is Harry Burton, a 21-year-old Norfolk Trojan who has waged into all manner o...

Adrift with the pickles
on Sep 2, 2009Yes, that’s me – on the water looking every inch the grizzled frontier man in my blue buoyancy aid and plastic Canadian canoe. Please note that the stretch of water is far too wide to be a creek, and that I am holding a paddle.Five days on and my...

Foggy heads and peculiar prizes
on Aug 30, 2009August. Fiesta and foggy heads, when normally depleted villages brim and cobwebs are blown from windows of old houses that stand empty for great lumps of the year.Everywhere you find that roots lie dormant but are rarely severed. Families drawn to ci...

The rhythm of summer
on Aug 11, 2009June and July turned out to be months of magical chords, from dance and drum to bright echoes of much loved history. I say that with all relief, for they began with panic, partings and nagging doubts about what suddenly seemed like loopy ambitions on...

April 2009
on Jul 7, 2009(Maggie and Joe Joe with willing worker, uncle Pip)Can you believe so much could dawn in just one month?Knowledge can come in torrents; that trees and bees can rise from the dead; that a foot of rain can beat down in three days; that (trust me on thi...

The circle of life
on Jul 7, 2009Meet the cute mountain mutts with no names, pickle one and pickle two, whose lives have entwined with ours.By the time you are reading this they will be answering to Bertie and Betty, Tilly and Ted, Nixon and Khrushchev, Fred and Ginger, Feng and Shu...

May 2009
on Jun 13, 2009The table of smiles I’ve been itching for the weather to settle and it has, into the season of scratching; when the buttery evening air suddenly becomes a soup of thirsty insects in which whirl swallows, swifts and our solitary Mother’s Garden ba...

January 2009
on May 14, 2009Clever blighters, mice. January. That deflated balloon of a month, and this year a foolish world wincing with a monumental hangover that won’t go away. Unusually persistent fog and penetrating dampness followed on the heels of the sierra sno...

February 2009
on May 14, 2009Great wind of change.I sincerely hope this finds you well and warm. What a bitter season to test the mettle. Here in the Catalonian mountains, a thousand feet nearer the stars, the year has at long last steadied its breathing, and the merciless gales...