Pete Ashton's Weblog

Well, the sun has set leaving a mix of light and dark blues clouding the skies and I'm coming to realisation that this time tomorrow I'll be on the mainland for good. The caravan is clean, most of my stuff is packed and I haven't got a damn thing to read.

This morning was, well, lets just say if it hadn't been my second to last day I would have gotten rather annoyed. I woke up and it was pissing it down - really heavy rain the likes of which I haven't seen for a good few weeks. I figured a nice easy day pottering around the farm and then some time inside doing some DTP for M's yoga and tai chi classes. But M said coppice, so coppice it was.

The logic was that since the coppice was a wood the trees would stop the rain coming through so it would be relatively dry. Right. All waterproofed up, M dropped me at the coppice just outside Chale and went off to her Friday morning yoga class in Niton. I trudged across the field in the belting rain to the coppice. I could feel the water seeping through my shoes already. I slid down the bank into a muddy puddle and entered the sheltered area. It was soaking. Yes, the trees had stopped the rain from coming through but only for a bit and now all that collected water was pouring down in huge drops. Still, only a couple of hours of this and it's not all that bad. I'd worked through worse weather weeding the fields and it wasn't that cold. Just wet. And muddy. Really muddy.

I suppose the advantage to this weather was that I wasn't really able to stop and sit down. I certainly couldn't roll a cigarette. Hands are funny things - very hard to dry when you don't have a towel. I managed to get the components of a fag together three times but was thwarted by blobs of water falling if not from above then from me. It's quite humbling to realise you have absolutely no shelter at all.

I'd cut down a good amount of coppice, at least equal to that done on Monday, and started bundling it up for Fred to collect later. I didn't have a clock on me and the sun was well obscured but surely M should be here to collect me by now. All the coppice was ready and still no sign. After sitting in the mud for a bit I figured I might as well get more coppice and as I did so the rain stopped. And then half an hour later the trees stopped dripping. And then at 2.00pm M turned up.

On Monday M was late picking me up because the car was leaking petrol and had to be fixed. This time she'd skidded into a ditch and had to call out a mechanic. I think there's a pattern developing. By this stage the change in the weather and my adjustment to being damp and dirty meant I wasn't in a bad mood, and the sight of M slightly frantic about having crashed leaving me stranded in the coppice while wearing plastic bags tied over her shoes brought a mutual smile.

As we drove back to the farm for a big lunch and a quick snooze I reflected on how I probably wouldn't be roaming around a muddy wood with a heavy duty saw in the rain for quite some time. I wonder if I'll miss it.

Up this morning and in the dash to the portaloo I noticed Rhona was standing on her own by the water trough with no calf in sight. Hmm. I do my daily task of filling the various buckets, basins and baby baths with water for the ducks when M also noticed the lone Rhona. Worry is afoot and we head off around the field looking for the wee thing.

I took clockwise while M went anti but we met with no sign. M started zigzagging the field while I double checked the ditch. Still no sign. I decide to join M on the hill but she's suddenly striding off to the farmhouse with what looks like a serious purpose. I head to where she'd come from with dread, not really wanting to look for the calf. M comes out of the house and waves me to come down. She'd not found the calf and had phoned Fred for advice - Fred knows cows like, well, someone who knows cows really well - and he'd said not to worry. The mother often hides the calf somewhere so it can sleep while she stocks up on food. Wherever Rhona had put her baby it was a damn good hiding place. The calf is about the size of a big sheep. M had never had a calf born in the summer - usually it's cold so they're still using the shed at nights - so this wild activity was somewhat unnerving, but mother and baby are both doing very well. I finally got a good look this evening. Still a bit unsteady on the legs but looking surprisingly strong.

Jobs today: Reinforcing the bottom of the chicken run just in case a fox comes at it with pliers and a screw driver; finished weeding the flower beds; strimmed the long grass in the rented mobile home. Also took lots of photos of chickens.

Last night Rhona, one of the three cows in the field, gave birth to a wee calf. Which seems to have disappeared. Admittedly I haven't been working in their field today but the two times I've gone to have a look I've seen Rhona and the other cows but not her calf. It's probably sheltering under a tree or something and I don't want to investigate in case I worry Rhona, but it's slightly frustrating. I was looking forward to seeing it stagger around endearingly but all I've seen so far is a very small brown shape lying in the grass in the distance first thing this morning.

More babies are on the way. Some of the chickens are broody again and one of them has been given duck eggs (M reckons she can corner the market in selling ducklings as no-one else bothers) while Ayisha, one of the Bengal cats is heavily pregnant and might, just might, give birth before I leave on Saturday.

Over lunch M was looking through the DEFRA guidelines for moving livestock and moaning about the petty regulations. Apparently Fred employs someone just to deal with all the admin stuff. I can't really give an informed opinion on this but it does seem to come from another planet. I must have a good look through the DEFRA website at a later date.

After building a small perch for the chicken run to give them another dimension I spent most of the day weeding the flower beds which was quite nice as it was a small, contained job. Clearing a field of weeds is on such a massive scale that to just do a bed means you can really get down and eradicate. The end result is satisfyingly fascist compared to the anarchic organic wilderness of the rest of the farm. Though at the end of the day I know what I prefer.

I also spent an hour showing M how to scan stuff into her computer, something I'm more than happy to do (I always enjoyed IT training at work) but it's quite an effort bridging the unintuitive whims of Windows and a non-computer oriented mind. I know that using a Windows PC is one big bodge requiring more mental sidestepping and abstract mapping than a walk across central London but the "average user" doesn't expect to need to do this or have the time to develop such maps. So I have to try and explain that it's not their fault while not getting them disillusions with the whole thing and giving up. I'm a bit out of practice and it was hard work but we got there in the end. Computer training is a bit like teaching adults to walk or eat - it's easy if you've had years of practice but...

And so to the coppice this morning to coppice some more coppice. We were last here on April 21st, exactly three months ago, and in that time it had become a bit more overgrown but still had a unique aura. About a mile away from the road and surrounded by fields it's very quiet and the tall trees create a dome letting through a mere dapple of sunlight.

The coppice coppiced today is to be used to make a fence around the other caravan in the farmyard and I was looking for thicker branches no thinner than my skinny arms but definitely not as thick as Fred's. It really is a case of trying to see the wood for the trees. At first glance there seemed to be very little suitable coppice in the mass of dark green but eventually the right trees popped into vision. It's a bit like very slow hunting.

M had left me in the coppice to coppice away while she went off to an appointment and not having a clock on me I just carried on. And on. I'd remembered to take my camera with me this time and, after a break, took a few photos. Checking back through I remembered the camera time stamps them and by golly it was 2.30pm! No wonder I was getting hungry. Turned out the car had broken down hence the delay, but it was actually quite nice to be lost in time and space in coppice world.

It occurred to me that I've really got myself tied into clock watching while here because of the "six hours a day five days a week" WWOOFing deal. While it's handy to make sure I'm pulling my weight while also not being exploited it's still annoyingly similar to the 9-5 employee routine I was so keen to escape. Other than the 8.30am breakfast it's not been strictly adhered to by M - it's been me who's been mainly aware of it, adding up the hours I've done and knocking off when they reach six. Often this is because I'm knackered or pissed off with a tedious job, but I wonder if there's more to it than that.

Anyway, a successful coppice trip with 12 bundles of 3-4 big pieces ready for Fred to deliver later in the week.

Funny, again I haven't wanted to write this journal for a few days. Is it because I'm leaving soon that my mind is on other things? Or is it that the routine of life here is not stimulating me to write? All I know is that when I looked at the handheld I just didn't have the urge or will to write in it.

Still, some stuff has happened. The young chickens have again been on the move. You'll remember on the 11th they were released from their little chicken runs and allowed to roam around the paddock but after spending a good hour at the end of the day trying to get some of them safely shut away from the fox M decided this was not such a good idea. This morning a new plan. My big chicken house is finally going to be used for chickens and we moved in five of them. At first I was using a piece of wood to corner them towards M but her arms weren't long enough so she asked me to grab them. This was the first time I'd had to physically handle the birds but jumping on sheep hadn't been so bad so I went for it, grabbing them by the leg so M could pick them up. As with the ducklings before them the chicks stuck together in a block, uncertain about the concept of not existing in a single square metre of space, but eventually they spread out. Tomorrow will be interesting as we mix in more chicks from different mothers. Will they fight? Most certainly, but hopefully with no major casualties.

The main impetus for not mixing the chicks with the older generation of chickens is the ever present threat of the fox. I've seen the fox from my caravan window twice now. The first time I thought it was Saffy, the hunter cat, but the colour was slightly too dark. I went out and chased it away, although to be honest this consisted of making my presence known causing the fox to dart away across the field. The nest time I saw it in the freshly cut hay field presumably hunting the wild birds feeding on grass seeds scattered by the harvest. There are a few remains about the place - pairs of wings with the body missing looking like they've been left there by very small angels. Both these visits were in the middle of the day and within 20 metres of the farmyard, which is a worry. M says she had 20 chickens a few months back and now there's just nine, most of them being cockrells, which is annoying as they don't lay eggs, being male and all. It also means the balance is wrong with too many cocks fighting over an ever decreasing pool of hens. So the new lot will be kept penned up. And now you know why free range eggs are more expensive (and not strictly "free range").

As the weeks have gone by my capacity for cycling has improved and with every ride I suprise myself. Tonight, after work, I rode into Newport to make use of the late opening library. On the way in I took the longer cycle path route because there's a post office on the way but when I left the library at 8.00pm it was starting to get dark with storm clouds brewing so I decided to take the quicker route home. The road out of Blackwater is the biggest hill on my local route which I usually get off and walk most of the way up. Half way up tonight and I'm still on the bike steadly pumping in 1st gear. Hmm. 3/4 up and I'm still riding away. To my amazement I cross the peak and start freewheeling down the other side into Rookley. There's another three hills to go and I assume that after this effort I'll have to walk up at least two of them, but no. I made it all the way home in one go, no walking, no stopping for water and to get my breath. Even the really really steep bit just before the farm. Wow.

The weather truly turned today taking me back to May with huge winds beating down the hill from the west and a chill in the air. Good for doing the hard work of chopping down all the thistles in the middle field (barely done a quarter of it so far) but quite a shock after the stillness of the last couple of weeks.

The hot weather has definitely broken and it's jumpers before sunset, but only just before. That said, the Island seems to have missed the thunderstorms reportedly covering the south of England and working their way north. My rusty knowledge of meteorology implies this might be the relative lack of ground heat rising from the surrounding sea, assuming that ground heat is an important ingredient of thunder clouds. Also there's still very little wind so no chance of weather created elsewhere blowing in. But above all is the empirical evidence that weather on the Island never relates to the forecast, so if it's supposed to be stormy in the south it won't be here.

There were a couple of showers though - one in the early morning and another in the afternoon - which have cooled things down a bit and a fairly consistent cloud cover kept the sun at bay, but while it hasn't been sweaty the rain has dried rapidly, so much so I was working in a downpour without really getting wet. If anything the weather today has been perfect, as transitional weather so often seems to be.

Lots of little jobs today as the main job was abandoned on health and safety grounds when I very nearly fell off a ladder twice. Trimming the top of the fir tree hedge is proving to be a harder job than the original cut. The first time round I was able to work in and up the trees but this time I have to attack from above. This means using a very long ladder and laying it at a 45 degree angle to the tree so that when I'm at the top I'm overlooking the trees rather that looking up at them. Already you can see this is not safe as the ladder can slip backwards if no-one's holding it steady. Then there's what the ladder is actually resting on. If the trunk is visible then it can rest on that but otherwise it winds up on branches or hooked over branches. Now imagine if the bottom of the ladder slips slightly while the top is hooked over a branch. The whole ladder moves back putting all the weight on the branch rather than the trunk. At the same time the two parts to the ladder are seperated thanks to the top being hooked. And I'm right at the top with my heart popping through my throat and a sudden realisiation that I'm a bit too high to jump safely while the only thing keeping me and the ladder up is a branch about as thick as a stick of rock. Fuck. Slowly I edged down the ladder trying to keep it from flipping over and holding on to branches to minimise the pressure before jumping down. As this was the second time it had gone screwy I decided enough was enough. Especially as this was a pretty much cosmetic operation. Generally I don't have much fear of clambering over things and taking risks but this was the limit. The job will be done but not without someone standing at the bottom of the ladder.

The heat of the last week looks like it's about to break at any moment and beyond my window a tractor is rapidly gathering up the fresh bails of hay from the field. Well, I say rapidly but the whole operation has been pretty rapid. This morning the hay was randomly scattered across the field, drying in the sun, but within a few hours it has been gathered into rows and bailed up. I really couldn't begin to tell you how the bailer works because it appears to be a box that sits behind tractor sucking up grass and, every so often, dumping a bail out of the back.

Again it's been very hot and I woke up this morning not feeling my best. Still exhausted from yesterday and dreading the prospect of 12 hours of sweaty work I stumbled over to breakfast. But the jobs today we not that bad. First we reinforced a fence protecting some baby trees from the cows who like to nibble them before letting the animals into the middle field. The top field where they've been for the last month is actually going brown so time to switch. This is nice because it means I can see the sheep and cows from my caravan window which is very soothing and occasionally entertaining. The big bull was drinking from the trough this afternoon when a single sheep tried to get to the water. The bull nudged the sheep away, not in an aggressive way but strong enough to send the sheep flying. There's a sense of respect between the sheep and cows and while they don't mess with each other they definitely keep to their own species.

The afternoon centred on bringing a couple of these water troughs round to the front of the house to turn them into very long flower boxes. These troughs are about twelve foot long but they can be transported on a wheelbarrow if balanced perfectly. However the longer route has to be taken as they won't fit down the side of the house this way, so it's out through one gate and in through another hoping not to meet a car careering down the road in the process.

Troughs in place they had to be filled with soil and compost which was quite a sweaty job but nice thin clouds were filtering the sun just enough and I utilised the hose to soak myself cool. Then a quick creosote of the garden chair out front which was cunningly positioned in the shade, and the day was done. Half an hour sitting outside finishing my book (Roth's "I Married A Communist" - very very good indeed) and it's dinner time. The clouds were gathering as I returned to the caravan and there were a couple of flashes of lightening, but the skies have cleared again setting up for another stunning sunset. But the hay is now going into the shed so it can now rain as soon as it wants to. Now would be good!

Today was a good day. We got a lot of stuff done and it was very rewarding. In fact it was what I always thought this kind of thing would be like.

First of all we brought the sheep in for spraying to keep the flies away. It's still very hot and insects are everywhere so to stop the maggot problem (see previous posts) the sheep are sprayed with a rather evil looking pink mixture along their backs and down each rear leg. It was all surprisingly easy to do, especially as it was my job to herd the sheep into the crusher (basically a metal corridor linking the shed to the field which can be closed at either end. The "crusher" part means you can hold a cow in place by squeezing it, though I haven't seen this done). Soon all 20 sheep and lambs had pink lines down their backs, the sun was starting the climb high in the sky and it was looking to be another very hot day.

Thankfully the next job was in the shade. The hay field has been cut and tossed and any day now will be gathered and bailed up ready to be stored for the year. There's still a fair bit of hay left over from last year so we had to move it out so the new hay could go at the back. Hay will last 3 or 4 years, as long as it doesn't get wet, but as with a fridge or food cupboard it makes sense to bring the older to the fore.

Now, the cow shed has a tendency to get very very wet and even in this weather the ground that isn't open to the sun is quite sodden. Which is where the tyres come in. When M bought the farm she inherited hundreds if not thousands of old tyres - a bewildering range from huge tractor tyres to car tyres to motorbike tyres to what look like speedway tyres and everything in between. So you have a boggy floor to your barn and you want to store hay in there which has to be kept dry throughout the long wet winter months. And you have some tyres.

First you cover the ground in tyres turning it into an obstacle course where the aim is not to walk in-between them or else your foot will sink deep into the gunge. Then you take pallets (of which a generous number were also left) and cover the tyres with these creating a floor that is raised. You then place a few tonnes of dried out grass onto this surface and hope the weight doesn't push it all into the wet.

There were about 50 bails for us to shift. Each bail is about four foot high and three foot wide and is quite heavy. Some of the bails were full of weeds and were to be spread over the cow area of the cow shed (tyres used there would just result in broken cow legs) and some had ended up too close to the mud and were going a nice shade of mouldy black so ditto for them, but most were perfectly fine.

The first part of shifting them is to get them down from the stacks, usually three high, where they've slipped slightly over the year. This requires a fair bit of clambering and a good tug or kick to send the dusty bundle tumbling down. Then roll it to where it's to go and hoik it up on its end. Rolling it generally not that hard unless the bail has been squashed at the bottom of the pile and has a flat side, in which case either a rapid pace or lots of strenuous pushing is in order.

This job could have been terrible if we'd been out in the sun but thankfully it was all done under the shelter of the shed making the ambient temperature rather hot as opposed to bollocks-to-this fucking hot and the steady pace meant that while the heat did slow us down we didn't actually get knackered. By 4.30 all the bails were moved, half to an easily accessible corner of the hay shed and the rest to middle of the cow shed where they'll be fenced off from the bovines. Time to fix the floor.

It was decided that we didn't have enough tyres so we went off to get some more. The tyres live... this is a bit hard to explain so bear with me. The top field is a hill and should slope gently into the middle field, but in order to create the flat farmyard it's been chopped short creating a 10ft or so cliff atop of which is the hedge. Between the hedge and the edge are the tyres, piled up ten high and three deep. I went up the ladder and, with prior warning, started tossing them down. There's something very satisfying about rapidly chucking large round pieces of bouncy rubber into a bouncy pile far beneath you and I was somewhat disappointed when we had enough.

Tyres laid down and pallets returned the shed was ready to receive the new hay and it was time for dinner. Today was a good day for various reasons. Firstly the conditions, while slightly harsh (the only thing that sets off my nose here is the dust in the hay shed) and hot, could have been hotter and I actually preferred being out working than lying in the oven of a caravan. Secondly the job was directly and obviously connected with the running of the farm. Thirdly the job was a visible achievement on a satisfying scale. And finally M and I were working together as a team, working at an equal level and chatting about stuff and nonsense. For the whole day.

While I have no regrets at all about staying here these last few months and have benefited from it a lot, don't get me wrong about this at all, these reasons are why I was thinking about moving to a bigger farm. I felt absorbed into the farm today, forgetting about how sweaty and dirty and tired I was. There was no struggle to adapt or feeling of being slightly out of place because there wasn't the opportunity to dwell on such things. If you get me. Ah, whatever. It was a good day.

Cycled 20 miles today. A few months back that would have been unthinkable, but I did it, and apart from a slight ache in my lower back muscles I could probably cycle some more. Blimey.

After lunch, at about 2.30, I went into Newport to quickly check my emails before the library shut. I'd discovered a new route in which, which a little longer, is almost completely a cycle route. A month back the route from Newport to Sandown was opened along a disused railway and as such it has no hills. After bombing it down the only slope to the wonderfully named Bohemia Corner, home of the RSPCA, you continue east to Merstone to join the cycle route (number 23 on the National Cycle Network). Turning right onto the route I did the three miles north to Newport, did the online thing and when the library closed at four considered what to do next.

I'd had a pretty dopey morning and to be honest fancied a dopey afternoon but I knew that the caravan would be currently turning into an oven. Fuck it, I rationalised. I'll go to Sandown. If I'm on the move at least there'll be a breeze and when I get to Sandown the beach will be somewhat cooler than the farm. I've got my book, I've got my water bottle, so let's go.

There are two things that are quite awful about the new cycle path. The first is their insistence on telling you how much further you have to go at every junction. It's eight miles from Newport to Sandown and to see these miles slowly ticking down makes it seem all the longer. For example, the cycle route from Newport north to Cowes is a good four miles but it doesn't seem like it because there are no signs. You just put your head down (but not too far as I realised when I nearly ran into someone once) and get into the 'zone', and before you know it you're there.

The second is really only temporary but it's still a pain. The council, in their wisdom, have decided to cover the new areas of path with fine gravel. In time this will be ground into the path and form a solid long lasting surface, but currently it can be like cycling through sand. But like I said, this is just because it's new.

Overall the ride was lovely, even more so when I noticed nearly every male cyclist was topless and decided to join them. Rather than soaking into my shirt and dripping down my face (the sun was behind me so no need for a hat) the sweat was whipped away and I'm sure my back was acting as a solar panel giving me energy. Either than or I was really warming up.

Finally I reached the end of the route and as I passed the sign pointing the other way saying "Newport 8 Miles" I let out a little cheer. Finally, the beach! Not so fast though. While the cycle route is generally a wonderful thing and the Council should be congratulated for it, the burgers of Sandown haven't quite got the connection between it and the beach sorted out yet and I found myself spat out into suburban hell. After riding though nature reserves and past fields with wonderful views of the hills to suddenly be in a seemingly never ending sprawl of identikit closes on a bakingly hot road (no trees) was, well, not nice. And no signs telling me I was going the right way, which of course I wasn't. I guess they don't plan for tourists in this part of town and after a couple of miles I was popped out on the boundary between Sandown and Shanklin. At least I knew where I was and, by five o'clock I was on a quiet bit of beach just outside Yaverland lying on the sand reading my book. The breeze was light but cooling and the gentle noise of the waves was oddly calming.

After an hour I set off home again to catch the Archers and have my tea. The ride back was incredibly easy, especially as it was ever so slightly uphill. As I started to really tire I was suddenly back at Merstone with half an hour to spare, so a gentle ride to the RSPCA and then a walk up the only hill and home.

When I came back from Newport this afternoon, all hot and sweaty from the cycle ride, I saw one of the orphan lambs in the farmyard but not in the field paddock with the calves where they're supposed to be. I put my bike away and went to investigate. All three were calmly munching the grass quite happy and at peace. I managed to get George into the farmyard paddock where they had first lived as babies and the other two followed. I went to tell M but she was still out, but they were okay. They're not going to run away but at least now they won't wander onto the road or anything. As I walked back to the caravan I saw they'd congregated around the new chicken house which has it's doors open to defumigate the creosote and one of the little buggers had walked all the way into it. You'll remember last week they were attracted by the evil black paint so there must be something really attractive to sheep about toxic chemicals. Maybe they're not so different to us, he says as he drags on a cigarette... So I patted the lamb on the arse and she jumped through the other door into the chicken run, calmly trotting out the third door. Thank god I made those doors big.

The lambs seemed very content to be back in their paddock and had a good munch on the new grass and clover before settling in their old shelter just like they used to do when they were smaller. And I knew why they were happy. Last night, at about eleven, I'd popped outside to get some air and in the moonlight saw the two calves bound towards me from the other end of the paddock. They've got quite used to me now and while I never feed them they probably assume there's the possibility that I might. The sound of their hooves rushing through the grass was relatively quite loud and the lambs darted out of their shelter looking very perturbed. Now, it was dark and in the moonlight I couldn't exactly see what was going on, but the calves stopped and became very interested in the shelter. First the bigger calf noisily stuck her head in and sniffed around and then the smaller calf got all the way in. I stayed and watched for a good ten minutes and they didn't budge. Meanwhile the lambs, who obviously just wanted some peace, wandered as far away as they could and waited for these two buffoons to go away.

The calves and the lambs did have a rather fractious introduction to each other but it all seemed to have calmed down. Now it looks like the calves are on the offensive and the sheep are not happy. They can escape from the paddock quite easily by jumping through or squeezing under the gates as has happened when they got a little too enthusiastic about being fed, but they then tend to hang about the same area. Today it looked like a concerted break out, as if they'd been bothered by the bovines too much and enough was enough. Tonight they're in the farmyard paddock but no doubt they'll be put back in calf hell tomorrow. I wonder if they'll end up reading the Daily Mail...

Funny, a week ago it was getting cool enough to wear a jumper out to the field (only to take it off as soon as actual work commenced) and, despite July and August still to come, I was thinking that maybe summer had peaked and that taking my hat and gloves back to the mainland was perhaps a silly thing to do. And now it's hotter than ever. Now, I know heat. I lived in London for three summers and worked in the centre of the metropolis where the concrete sucks in the heat and holds it there multiplying the friction of the constant movement and concentrated living, and to be honest it's no doubt hotter temperature-wise in the big city at the moment. But the sunshine. I feel as if I've never really appreciated the power of the sun. The heat of the city surrounds you and drags you down, baking you like some potato. But this sun, this crisp beam of pure radiation, it pours down like a thousand daggers and fries you. The wind might make it more bearable but it perversely increases the burning, smoothing out the power of the sun but taking it deeper. You only solace is shade and at least here you have one up on the city dwellers.

On a day like today I should have been out in the sun, maybe down at the beach or walking the hills. But I spend all week in the sun and I wanted the opposite. Shade. Air conditioning. I headed for the library and spent five hours in the internet room. I had thought that I might venture further into the world but a fag break confirmed to me that it was too hot. The forecast for next week is the same and I'm going to be out in it, so while everyone else was rushing to take advantage of the heat I felt somewhat justified to be in a cool room with the blinds shut.

When I got back to the farm at 6.00pm it was as hot as ever and my caravan had been soaking it up all afternoon. Oddly, other than the cow shed there isn't really anywhere on the farm that's decently shaded where you can sit, and the cow shed is full of cow shit, naturally, and not a stranger to flies. In fact there's something of an insect frenzy at the moment no doubt thanks to the lack of pesticides and the stunning variety of wild grasses and flowers about the place, so sitting still outside is not really an option. Especially as I've been bitten by the nastiest fly I've ever encountered. It looks like a normal fly but can smell sweat and dive-bombs any bare flesh. Swat it away and it circles you for another attack again and again. Then finally it manages to land and immediately stabs you. By the time the pain hits your brain and you bash it off it's too late. Two bites on my arm have come up and they itch like hell.

But I digress. The insects were forcing me inside, but inside was an oven and I'd just cycled four miles. Did I say there's no wind today? There's no wind today. So there's only one thing to do. Strip off to your pants and lie very still.

Anyway, enough of the moaning about the weather. It's all very good and I'm dead pleased with my tan. I just wanted a break from it today. And the sun soon went down and it got all cold, which is lovely.

"How did the idea of Ira's shack maintain its hold so long? Well, it's the earliest images - of independence and freedom, particularly - that do live obstinately on, despite the blessing and the bludgeoning of life's fullness. And the idea of the shack, after all, isn't Ira's. It has a history. It was Rousseau's. It was Thoreau's. The palliative of the primitive hut. The place where you are stripped back to essentials, to which you return - even if it happens not to be where you came from - to decontaminate and absolve yourself of the striving. The place where you disrobe, moult it all, all the uniforms you've worn and the costumes you've gotten into, where you shed your batteredness and your resentment, your appeasement of the world and your defiance of the world, your manipulation of the world and its manhandling of you. The aging man leaves and goes into the woods - Eastern philosophical thought abounds with that motif, Taoist thought, Hindu thought, Chinese thought. The "forest dweller", the last stage of life's way. Think of those Chinese paintings of the old man under the mountain, receding from the agitation of the autobiographical. He has entered vigorously into competition with life; now, becalmed, he enters into competition with death, drawn down into austerity, the final business."

Philip Roth, I Married A Communist, 1998

Just now I was lying down in the caravan as the sun set, reading the Philip Roth book (very good, btw), listening to Miles Davis (Kind of Blue) and pondering how good I was feeling. It occurred to me that the uncertainty of where all this was leading definitely coloured my stay here. That's not to say I regret that - it was essential to be in a completely new and strange place in order to put stuff in perspective and get out of the mental hole I'd dug myself in to - but I started to think about what it would have been like had I had a concrete thing to go back to. I thought about Fred's offer of a job should I want to come back to the Island and the idea of doing this same thing again next summer. It occurred that having this plan would be a good way of ensuring I don't get trapped into another dead end job or into a cycle of despair and destruction. My aim is to put myself into a position where I am able to spend two or three months on a farm next summer, but also to have something to go back to afterwards.

A good friend of mine's ex-boyfriend had an interesting approach to work. He still lived at home and worked in computing earning relatively silly money on short-term contracts. His system was to spend a few months earning loads of cash and then spend the next few months constantly online gaming until the cash ran out. Then he'd do it again. Whether this led to him being a friend of mine's ex-boyfriend I'll let you decide, though I should say he was a decent chap and good company down the pub.

This is not a new idea for me. I'd often thought about what I would do in his situation and now it looks like I might be in a position to do this. If I could be in a position where I'm able to just fuck off for a month or two to dig up weeds on a farm that would be a good thing. A little, teeny worry is that once I'm back in a city I'll lose not only the fitness but also the mental attitude I've developed these last few months. If I can recharge regularly and as part of my normal life with minimal reliance on the goodwill of others that'd be five-red-cars-extra-super-good.

I was lost in the noise of strimming the lawn when I spotted M looking thoughtful in the farmyard paddock amongst the chicken runs. As she was coming back to the house the plastic cord in the strimmer snapped off and I cut the engine to lengthen it. She announced that she'd opened up the chicken runs to let them out. I looked over and saw a rooster, which had been hovering around the enclosed mother and her young brood every day for months, fiercely mounting what I presume was a hen, his wings flapping as he pounded away. I guess once four mothers were away from the flock there weren't enough females to go around, especially as one particularly impressive (and loud) rooster seems have collected an ever increasing harem, so this was a moment he'd been waiting for for a long, long time.

The problem had been this. When eggs hatched we moved the mother and chicks into a chicken run. Now they're pretty much adult it's time to set them free of the cage, not only for practical reasons (breeding, eggs, not having to feed them so much grain) but also because having four to six large chickens in a cage designed for baby chicks is really not on for an organic, free range farm. But how to do it? The bigger run I built is being saved for the next generation of ducklings (or something - I don't know what's going on with it) and so eventually they're going to have to join the existing chicken population. But in order to make sure they know where their new home is they'd have to be shut in the chicken shed for 2 or 3 days, along with the older birds. It's currently very very hot indeed and keeping the birds in for that period of time might kill them, if they didn't kill each other first. So the logical solution seems to be to open up their cages to the rest of the farm but close them up at night. That way they get used to the big outdoors but still know where home is. Interestingly, most of the chicks didn't leave the cages even though the doors were open - I guess after three months of knowing one a square metre of space the concept of moving outside that was completely alien. Still, they'll get used to it. Plus it's probably a good thing they don't have the instinct to wander or else they'll be fox food.

Finished creosoting the shed - it really does soak it up, like painting a sponge - and set to work clearing some thistles from the top field. This is where the animals are normally kept and while the grass is short the thistles were getting out of hand. Fred had mowed them down with the tractor but a few were left so I spent the day wandering around with the loppers killing anything that looked like it might release seeds into the air.

In the adjoining field grass was being harvested for silage. As usual, don't rely on my accuracy in this, but from what I can gather the grass is bailed up in what looks like a big bin liner and left to slightly compost. Cows love it but it's poisonous for sheep. I suspect it's more nutritious than dry hay and allows the cows to eat something wetter in the winter. How it's bailed up is rather fascinating. An ordinary roll of green hay is placed on rollers which spin it round very slowly. While this is going on a roll of black plastic whizzes around it tightly wrapping it. Once this is done it's picked up by a forklift/digger thing and stacked up. It's like some kind of industrial food packing cellophane operation on a massive scale. In a field. With tractors. And it makes a quite unearthly whishing sound.

The area is currently busy with harvesting and hay making. A month back I could sit on the hill and maybe see a truck drive along the side of field but now there are tractors everywhere with all manner of cutting and swishing things attached to the back. The hay field on this farm was cut today, which was a nice piece of closure as I'd spent a good chunk of my time here clearing it of ragwort and thistles. It's a bit odd looking out on it. Yesterday the wind was blowing waves across it and now it's flat. Tomorrow, once it's dried out a bit, it'll be tossed over using a machine that looks like collection of brushes to dry completely and then it'll be bailed up and stored in the shed. All this is organised by Fred, of course, who seems to act as hay-making broker for the local farms.

I had a nice little chat with Fred today about me leaving. He asked if I'd be coming back to the Island. In fact he said "You'll be coming back though, won't you?" and then offered me a job, saying he'd house, feed and pay me. So either he's got completely the wrong impression of my abilities or I'm better at this lark than I think. Whatever, it's worth bearing in mind. I think next year I'd like to spend a bit more time on a farm - maybe a couple of months over the summer - and if I could get paid it'd make a big difference. In fact, if I didn't have the computing stuff in mind I'd seriously consider taking him up on it now. But I'm not going to.

Today I tried to be clever. On Thursdays I have a big lunch and sandwiches for dinner as M runs yoga classes in Freshwater in the evening. So, finishing work at 5.00pm, I jumped on the bike and went to the library which closes late today. I figured I could get a couple of hours internet time in and set some stuff in motion for my return. But the internet was down. Might be back at six, so I hung about typing up my emails in Word. Maybe seven, so I went through the fiction department looking for interesting books. Library fiction departments really are quite poor but I managed to get three books. James Ellroy's Cold Six Thousand for the 60's American Kennedy stuff, David Mitchell's number9dream for the cyber-Murakami angle, and Philip Roth's I Married A Communist for the 50's American McCarthy stuff. All three have been raved about by bookseller mates and I might have time to actually read them over the next couple of weeks. On the book tip I just finished Norwegian Wood which for some ungodly reason I hadn't read yet and it was stunning. Absolutely incredible. Read it now. Still waiting for the library to hit home with the net I worked through their collection of Asterix books and to my surprise found them slightly lacking. And yes, I was avoiding the later ones. Seven came and still no internet. At 7.15 I gave up, bought a floppy disk (30p! Storage is cheap these days!) to store my emails on and went home.

The only measure I have of my relative fitness is the cycle ride into Newport. Last week I was rather shocked to make it up every hill and today I made it in without reaching for the water bottle. Now, this is only about three miles but when I bought the bike three months ago I was walking up every slight incline and downing a bottle of water each way. Have I gotten fit? Looks like it.

I have a serious urge not to write for this journal. Ever since making the decision to leave the farm I just haven't felt the need to write stuff down. It's really odd as usually such a thing happens when I'm feeling down and over burdened with stuff but this is not even the opposite. I just feel calm and centred, just getting on with my life. Now, this is quite an odd feeling and, to be honest, I don't want to start analysing it!

So, today I cleaned out a water trough (it was in a field without animals and was going stagnant with lots of wiggly things that would probably grow up to be flying bitey things and eat us all alive), finished painting the big sheds with the evil black pant, fixed a chicken run so the door can be opened with ease, and creosoted another couple of sides of the garden shed. And then it was dinner time. The weather has been really hot. At one stage I slipped off the stool and splashed creosote down the front of my t-shirt, though most of it went on the shed which was a relief. I perfected a way of keeping cool by soaking a bandanna in cold water and plopping it over my head like a scarf. This is held in place by the cap and flops down the back of the neck. The water keeps the head cool by dissipating the heat and it stops nasty sweat pouring down your face which, when your hands are covered in paint, is impossible to wipe off without toxifying your face. Very nice.

So that was my day. Sorry for the lack of flourish, but I have been thinking about what I'm going to do with this journal once it's all done and dusted. Should hopefully be a good un.

What is it now, Tuesday? Well, I made the decision on Saturday and told M on Monday that I'd be leaving in three weeks and I feel pretty good about it all. There's no sense of "escape", because I'm not escaping, and neither is there a sense of relief at it all being over. More there's a feeling that I'm back on track with a nicely loose plan. The farm has done it's job. What the job actually was I'm still not 100% sure, but it's done it, and that's enough to be aware of.

So, what's been going on on the farm? Well, today I discover that sheep like paint, especially really evil black paint that's mixed with white spirit, comes in big barrels and is for slapping on the side of barns. This stuff really is evil, sticky and impossible to get rid of without lashings of turpentine, which is in turn impossible to get off your hands without hot water, which I don't have in my little portaloo.

But back to the lambs. I'm painting the side of a barn, a job I quite enjoy, when I hear a shuffling of little hooves. The three lambs have come over to say hello and George is immediately drawn to the ladder, sniffing and nibbling the narrow end which has fresh splashes of paint on it. Now, these lambs will not run away because they're hand reared and completely tame, so I had to kick the ladder to stop George from licking it and push them away. Then, one of the moaning twins was attracted to the barrel of paint which, thanks to a useless design, has a lake of fresh paint around the screw top lid. Before I can do anything she's stuck her nose in and is licking away. I shout and wave my arms around and she stops but has a black goatee beard. Don't worry, I got a photo.

I've decided I like painting. My canvas is a ten foot high wall of corrugated iron and I have but one colour. The resulting work is simple, if a little dark, and I'm pleased with the aesthetic result. So far I've done five pieces which are on show in the farmyard. The juxtaposition of my somewhat flatly morbid work with the life and vitality of the farm is quite provoking.

I can announce I'm leaving the Island and stopping WWOOFing on July 26th, though why I'm bothering to announce it on a journal that won't be public until after that date is beyond me. (Cue meta-summat discussion about the need, desire and internationality of writing for a perceived audience whether that audience exists or not in the notion of autobiographical journaling...)

So, three weeks to go. Better make the most of it.

M grabbed one of the sheep's rear legs and held it up. Fred and I were sitting on the bonnet of the car having chased the sheep down from the field. M wanted to trim the sheep's hooves and called us over to hold the sheep which was getting a bit fed up with having its foot in mid air and was trying to get away. I did what I'd done before and held it by the neck while M instructed Fred to cut the hoof with the rather brutal looking scissors. Fred said to get the sheep on its back and before I knew it he'd grabbed both hind legs and the sheep fell down with the thud. With me lying prone over its shoulders and holding the front legs still Fred started cutting. One foot was fine but the other hoof was very overgrown and as he cut through the sheep started struggling with pain. A preparation of foot-hardening-stuff was mixed up and the sheep's foot bathed in it. This will harden the whole hoof so it can be cut without causing bleeding.

M identified another sheep that was hobbling and again we got it on the ground. This time Fred said to "sit on it" but knowing I didn't have a clue what was going on M said she'd do the sitting and perched on the shoulders of the sheep holding it down while I held the hind legs steady. This sheep was not a problem and after a couple of snips we let it up. The third sheep I was permitted to sit on, and sit on it I did. This one had developed a mild case of foot rot and Fred was keen to point out the maggots to me, which was nice. A quick spray and off it went. Other than this being a regular thing that needs to be done it's doubly important for the rams because eight of them are being sold.

Two went today which was why we brought the sheep down in the first place to separate and pen them in ready for the truck. Getting them away from the rest was quite a trick and Fred's technique is best described as shuffling or sifting by holding a gate. A collection of sheep, say about 10, were in the shed and we had to let out the 8 that weren't being sold while not letting the 2 that were out. The trick was to move the gate into the pen scattering the sheep and then quickly bringing the gate back to only let a couple out. Eventually the two target sheep were in a corner and we rushed the gate towards them penning them in while the other sheep moved out. Then we quickly dragged the gate back to keep them in.

The sheep have now been collected and are probably by now on the mainland at some stage of being slaughtered. Which was a bit odd. As I've said in much earlier entries M doesn't like selling her animals for food but these were castrated rams so no good for breeding, and in a year or so would have not been worth selling for food, so off they went. (The other six still have their balls and will be sold at auction as breeders in a few weeks.) They definitely knew something was up as they were shut into the shed on their own while the rest of the flock were free to roam and they jumped and bashed against the gates trying to get out. Soon they gave up on this and lay down like dejected dogs. I wasn't there when they went off but M said they went calmly into the truck taking the man by surprise as he'd never seen sheep go so easilly but M was talking to them all the way.

Apparently, when there were more small slaughter houses, farmers and shepherds used to ensure their animals were killed in the most human manner possible staying with them to the end. Today the nearest slaughterhouse is miles away on the mainland. I can't believe there isn't one on the whole of the Isle of Wight, but there isn't. So the animals have to be taken on the ferry and killed in what is probably a massive industrial operation. Of course the pros and cons of this system can be debated and I'm not in a position to do so with any intelligence, but one myth that's been exploded for me is that farmers see their animals as mere product.

Yes, M has a somewhat unique emotional attitude towards farming and, while incredibly commendable, can't really be seen as the norm, but to see Fred dealing with the cows (his speciality) is a revelation. He's been a farmer since birth and is under no illusions about his animals becoming food, and yet he treats them in a way that's actually quite hard to describe other than with great kindness, respect and identification. They are his livelihood and he treats them as much more than product. In fact he probably treats them more as humans than a lot of companies treat their employees. During the foot and mouth debacle I was quite scornful when reading of farmers getting upset about their animals being slaughtered - surely they were going to be killed anyway so what's the difference? It's rather shocking to see how ingrained the notions of resources and profits were in my mind that I couldn't see outside of that model, even though I'd felt vaguely similar things about books in bookshops. But then I along with many others got burnt by getting emotionally involved in bookselling when Waterstone's went down the road of rationalisation and cost cutting so maybe I'd assumed that combining hard business sense with a love of the things you trade in was impossible. I wonder if, when people talk about farming being in trouble, this is really what they're on about - that farming still just about has a handle on something that the rest of us have nearly completely forgotten about. Something to think about methinks.

Well, last night I wrote a 1000 word review of John Bagnall's collection of strips Don't Tread On My Rosaries (publisher), ostensibly for the TRS2 site but also with the idea of editing it up for submission to something like The Comics Journal, hence no Farmblog entry. But I also didn't have much to say so probably saved you a load of psychblog introspection. Still, I'm sure I'll fit in some today.

In fact let's get it out of the way at the start. I wouldn't call it a breakthrough, more of a click really, but today I noticed that the patterns of my mood swings pretty much match what they were doing when I crashed with depression last spring. What this means is it's not the environment that's causing these things and by extension lets London off the hook (many people assumed living in the capital was a cause of my mental instability but I always felt this was too simplistic, especially as Being in London (as opposed to just being in London) always cheered me up). It was also interesting to note how different these depressive incidents are to the panic attacks and anxiety of my last few months at work, which puts work firmly on the hook (many people thought my job was doing me in but for a long time I assumed it was my illness that was causing the problems. Since leaving though I've become more and more convinced it was that place that specifically caused stuff, but this is not place to get into all that). A third point is that my medication was obviously working in that I haven't found myself in this state since starting Sexroxat/Paroxetine a year back. So I really shouldn't have stopped taking them when I got to the farm. But what's done is done and once I'm settled somewhere I'll get back on them again.

I'm now 90% sure that I'll be finishing WWOOFing on July 26th which leaves me three weeks on the island. With an understanding of the above three points I should be able to make the most of this time in the knowledge that what I'm moving to is a better future. As such the WWOOF episode has done exactly what I wanted it to do - allow me some space to figure out stuff, put the last few years into perspective and the opportunity to move on to something constructive. I must admit I didn't think moving to Birmingham to develop my computing skills was going to be the end result but there you go. I suppose I've learned that if you throw everything up in the air it's going to be difficult seeing where it all falls down and how it all then interrelates, but then I would argue that I had to throw everything up in the air otherwise I would have gone mad. Really mad as opposed to the slightly mad that constitutes my normality.

Now all I have to do is keep myself busy over the next few weeks to distract myself from dwelling. When I left I passed BugPowder to Jez before leaving for the farm I announced (though that sounds a little pompous) to the readership that I hoped my time away would recharge my batteries for my return. Interestingly I barely thought about comics for the first couple of months and haven't missed having my collection to hand one bit, but since going to the ComICA launch party last week and talking to various people the ideas are starting to flow, though a lot more tempered and realistic that as has normally been the case. So expect stuff from me in that vein either on BugPowder or perhaps elsewhere...

I haven't really written about my time in London here mainly because it's in danger of running into a long "what I did in my summer holidays" type thing, but some things pertinent to the Farmblog did arise. The most interesting phenomena was how much further away places seemed from each other when I was walking around. I now walk a lot slower than I used to and it occurred to me that I've only run once since being on the farm. Ignoring my attempts at cycling my pace here is way slower that it used to be and it was fascinating to see this carry through to my London brain. It wasn't that I felt lost in the rush - far from it. I just didn't feel part of the rush, able to deal with and understand all that is London while keeping a slight detachment from it all.

Admittedly I was playing the aware tourist. I didn't have anywhere I had to be at any given time and spent my hours wandering around randomly arranging meetings with friends and spontaneously arranging to visit things. Some days I just stayed in and watched a Wimbledon tennis match and that was fine because it was a change, while other days I saw countless people and returned to base exhausted from miles of walking about town. It was a good holiday.

By the last day, however, I was getting a bit antsy and the opportunities and possibilities of London hit home. I might not have taken every opportunity London offered me when I lived there but I sampled a fair few and were money not an issue I would return there in an instant, so to be there for such a short period and thus unable to set anything in motion was slightly frustrating. But only slightly. Generally I could detect a real change of attitude in myself. Needless to say very little had changed in the three months since I'd left so I was able to take a somewhat objective look at how I'd developed, and the conclusion is positively but subtly.

What's weird is how I've managed to forget this the last few days. What is that all about?

Another day of roller coaster emotions. I had a particularly vivid dream which, while not disturbing in any way, woke me up in the middle of the night. Normally I'm aware I'm dreaming due to the subtle layer of surreality but this one was clear as day (though I can't remember any of it now, of course). So, not a full nights sleep and when the alarm went off at 7.30 I put it back an hour to the usual 8.30 breakfast call. The thistle chopping of yesterday had left me knackered so no early start today.

My jobs for the morning were to finish weeding the compost heap area and paint a couple of things, but for some reason I couldn't get going. Every weed was an effort which was stupid as I've pulled up tens of thousands in the last few months. Again I wondered if I really wanted to be here, and not just at this farm but on a farm at all. I started thinking about going straight to Birmingham in August and pulling the plug on the WWOOFing thing two months early. It occurred to me that when I'm doing these farm jobs I'm not thinking about anything useful and neither am I at peace. Either would be good and much better than dwelling on bad stuff.

Maybe standing in a compost heap in the rain isn't really conducive to positive thinking but after a couple of hours the rain cleared and, one cup of tea later the things to be painted were dry so I painted them. Painting seems to work for me and even though creosoting the inside of the new chicken house was quite a tricky operation (I hadn't designed it for a human to be in) I chirped up a bit and had a nice lunch chatting about nothing in particular with M.

The afternoon was spent creosoting and painting various things about the place in between light showers of rain, finishing up with the start of a major job painting the side of a barn on a ladder. Maybe it was the variety of little jobs coupled with the distraction of boxing up the ducks (see previous post) but I came out the day in a much better mood.

All. Very. Confusing.

It looks like, if all goes to plan, I might have a laptop by next week which I can learn programming on. I'll know if it's any good on Friday from bro-in-law, then if it's a go-er Mum will pick it up when she visits this weekend and I can pop over and pick it up from her Sunday/Monday. Whether this'll make a difference to my attitude to being here I'm not willing to bet on, but I suspect being about to spend an hour or two in the evenings learning stuff and then having something to work on in my head during the day won't hurt. [later: no go on the laptop front]

I'm now here for at least four weeks. The last week of July I'm house-sitting for my Mum and Stepdad in Winchester. After that I either come back to the Island, move to a different farm, or draw the WWOOFing to a close and move up to Brum. Mentally, financially and other-things-ly I'm erring towards the final option. But I'll make a decision on Sunday. As ever, I'll need to talk to some people first.

A quiet has descended on the farm the likes of which I've not heard in a while. At lunch time the ducks were sold to a nice lady with a box. She knelt in the pen holding box while M scrabbled around grabbing ducks and shoving them in while I took photos. Well, what else could I do? Once all seven ducks were in the box M asked me to hold it shut while she went off to find some string. I've never experienced a sack of badgers but a box of ducks is probably quite similar. One moves, the all move, the box shaking and quacking with little beady eyes peeking through the air holes. All tied up I carried it to the car taking extra care to support the base which was weak from resting in the sodden duck-muck of the pen. The last thing we wanted was a comedy tumbling of ducks, although it would have been very amusing in retrospect.

And so, after six weeks, the ducklings have gone. Boy, did they make a racket! They started off tweeting in a most cute manner but gradually these tweets turned to chirps, then the high-pitched quacks and the, in the last week, they broke into full-on quacks. And unlike the grown-up ducks which only make a racket at food time or when the mood takes them to run around like mad fuckers for a few minutes, these little ducks quacked from dusk til dawn. And we never really noticed until they were gone. Odd that. Still, in a few weeks there'll hopefully be a whole 'nother batch of baby ducks - a hen is sitting on some duck eggs right now - and then the whole cycle begins again.

Got a text from bro-in-law. He's located a laptop for £50 which might just do the job. So after the Archers I took the mobile up the hill to get a signal and phoned Jeff. Sister Lucy answered his phone - he was out - and I had the weird experience of faintly hearing our dad on the other line from Texas. Aren't modern telecommunications great!

Lucy called me back and as I waited I heard the rumbling of thunder behind me. A large black cloud was coming from behind the hill while in front the sky was clear blue. The weather never stays the same on this island at the moment which is quite exhilarating when you're outside all the time. Lucy went through the notes Jeff had left and I went through what I'm going to need and it looks a go-er, but soon the rain started to fall and once we'd sorted out the skinny of the deal I made my way down the hill. Reception disintegrated and we said our goodbyes as the heavens opened and I dashed inside. The cloud is right over the farm now, unleashing it's burden loudly on the caravan roof, but behind it, clear blue sky. Looks like a nice sunset on the way.

I don't know how I did it but at some point this afternoon I must have banged into something because there's a deep pain on my hip/arse bone forcing me to limp about the place. Nothing visual there but it made me realise this is the first time I've wounded myself in such a way since starting here in April. Well, other than the incredible back pain of the first few weeks, but that doesn't count. That was part of the process. Interestingly, when I was off on my London holiday I wore a tight t-shirt - the sort that's totally impractical for farm work - and it was much tighter than I remembered. I haven't built up my arms much but I'm much broader across the shoulders than I've ever been. While I'm not particularly vain about such things it's good to know that all the shovelling, sawing and lopping has had some effect.

Today's job was quite satisfying. I was to clear the forest of thistles from the drainage ditch that runs down the hill, around the paddock and through the farmyard. These were not the bad, evil big thistles I'd been clearing to date but the smaller, thinner variety that are normally left. These, however, had not been grazed by the adult animals and had to be culled before they released their seeds.

I started off with the loppers (basically scissors with really long handles) which had proved very effective with the big thistles but it was like cutting the lawn with nail scissors. M suggested a hand-scythe but it was all rusty and I didn't really want to spend time sharpening it up. I then spotted the machete, or whatever it's called. Basically it's a big heavy knife about a foot long with a hook at the end. I suspect it's for harvesting turnips - slice underneath, stab with the hook and throw in the barrow - but whatever, it's an vintage piece of kit.

It was perfect. Light enough to control but heavy enough to get a good momentum and sharp enough to glide through 10-15 thistles in one sweep. Soon I'd developed a technique of swiping, spinning it round 180 degrees, swiping back and clearing with the hook, then swapping hands and repeating. By standing in the ditch I didn't have to crouch down too much and in a few hours I'd cleared all the thistles with a relative lack of effort.

The last couple of hours of the day were spent weeding the compost heap which, because it's not covered, tends to bloom with unwanted plants. Because it's compost it's quite easy to pull up the weeds but there were a lot of them. Most of the weeds in the compost were a variety of wild spinach which is edible, though presumably not very nice as we didn't eat it ourselves. Instead it's been given to the ducks and chickens who seem to love it.

Ah yes, the ducks. M has decided to sell the ducklings (which are now pretty much fully grown in size and attitude) because there's not enough room in the current duck house and there's another batch of duck eggs under a chicken as we speak. I get the feeling the current duck-mother hen has realised the error of her ways and wants to get away from her seven giant 'children'. Can't say I blame her. It's hard enough being a duck amongst ducks let alone small chicken.

Quite a few changes over the last week, although some of them are gradual ones I've only noticed because I've been away such as the orphan lambs getting fatter. Compared to the other lambs in the field they're waddling little tubbies since all they do it sit around and eat while the others have to run with the grownups.

One shock for the lambs has been the introduction of bovines. Millie's calf has been let into their paddock along with Millie's calf's little friend. This dwarf cow came from Fred's herd and wasn't fed properly as a baby, stunting its growth. Fred brought it here to feed up and M won't let him take it back because the two calves are now inseparable. The visual result is quite odd. The calves are about the same age but one is half the size looking like a scale model of the other.

Now, Millie's calf used to be in this paddock with her mum while the lambs have been here for a while with no other animals around (other than chickens and the odd pheasant). Suddenly there's a big brown thing and a not so big brown thing wandering around like they own the place and the lambs aren't to keen on this, running away whenever the calves come near, which they do quite often, having never seen sheep before.

The paddock now opens into the cow-shed meaning the sheep could go in there to sleep, but they don't because that's where the calves go. Instead they're finally using the rusty iron arc shelter (which I think was built for pigs back in the days when there were pigs here) because the cows can't fit in it.

I was in the paddock today digging up some last remnants of ragwort from the drainage ditch and moving some baby trees which were (dare I say, mistakenly?) planted there. The cows and sheep like little more than to eat the leaves off trees, especially little foot high trees, so they had to come out. It was a relatively tricky operation as everything else I've dug up so far has been thrown away whereas these had to survive, and this was not helped by the lambs coming right up to me and trying to nibble the leaves. George (as I've named the smallest lamb) showed absolutely no fear of the swinging spade and would not be gently pushed away - completely, incredibly tame.

The most notable change has been the colour of the farm. In essence, everything has grown. The grass in the fields is longer (in the paddock the lambs appear to swim through a lake of green) and is turning a slight shade of brown in places as the seeds get ready to take flight - it'll be harvested as soon as we've had three straight days with no rain. Meanwhile the farmyard paddock, which was bare chalk when I got here in April, is now almost totally green and gives a real definition to the chalk road that winds through the yard. This is the colour of mid-summer - the greenery is at its peak and it getting ready for the long journey into autumn. Big, lush and alive.

I've made a personal decision that I'm going to stick to my allotted hours - the WWOOFguidelines say I should work 6 hours a day. Quite often I do about seven or eight hours, working from 9.00am to 6.00pm with a few breaks. Today I just took an hour for lunch plus a cuppa tea in the afternoon and had done my six hours by 4.30, meaning I could have a little snooze before dinner and not feel too knackered this evening. Despite keeping my options open I really want to see if I can make a go of staying here, and part of my disillusionment a fortnight ago came from being totally knackered. I've done the shock-of-exercise thing and it's time to recognise my limitations and work with them, plus by being awake with more energy I can probably fit more into those six hours than I was doing in the longer days. Tonight I feel fine (in fact I wish I was more tired as I've run out of fags...) but it's only Monday and I've been on holiday. Thursday will be the crunch day.

Again with the rain worries. When the ferry was docked at Southampton it was sweltering and sunny but as soon as we disembarked a fierce wind hit in as the clouds darkened and the odd little spot of rain came down. And here's me with two panniers and one carrier bag. I'm not worried about myself getting wet but the papers, books and electronic gadgets might not survive a summer downpour. So I pelted it back to the farm and made it with 45 minutes to spare before the heavens opened.

It was an odd ride as I'd had a wonderful week in London (which I'll write about in another post) but before leaving I had been going a bit stir crazy. I'm now pretty certain that my immediate future is not on this farm but that whatever happens I'll be here for the next few weeks while I sort out where to go next, so all manner of emotions were going through my head.

I've managed to strike a good balance between having a loose plan for the future while still remaining free, "living in the moment" and not worrying about the details, but it's still a little daunting to actually set things in motion myself. The target is to end up in the Birmingham area with a temp and/or part time job developing my computing skills in October. The next three months have to lead to that on a budget of £400 (including getting somewhere to live in Brum) so it's going to be tight. If I move around a lot money will vanish on trains and busses.

As far as M's concerned I'm here until September, but after the loneliness kicked in a fortnight ago I've been looking to move on. Now, if I move onto somewhere they might not want me to stay there for three months, so I'll have to move on again. The question is, was the period I went through here recently a signal that it's time to move on or part of the process of adjusting?

Having had a week recharging my social batteries and getting some much needed perspective on my situation I feel I set up for the next few weeks. And as I came through the gates tonight and noticed how certain things had changed (the ducklings are now ducks!) while others were reassuringly the same (it had only been a week), M greeted me with a big smile. I felt the worries of the journey melt away.

It's funny, when I started writing this post I was certain that tomorrow I'd be contacting other farms with the intention of moving to them later in July, but now I'm pretty certain I'm staying here. All very confusing, but this journal writing does help sort out the thoughts, especially when there's no fellow human to bounce them off. Whatever, I'll see how I feel next weekend before making a decision.

I've had a couple of very complimentary pieces of feedback to this farmblog , which is very nice since it's what I spend a good hour or so each night working on, one of which suggested turning it into a book of the Oranges Over Tuscan Lemons variety. Okay, it was my dad what said it and like any good son I immediately dismissed it as a stupid idea conceived through paternal-tinted spectacles. And then like any fatherly advice it hung about gradually convincing me of it's viability. And so last weekend I got three books on creative writing from the library, all of which were completely inappropriate but even the useless can act as a framing device.

Fact is, I've got here in this journal the foundation of a story, or at least a chapter or two, which could be turned into something bigger. Now, I don't think I'm ready to write a book, at least not yet, but my background is in zines. I miss doing zines. The web is great and all but there's something about making your own wee zine from conception to having a pile of them hand assembled before you. It's an object, set in toner and there for life.

So I'm going to take this blog, chop out the crap, fill in the gaps, make it flow and try and tie some themes together. Farmzine #1, coming your way, ooh, about Xmas I guess. Who knows, it might actually be interesting!

The whole day today was spent in the middle field collecting rocks and stones. With an overcast sky and a breeze working conditions were quite pleasant and since I've been dwelling on stuff a bit too much of late I took the mp3/cd walkman out. The Butthole Surfers and a significant chunk of PJ Harvey's oevre had me dancing and singing around the field in a most unselfconscious manner, but when you're just being watched by sheep and the odd cow, hey! One Butthole lyric made me smile - "If you wanna touch the sky you must be prepared to die" - which, along with some other significant things I've read and heard recently has reminded me that I really want to do something fucking crazy if only I could get the guts together.

It's interesting - while I've been listening to music I've owned for a number of years it's only now, in this context, that I've found myself really listening to lyrics. I've never been that bothered with the words of a song, being more interested in how they're sung, taking the voice as another instrument. Quite a revelation all this "songs meaning things" stuff.

The methodology for collecting stones is to start a pile and then spiral around it, building the pile into a pyramid that can be seen from a distance. After a few hours seven or so small monuments were evenly spread around the field. Aesthetically they looked like Andy Goldsworthy sculptures but there was also a potential spiritual angle, as if they were dividing the field into quadrants of energy. Even though I was doing a quite mechanistic job it was nice to think I was creating something on such a large scale. Still all gone now, which is shame, but there you go. To the tune-age of Frank Sinatra they were dismantled into a wheelbarrow and lugged down the hill, through the farmyard and dumped in a muddy shed to make a solid floor.

[Interlude: Just had a weird assed synchronicity thingy. I'd been looking through the WWOOF booklet of host farms with the idea of trying somewhere a little bigger with more of a community going on and one of the two places in Midlands I'd highlighted was Redfield, a "community of 15 people sharing a 50 roomed house set in 17 acres". I was just tidying up my paperwork and came across a letter written to me in April by Felicity, my mother's friend from University who started WWOOFing a few years back, giving up all her possessions and moving around various communities. It was hearing of her experiences that put this idea in my head. I though it'd be interesting to re-read it. And wadaya know, right at the top of the letter is "Redfield". She lives at that very community. Is this a sign? No 23's that I can spot, but even so!]

Despite a relatively good day today and I'm still thinking of leaving when I come back after my week in London. Not sure what exactly I'll do, partly because I just don't know but also because I need to talk it through with various people. The big problem with this life is I'm blatantly dependent on other people's goodwill. I like to think my karma is reasonably in credit but it's rather awkward asking for help when I've put myself in this situation voluntarily. Interestingly this wasn't really an issue when I was going through the process of packing up my London life because, I think, I really was in the shit and it was obvious I needed help. Right now, having put myself in this situation, I feel obliged to be fairly self sufficient and proactively asking to be housed and fed just feels wrong. In fact, even writing this here in the knowledge that friends and family will read it seems like pushing it too much. Looks like I'll never be a decent sponger, at least not consciously.

Nearly threw in the towel today. Let's just say I'm starting to wonder if this is actually going anywhere. Aside from being constantly exhausted, uncomfortable and, yes, a little bit lonely, I don't seem to be moving on in any way. I don't think I've learned much the last few weeks and I seem to be dwelling on little, often negative, things and getting easily wound up by stuff. I could list it all here but I think I won't because while I'm happy to moan to myself about stuff, to do so in a public forum would not be on, as I hope you'll understand.

The more pertinent point is why am I getting fed up? Is it the circumstances I'm in that are making me this way, or is it just me? Do I need the novelty of a new situation to distract me from the grim reality of life? Would this happen wherever I was and whatever I was doing?

I was playing around with an "escape plan" fantasy (as I did for the last few months at the bookshop) and had this idea of renting a very small flat or bedsit in Southampton or Birmingham (familiarity is safer, you see, while London is just too expensive) and getting a part time job to earn enough to get by on, hook up to the net and crack on with learning programming. A great idea that could lead to an interesting future, and I know I can survive on not much money these days. But, two or three months down the line, would I be at square one again?

I dunno.

It'll be very interesting to be in London next week, seeing people and places I used to be very familair with in a new light, and seeing how I reflect off them. Interestingly I've tentatively aranged to see nine people in six days after intending to plan to see four. I wonder what that means...

Shall we talk about the weather? I know, nothing more tedious, but they are an important element of my life here these elements.

At some point last night (5.00am?) there was a huge thunderstorm and while I didn't get up to look I could hear the rain lashing down on the caravan and the lightning flashing through the window. I was hoping the rain would cool everything down a bit but it didn't - all it did was add a heavy dose of humidity moving the farm temporarily into rainforest conditions with a warm mist everywhere

After a sweaty and quite uncomfortable morning the sky cleared and the sun started beating down like nothing had happened. It was the same as the last few days and I feared heat stroke. I've never knowingly had heat stroke but I know when a heat is so strong that it wears you down. Thankfully I've had the intelligence to wear a cap all the time I've been here (so much so it's become second nature (and is starting to smell a bit)) but the back of my neck is still radiating heat like a four-bar electric fire.

And then, as I was wrapping up for the day, it all changed again. The wind picked up from the west for the first time in ages, belting down the hill and rattling the open windows of the caravan, as the sun was obscured by a few very large clouds. It was a very odd sky - in the north-west, where the sun was setting, it looked like a storm was brewing, but everywhere else was the stunning clear blue I've come to associate with this island.

And then, change again! The wind suddenly dropped to nothing and the clouds thinned producing yet another stunning sunset. As I look out now (10.30pm) the sky is a totally clear dark, dark blue, the stars are starting to come out and we're back to where we were 24 hours ago.

There's a very slight breeze blowing across the farm this evening which , while not strong enough to do anything about the almost debilitating heat, does affect the ambience in a rather odd way because it's coming from the west. The last time there was wind from this direction it brought with it a torrential horizontal downpour of rain, but no hope or fear of that this time. The effect is more subtle. The long grass in the hay field is blowing in the wrong direction while for the first time that I've noticed the church bells of Godshill are audible. It also means there's no wind coming into my caravan, which is a bit of an arse as it could do with being cooled down a bit, but you can't win them all.

It hardly deserves mention but I'm English so you'll bear with me. It's been very hot this last few days. Clear blue skies and a beating sun. I didn't think much of it until it was so hot on Wednesday that I cut the arms off a t-shirt to let some air in. That evening I was lying on the sofa-esque furnishings of the caravan and I noticed a pain coming from my shoulders. I've got sunburn. Now, I never burn. Maybe it's due to growing up in the Singapore as a kid in the 70s or maybe I've just got tough skin, but I always go a nice dark brown without all that tedious burning and peeling. I've never owned sun block and I never make a conscious decision to stay in the shade. But the sun was so strong that it burnt me. It's hot here.

The caravan, while it builds up quite a temperature during the day, does still get quite cold at night and I'm still sleeping in a t-shirt under two blankets and a sleeping bag. As soon as the sun sets I have to get change into my jeans and put a jumper on, which is quite a relief in some ways. But if this caravan looses heat so easily in this weather, what the hell is it going to be like in the winter? Thank god I'm definitely leaving here in September.

On that note, I was looking at my diary and noticed I've planned the rest of the stay here without realising it. When I get back from London there's a good five week stretch until the Caption comix convention in Oxford which I'm inclined to extend into a bit of a holiday, cash allowing. Then there's the final seven week stretch to September 29th where my diary says "finish farms - get a job". A little after that I'm due to become an Uncle, which I just quite tellingly typo'd as "unclue". I'm actually quite inclined to move back to Birmingham for a few months. I can't put my finger quite on it, but it's calling to me. Maybe a three month reprise would be useful to settle some ghosts and help segue me back into society. Hmm.

You'll remember the ducklings that hatched to their surrogate chicken mother a month ago (to the day, actually). When I was building their home I was expecting three of them but we ended up with seven. Now they're half the size of an adult duck having them all crammed in such a small space was getting them rather distressed, so M decided to put them in the monster-chicken-run for a bit before casting them into the anarchy that is the duck enclosure.

So this morning, before letting them out, we carried their existing home into the big run, gave them a much bigger water bowl, and boy do they seem to like it. At first they couldn't figure out that they could leave their old home through the open door but they soon worked it out and were loving all the space! There is a slight problem though.

It's now dusk, the sun and set and it's getting dark. The 'mother' hen has gone back into the home to sleep but it looks like the ducklings didn't notice her going in and now they can't work out how to get there. Now, this isn't a problem as the new run is fox proof (at least I really hope it is!) but they need to get some rest and get out of the cold. I suspect tomorrow we'll have a repeat of what happened to the lambs when they were first put in the field and couldn't cope with the change. A similar things happened to Millie's calf when it was taken away from her.

They don't like change these animals, and I have a lot of sympathy with them. Modern management theory seems to hold as a holy truth that change is essential and adjusting to change is a necessary duty of every employee even though it seems wrong. It could be said that, even though it's necessary to move the ducklings around like this, it's only the fault of us humans for not planning their housing better (a bigger home built in the duck enclosure would make sense) and the onus is not on them to adjust without complaint.

I realise I'm making comparisons between juvenile farm animals and the underpaid workers of the world which some might take offence to but hey, it's only an analogy guys! I used to be one of you before I became a serf...

And so, to Rookley for the Art On The Green art and craft fair plus mail art exhibition. At first glance a village event like many other - lots of stalls mainly manned by persons into retirement age, bunting around the place and a couple of big white tends, one of which selling tea.

I had secretly been hoping for a subversive mini-festival of underground art, my appetite having been whetted by the prospect of an international mail-art project centring on this little village, but in now way was I disappointed. Yes, it was at first glance quaint and seemingly out of time, like a scene from The Archers or a John Major speech, but it was also monumentally impressive and alive.

The main focus of the stalls was local artists, many of whom seemed to be people who had retired to the island to paint watercolours. The range was truly democratic, from enthusiastic amateurs whose work sometimes verged on the naive, to some quiet masterpieces. I was particularly taken by one Harold Sheath. Working with a strictly reduced palette and an almost minimalist brush stroke his studies of moored boats and coastlines are cold a a crisp morning but with a subtle warmth. I liked his work so much I bought one, which says a lot as don't buy anything these days.

Still, it was only a fiver, framed. Most of the work on sale was under £50 with most of that being in the £15-25 mark making supporting the local art scene a very viable option. The event reminded me of the small press and zine tables at comic conventions where quality is variable but everything is driven by passion and the chance of finding something unique is high.

Interestingly, the thing that brought be to Art On The Green was the hardest thing to find, The mail-art exhibition was displayed in the tea tent, pegged up on string along one wall. A quite impressive number of entries - 40-50 I think - literally from all over the world. Some were pretty pedestrian but, as expected, some were wonderfully deranged graphical blurtings. I was slightly disappointed to see themes in mail-art seem not to have moved on in recent years - cut-ups, collage, xerography and polemic still the order of the day, but I guess that old internet bugbear has sapped the new blood, the kids preferring the Photoshop forums of b3ta et al. Still, taking away my personal familiarity with the form it was pretty mad to see such things in a tent in Rookley. In some ways I would have liked this stuff to be plastered all over the green, shouting into the faces of people, but at the same time having it hidden away waiting to be discovered was just as good.

Like any successful event there was an overspill into another venue. The church hall held Steve Gascoigne who stood out somewhat from the throng. Not only was he a photographer, the only one I saw there, but he was a youngish man (in the sense that I'm a youngish man) working digitally and with an artistic statement, his project being to record the beauty of the island in an ongoing series of limited edition photographs. His work is excellent. I cannot recommend it enough. Actually, I came away from the stall despondent. Here was yet another person successfully (artistically at any rate) ploughing a specific furrow while here I am still floundering around looking for a medium... Ah well.

And so that was Rookley's Art On The Green 2003. A village event not centred around the church or using charity as a justification or some earnest attempt to generate community, but about Art, and through that bringing out everything you might want and expect from a village community. Well done to all involved, and I mean that quite sincerely.

Great blurting on Any Questions just now. "Serious Dischuffment." Must use that myself often.

(Currently 2 occurrences of Google as of this posting...)

Word is on the vine - lambs in the area are getting maggots. Fred lost a couple the other night and others have found the wiggly things in their baby sheep. So first thing this morning we again brought the sheep down from the field.

After fixing the gates across the entrance to the farmyard to keep the sheep in one place we marched up the hill to drive them down. By this stage I'd been awake for, ooh, ten minutes, had had no tea or cigarettes so to say marching is a little generous, but up we went. As before, most of the sheep ran to M and followed her to the gate but a few straggled and I had to do the running around with my arms stretched out thing. I think there was a memory of the last time they came down to be sheared still lingering and they didn't want to go through that again. Interestingly, one of the sheep looked like it had been shat on - a streak of black across its back like a birth mark or splodge of ink. Whatever, I thought to myself.

Soon all the sheep were off the field. But they weren't in the shed. They were all over the farmyard. The gates had fallen down. I put the gates back up and waited for M to drive them towards me. Sandy, the dog, was enlisted to help. While she's not a fully trained sheepdog by any stretch of the imagination, she has had a bit of training and the instinct of her breeding and, kept on the lead, was ably darting from side to side yelping the sheep forwards. Meanwhile I was keeping myself hidden from view by the gates waiting for them to come pass. Suddenly a thundering streak of white passed me and they were in. Well, all but three, but those three didn't have maggot issues so we just left them to graze outside my caravan. With a magic I could scarcely believe after the hassles of last time, Sandy herded them all into a shed and we fenced them in. Then M explained what we were going to do. Or rather, what I was going to do.

"Just grab him" she said. Huh? Just grab him? Grab one of the sheep? You what? Picture the scene. A shed about 15ft by 20ft filled with 15 sheep and four lambs. as you approach them they move around in a circle creating a vortex of, well, sheepness I guess. And they get up to quite a speed, jumping over each other and changing direction. "Just grab one of the lambs." Go on, grab him." I made a few half hearted lunges with no effect but as the lack of morning stimulants kicked in, the spiralling sheep and repeated instruction to grab put me into a zone. I was devoid of ego and fear and quite unaware of what I was about to do so it was with some shock that I walked over to M holding the smallest lamb in the air, holding it out so M could spray the anti-maggot stuff down its back and around the tail. I worked through the lambs, throwing myself onto them, grabbing them around the neck and pinning them to the ground. I was half expecting a hoof in the face but it was relatively easy, though even now I can't quite remember how it all happened.

But I'm jumping ahead. There was still the sheep to grab. M had pointed him out as being the one with the black mark on his back. This was blood. The maggots had hatched under the skin on his back and burst through. I chased after him and after a couple of attempts finally made the lunge. I dove through the air and landed on the sheep, forcing his head to the ground. As I held this struggling beast down M came up from behind and put his rear legs in the correct position. I did the same at the front and suddenly the sheep was docile. Just being in the sleeping position calmed him down. It was incredible.

As I, quite loosely, held onto his head M got out the maggot killing spray and set to work on the affected area. Little maggots started emerging from the skin wriggling their last and falling dead to the ground. Then more maggots. And more maggots. I couldn't count them but we must be talking a good hundred. As M brushed them away the sheep flinched and moaned slightly. I stroked his head and murmured calming words and it seemed to help. When it seemed they were all gone I let go and up he went as if nothing had happened. The gate was opened and they all ran back into the field. Job done. Time for breakfast.

Apparently all these maggot issues are not so much to do with being bred to this level but to do with climate. Sheep on the Scottish Highlands do not have major maggot problems, while down here in the south it's been heavy fly weather for weeks now. Also, in "olden days" the shepherd would be with the sheep 24/7 and would keep an eye out for such things. More importantly, he'd know what to look for before it got too bad. While you can be preventative, as we were being with the lambs, quite often you don't know there's a problem until the eggs hatch. And then if you don't treat it quickly the animal dies. We're only dealing with 18 sheep here but Fred has 300. Even though he checks on them daily there's no way he's going to catch every problem.

A few years back the sheep would be driven through a sheep-dip which, for younger readers, was essentially a long trough filled with stuff-that-kills-maggots. The sheep would be thrown in at one end and forced to swim to the other. These are no longer used because they poisoned the water table and caused long term health problems for farm workers. So now you know.

Anyway, if you'd told me three months ago that I would wake up one morning and spend half an hour leaping like a wild predator onto maggot infested sheep, I'd have laughed you out of town. Actually, if you'd told me yesterday I'd still have sniggered you into the next room.

Blimey.

Just realised that I'm connected to Captain Beefheart on a personal level through just two people. A friend of mine is Mike who works in a London bookshop. He played guitar on PJ Harvey's first album and has remained in touch, meeting up when she's in London. John Peel has just said that he hadn't heard from Beefheart for a while now and the only other person he knows who is in touch with the great man is PJ Harvey. And all this adds up to absolutely nothing at all.

Did I ever tell you I'm descended from Mary Queen of Scots?

Actually, right at this minute, I feel rather damn fine. After dinner I came back to the caravan and sat outside smoking a cigarette with my feet on this table I found in a shed watching the lambs graze and the rabbits hop as the evening sun shone down and it all felt good. Odd to think that a couple of hours previously I was seriously thinking about throwing in the towel.

I finished the chicken house a little after lunch having had to pause in the hammering as M had a Tai Chi class. Somehow I don't think people travel to the farm for the sound of a mini building site so I did some weeding out front. A couple of things went wrong. First up I had to saw a huge 10ft post to size. All the other posts I've sawed had been easy but for some reason the saw kept sticking refusing to let a rhythm start. A mild frustration but a frustration none the less. Then while I was weeding the hoe broke. The business end snapped off and whacked into my shin.

One of the great things about my work here is having to make do with what's available. It's a challenge both mentally and physically and can be very rewarding. It can also be really fucking frustrating. With a basic plan and a trip to B&Q I could have finished that chicken house in 2 days with next to zero hassle I'm sure.

When I'm alert and raring to go this celebration of the bodge is great, but when I'm tired and irritable, as I have been for the last week, it's just the bloody worst thing. I feel like I could be at a very important point where I either adjust to this way of life or I don't. I'm at the stage where I could in theory carry on living like this forever. But accepting this as normal still requires a change of attitude. Anyway, still early days to muse too much. Later...

And so to the accursed chicken house and run and the fifth day of construction. Now all my efforts were to come together to form the whole and the proof would be in the pudding. Will it work? Well, we're not going to find out for a bit.

First, time to put the doors on. Only the hinges didn't come with screws. And the only screws left in the box are an inch long. The doors are about a centimetre thick. They are also hard, tough buggers resistant to screws. The bastards. My thumb still aches, this time on the right hand, the left being the victim of the hammer last week.

Little things that should be easy, like screwing in some hinges somehow takes all morning. Oh yeah. The bolts. They come with screws. But they're shite. Tiny little flat-head buggers (why, when we have had the cross-headed screw for so many years does the flat-head still exist? Why?) made out of the metallic equivalent to porridge. Half way in the head crumbles. It won't go in and it won't come out.

Now, I'm naive and expected to have finished the whole thing in a couple of hours. By lunch time I'd put on four doors and hinged the flap at the back (allowing access to the nests where eggs are to be laid). But now the worst was over, or so it seemed.

Next, the felt. Since the chicken house is made up of about a hundred separate pieces of wood, it's not particularly waterproof so the whole thing has to be covered in roofing felt. Not a problem and I had this all figured out. Cut the pieces to size and hammer them on in such a way that the rain runs off them without getting to the wood. Easy. The only issue is once this is in place there's no turning back. To remove the felt is to tear it and I'm not about to waste any. Soon the house was cocooned in three different shades of felt and it was time for the moment of truth - fitting the house to the frame of the chicken run.

The house now weighs a ton and carrying it is impossible, so I slowly dragged it the couple of feet into position. Nice and snug, or so it seemed. Only the overhang at the front (acting as a small porch over the door) didn't clear the top of the run keeping the door of the house a good few inches back. Since the frame is triangular (being made of spare roof struts) moving the house slightly to the side would solve this. Only now the door wouldn't open. My patented "opening the door via another door alongside it" to let the birds out was now a bit of a stretch. I could reach but could M?

On top of this the floor of the chicken house was a little too low compared to the frame. I heaved the house back and with most of my strength lifted it up. With the rest of my strength I gently pushed it over and hammered in a couple more stakes to the base to raise it up a few inches. A brief rest later and again with the tipping and hefting about the place.

By now it was getting on 4.00pm. Enough with the tinkering, I thought to myself. Time to finish this. The rest of the working day was spent plugging the gaps between the house and the frame with strips of chicken-wire fencing before I was called over for dinner. The al fresco delights of a summers evening were lost on me as I sat on the patio furniture darkly sipping my soup. This had not gone to plan, and to top it all I was knackered. And I still had to water the trees.

There are two trees at the top of the middle field that were planted last year but are not growing. Because of their position the water drains away and they have to be watered through the summer. There is no water outlet at the top of the hill. The water has to be carried up there. The method currently being seen as best practice is to half fill a beaten-up metal dustbin with four buckets of water, put this in a wheelbarrow and wheel it up the hill. By the time it gets there three buckets of water are left, which is enough for the trees. I'm pretty sceptical about this system as the dustbin tends to rock forwards and backwards in the barrow splashing everywhere. And it's fucking heavy. This wouldn't be as much of an issue if they didn't have to be watered at the end of the day. And of course, what with me being knackered, pissed off and achy, it was destined to go wrong.

Half way up the hill I stopped for the rest on a plateau before attempting the final slope. The wheelbarrow seemed secure and I turned to stretch. Bad move. The water must have still been sloshing and the momentum caused the bin to rock backwards. As it did so the barrow fell backwards and the water splashed out. All over my trousers. This is not just water but water taken from the algae-green trough in the field. And while they were my work trousers I'd just had them laundered for the first time in two months. I stood there agast as a river of water trickled down hill through the cow shit and completely forgot the swear. Then I remembered.

Eventually the trees were watered and I was back in the caravan listening to "Wireless Wise", the worst Radio 4 quiz show ever devised, gently fuming. Not a good day...

Why are all the good music radio programs on so late? This is a rant I've been building up to for a while so expect it coming your way soon, but Mixing It on Radio 3 is the most tedious culprit, running for a mere hour from 11.00pm on Sunday night. While getting to bed at midnight is not really that bad, these late night avant-guard music shows tend to be a bit on the cerebral side which, while great radio doesn't exactly wind down the mind. And then there's my bedtime book, The Illuminatus! Trilogy which tends to send my brain off in a million different directions keeping sleep further at bay.

So, as I staggered out of the caravan at 8.30am this morning in the stumbling dash for the portaloo, the sight of a couple of gates in the wrong place puzzled me slightly until it dawned on me. The sheep were being sheared.

I wandered over and was greeted by what looked to me like a goat that had been plastered in that 80s DIY manner using a square plastic tool to make random rectangles across the wall. This goat was of course a sheep and it bleated at me as I clambered over the gate. Four or five others were milling around looking somewhat dazed, while cooped up in the shed were the other sheep, nervously bleating as they awaited their turn under the razor.

The shearer had set up a small pen with a gate at each end. She herded in a few sheep from the shed and then took them out one by one, grabbing it under the chin, pulling it up and onto its arse and shaving from the belly out. It was interesting to see these stubborn creatures being manhandled in such a quick and effective way, but then the shearer said she'd been doing this since she was a wee girl. She sure had the arms to prove it, but an incongruously high pitched voice. A few of the sheep were nicked by the shears (which is basically a bigger version of what I use on my own head) but aparently this breed cut quite easily and should heal in a day.

There were some quite traumatic moments when the lambs were separated from their mothers and one of the mums even tried to jump back into the shed to be with her child, the mothering instinct obviously overriding the fear of being sheared again. And then the rams started getting boisterous. With the wool gone their smells were different and suddenly a couple were butting each other. One of the rams already has a split skull so we tried to separate them, which was rather daunting as they growled and struggled to get past the human barrier between them.

But all in all it went very smoothly. They do look very odd now. Their heads seem far too large for their bodies and, compared to pre-shearing, they look almost skeletal.

Anyway, there was not much for me to do so M asked me to start on some weeding in the front garden. With the rampant sunshine of the last fortnight the weeds have gone ballistic taking over every patch of soil and more. And so it was that I spent most of the day pulling up small clumps of grass from the gravel drive. Best described as very Zen indeed. And there's really not much more to say about that.

I'd had a do-nothing-day today. The wind was battering the caravan turning the boiler flu (for which there is no boiler) into a sound effect for a really scary movie and I just fancied lying around reading. Then, at about 7.00pm, M unexpectedly knocked on the door. She needed some help bringing the sheep in.

We walked the long way to the top field to approach them from behind, M armed with a bucket and me armed with my arms. M's still got this tedious virus she'd picked up at the doctor's surgery when she went there to get an insect bite looked at. This is ironic as she never goes to the doctors as a rule and so has obviously not built up an immunity to the sort of bugs city people shrug off easily while her catching something from the animals is very unlikely. I asked if it was getting annoying, being drained of energy when there's so much to do, but she said she didn't have the energy to get annoyed. So far, touch wood, I haven't had any symptoms, but then I have spent the last decade in cities.

(Of course, I'm now worrying about this sniffle I've developed, but that's probably just from having carried a bale of hay which always seems to set me off. Yes, that'll be it. Yes...)

Anyway, the sheep had to be brought in because tomorrow morning they're getting sheared. The rain seems to have cleared, though you can never tell with the island weather, but they'll still get wet from the dew first thing, so in they come.

It wasn't so hard this time. At dusk they're more happy to come inside as their feeding is done and they're ready to bed down for the night, but there were a couple of stubborn ones which I had to wave my arms around at and scare forwards. As I weaved across the top of the hill with my arms outstretched the setting sun cast a long shadow of my crucifixion in front of me. I am Jesus bringing in the flock, I mused for at least three seconds.

The sheep will generally follow M anywhere and they were soon in the cow shed. But the journey was not yet over. They had to go from the cow shed across the farmyard road into a different shed. With me holding three gates in a line to stop them getting into the rest of the farmyard M tried to lead them over with the bucket. Most of them followed but a few remained. Why should they move? They're happy in the cow shed, after all. So M goes back to encourage them, followed back by all the by all the obedient sheep. Every time she goes back and forth another stubborn sheep joins the happy throng until there's just one left. This one ain't moving. M stands behind it and shoves but it's like a donkey that don't wanna go. I should point out that I'm helpless to assist as I'm holding the gates up. If I go, they fall and the sheep get everywhere. Eventually the sheep are completely out of the cow shed but not yet in the other shed, but at least we're able to close the main gate so they can't go back. Gradually we're able to edge the three gates from a straight line to half a hexagon, then two sides of a triangle and finally, with a quick shove, a single gate holding them in. Eighteen sheep and four lambs all accounted for. And then Fred turns up to help. Nice one, Fred!

Last weekend I went for a quick drink with Dave and Anita, a couple of old friends who happen to be civil servants in Winchester City and Hampshire County Councils respectively. While it never really occurred to me, the Island is part of Hampshire and therefore during her work Anita has contact with the council here. She said that she had noticed they do things slightly differently here and have a slight scepticism towards "the mainland" which bore out some of my observations. Nothing drastic, you understand, but it was interesting to see the uniqueness of the Island described from a completely different perspective.

Anyway, I joined the library today. Armed with my so-easily-forged letter 'from' M which I typed and she signed, and an old credit card statement sent to my mums address - where I haven't lived since 1991, I strolled up to the desk, sweat pouring from my bearded face after the bike ride, and announced that I would like to join. The perfectly normal (ie clean) young librarian stared at me for a second then started the usual patter about proof of address and after I'd presented my documentation went to consult a slightly older librarian. "How long are you staying on the Island?" she asked. Ooh, at least until October, maybe longer!

As my addresses were being typed in a chap at the next desk was enquiring about a book he'd specially requested which was coming from another Hampshire library on the mainland. A very familiar confusion was played out as the staff couldn't work out where the book was but fortunately the guy wasn't that bothered, but I was again struck by the repeated use of the term "mainland". Turns out there's an extra surcharge of £2.50 to get a book over on the boat as opposed to the basic 50p to get it from another Island library making for a two-tier system.

It's easy to find this amusing, as I do, but thinking about it, what how else would you describe "the rest of the country"? When Fred talks dismissively of the mainland it's hard not to raise a smile, but there are obvious logistical issues here. This is not just an island but a massive, self sufficient, community that doesn't have the normal blurring of boundaries that other areas of the country have. I still haven't put my finger on how exactly this affects the society here - it's not exactly isolated but it's also not homogenised into the rest of the south of England, and you have to factor in the huge tourism industry and large number of retirees which brings in a wide range of other voices and cultures, but it's still a very different place.

That said, if I was living in an isolated part of Yorkshire or Wales it might well have the same feeling - my chum Brett's stories from Lampeter in darkest west Wales seem to bear this out.

Anyway, I joined the library, principally to use the free net access through the spangly new People's Network initiative, and I must say I'm quite impressed. You log on using your library card number and this gives you your own Documents and Settings folder to download and save stuff into. I logged off a couple of times and when I logged back on my files were still there and IE still remembered my browsing history. Whether this stays until the next day, and whether this sits on that specific computer or on the server I don't know [later: it doesn't, obviously deleting everything with a reboot], but makes for a nice personalisation. You can also plug in USB devices, like my digital camera, although the computer had problems with the jpeg images for some reason. And other than the usual restrictions you'd expect (nannyware blocking restricted sites, not able to install programs), it gives a very good impression of being your own computer, which so many internet cafe type systems don't.

I'm quite impressed with this setup, especially as it's a new thing and will hopefully evolve in interesting ways. An obvious development would be establishing WiFi hotspots in each library so people can bring their own laptops into the library and hook up, and to then extend the range of internet applications away from the Microsoft stable. I've noticed a drift away from the browser of late with RSS aggregators, IM programs and the like, so this would be a natural development. It's clear someone with a bit of vision is co-ordinating this initiative so we can only hope for the future.

It's the little things. Last weekend I brought back from my stash of stuff in Winchester a sheet and duvet cover. The idea was that now it's getting warmer I can escape the straight-jacket of the sleeping bag and have a proper bed. This is actually quite important. The sleeping bag I have is one of those hardcore ones that narrow at the bottom. I suspect this is to keep the feet warm during a hardcore camping experience. Which is all well and good, but I don't sleep well stretched out like a board. Also, the sleeping bag liners, which are a brilliant idea for keeping the bag clean, just add to this constriction. I can deal with this for a short period but after two months it was getting a bit much. I'm also informed that lying foetal-like with the knees level with the stomach is good for the back, and boy do I need stuff that is good my my back. So I put the blankets in the duvet cover, laid out the sheet and lo and behold, a bed.

Now every time I go into the bedroom I'm greeted by a very good impression of civilisation. This is compounded by the sheets being ones I used in London for the last couple of years. The room is quite small and the double bed rather dominates it, so every time I go in there I'm greeted by a vision from my pre-farm days, completely out of context. I half expect to see an iMac and loaded bookshelf in there. Very, very odd indeed.

Today started wet and stayed wet, the most heavy rain we've had here for weeks. But at least it's warm rain and not too windy. M's got a virus laying her low so we weren't able to get the bits needed to finish the monster-chicken-run (hinges, bolts, some more chicken wire), so I spent the day cutting back the hedge and weeds around the gate. I'd trimmed this back a bit last week when M's son pointed out how hard it was to see oncoming traffic when driving out, but was surprised when M asked me to take it further back so the gate posts were visible. gate posts? There are gate posts?

A picture is emerging of how this farm came together over the last year or so. I know that when M took it over it was in something of a state, and also that she was starting pretty much from scratch having had a much smaller smallholding in Chale. When I got here in April it looked pretty smart but the house had only just been built, the paddock just fenced off and so on. I suspect that as these important things were taken care of, other things, such as trimming hedges, were understandably left for later.

This would explain why I feel there's an almost transitional feel to the farm. Sometimes it runs smoothly and efficiently as M obviously desires that it should, while at other times it's a bit more haphazard as things are being done for the first or second time and the systems are still being worked out.

It really is an incredible thing M is taking on here. To set up and run a farm on her own (with help and advice from Fred of course, and with Mike coming down at weekends) in the current uncertain farming climate (I keep hearing about CAP reform in a very negative light - must do some research on it) takes a lot of guts. I wouldn't dream of putting words into her mouth and trying to explain why she does it, mainly because I'd probably be insulting with my level of ignorance about farming, but there's obviously a belief or knowledge that this is the right thing to do, a credo that I 100% subscribe to.

In my "specialist fields" of comix and blogging there are many people who do stuff for little or no material reward because it's the right thing to do, and I consider myself one of them, so it's illuminating to confirm that this kind of behaviour goes on in other realms. I can say with certainty that this farm operates on the principles that animals should be raised with love and respect and that pesticides are not necessary. Again, I could be wrong, but I think what I'm seeing here is the "think global act local" idea taken to the next level.

I will confess that my passion for organic farming is only slight, fitting in with a mass of other somewhat utopian ideas about rampant commercialisation, the evils of target-based efficiency and the dehumanisation of modern post-industrial society (get me drunk sometime and I'll tell you all about it!), and I don't think I'll be playing much of an active part in the WWOOFing world once I finish here (although I suspect any holidays I take in the future will probably be working on a farm) but a revelation is starting to come through to me.

The day to day life here is hard. Some days I'm bouncing with energy and some days, like most of this week, I feel terminally exhausted, filthy, sore and shitty. It's also quite a lonely existence - M values her privacy and I respect that. In fact, when your thumb is bruised from hammering in 2000 nails and missing three, your knuckles sting every time you clench your fists thanks to the tiny thorns embedded in them, your back aches from repeated shovelling and carrying of mud, trees, weeds and wood, and when you look in the mirror and a haggard face with dog-tired eyes and a matted beard looks back at you, it's very easy to wonder what the fuck you thought you were thinking about. And, if I'm honest, as I sit in my spartan caravan making a cup of tea from water collected from the paddock in a mug that hasn't seen detergent for a good few weeks, that thought crosses my mind a few times each day.

I'm starting to look like an old man. This is not something I'm worried about - in fact I've embraced the signs of aging with excitement over the years - but it's become much more striking over the past month. Maybe it's the heavy beard that does it, covering up my babyface cheeks and extending my chin down. Maybe it's the fact that I've actually got hair on my head for the first time in ages that the receding hairline is more pronounced. And maybe it's the weather beaten look in my eyes that says so much more than just tiredness. Maybe if I shaved, scrubbed up and lived indoors for a few weeks I'd look no different to when I first came here. But maybe this is the physical turning point, a kick start into middle age. Like I said, this doesn't worry me. I'm merely curious.

And yet, despite all these negative things, I'm staying here. Yes, it's true I don't have anything much to go back to, that in a way I've made this the only option in the short term, and also that it's a relatively easy option, not having to take responsibility for my day-to-day existence.

Part of it is a trial, I suppose. If I can see this through then I will be a better person. I want it to be hard and I want to falter. I want to put my problems into some perspective. But a big part of it, something which is so obvious it often sits unnoticed, is that I'm in an ethically positive situation. I was thinking about the WWOOF setup, which as been running since the 1970s and is now a collective of international groups, and wondering if the very simple system of hosts and guests trading labour for food and accommodation, could be applied in other areas of society. I wish it could but I have great difficulty seeing how it might. Any ideas?

Y'know, keeping this journal actually has a use. While I was on the mainland last weekend I spent a bit of time tidying up the presentation of my three year old weblog and glanced over entries made in 2000. This blog was started just after I'd moved to London and while it's not a strict diary, it does show certain nuances to my thoughts and mental attitude. Key moments aside, the actual content is pretty irrelevant and I don't think it has any value as a work in and of itself, but there's something in the immediacy of it that says different things about me than a strict diary would. In other words, while it doesn't necessarily stand up as literature, it stands up to analysis and as a springboard to memories.

With that in mind I just had a re-read through the first four weeks of farmblogging. I must apologies not only for the typos, many of which will have bypassed the spellchecker, but also the appalling structure of parts of it. I really must proof read these entries more. All I can say is that this Targus Stowaway keyboard takes some getting used to and I was really knackered those first few weeks.

That aside, I'm really glad I kept the journal. I'm still having niggling doubts about my ability to stick this through, but to be able to look by and see not only what I was doing in April but what I was thinking and the assumptions I was making really helps put things into perspective. Memory seems to work for events but not for states of mind. It's good to have the changes in my state of mind recorded.

Kneeling down, hammering in a nail, I spied two wellington boots walking along with a familiar gait. "Hello young man!" came the call. Fred-the-Farmer was in the house. This was good news as the chicken house I'd just built was way to heavy for me to move so I needed a hand. Fred gave a sharp intake and pointed out his thumb which was all swollen up, but still went to one side of the house. With one arm he gracefully lifted his side and started moving it. On the other side I struggled to keep it an inch clear and pretty much dragged it along. "You're not liftin'!" he helpfully advised. Yes, but I haven't spent the last 30 years carrying cows about the place now, have I. "Ooh, I've done a lot in my life" he said, before leaning in close and lowering his voice. "Did you ever sleep with five women in one night?" The mind boggled, got itself together and came to the conclusion that he's probably telling the truth. Then the mind boggled again, just for good measure. By the time the mind had stopped acting like it was in a Douglas Adams novel, Fred had gone to find M.

I hadn't warned Fred about what he was about to get involved with because I suspected he would have made a quick getaway, or at least prepared a solid argument as to why he couldn't possibly do what M wanted him to do. The sheep had to be de-maggotted and no way was M doing this alone, and no way was I likely to be competent enough to help her.

As I've previously described, when the sheep's fleece gets long it tends to collect substantial amounts of excrement around the tail and arse area. In this hot weather flies are attracted and because the wool is so matted with shit no wagging of tails is enough to deter them. So this encrusted wool has to be cut off and the remaining area sprayed to kill of any maggots that are feeding there. The implications of leaving this can be fatal as the maggots burrow into the sheep, either up the anus or through the skin, eventually killing it. On this farm the symptom is known as "mucky bums".

Normally this wouldn't be such a big problem as the sheep tend to be sheared before the flies take an interest, but M couldn't get a shearer until next Monday. Now, this is an assumption and I could so very easily be wrong, but I suspect that because farm sheep have been bred for their wool over the centuries natural moulting isn't fast enough to protect them. In fact they do seem to suffer from a lot of problems that were they wild would probably render them extinct. But I digress. [later: and I'm wrong - see later post...]

The last time mucky bums were dealt with it was a Saturday and I was off on my bike. This time I was on the farm and while I didn't actually get my hands dirty I was helping to herd them into the tunnel between the shed and the field. Here's how it happens.

First, Fred and I chase some sheep from the shed area into the tunnel by walking behind them with out arms outstretched making hissing noises. If they tried to bolt through us we just jumped in their way forcing them back. Eventually one or more of them would go through the gate. At the end of the tunnel is M who they are not afraid of. She hold one of them steady while Fred inspects the arse, cutting off matted wool to see if there's a maggot problem. If there is, M sprays the area while Fred keeps it clear. After a quick check of the hoofs, trimming where necessary, the sheep is let out the other side of the tunnel back into the field. Simple.

Of course, it's not really that simple. Not only is the job quite disgusting and the sheep stubborn, frightened and quite absurd, but M and Fred have what is best described as "a certain dynamic". I can't describe it in detail without seeming to take sides and probably be mortally offensive to one or both parties, but suffice to say the standard of discussion has a level of stubborn argumentative bickering that can only exist between two very good, old friends. I kept well out of it.

At one stage an exasperated M shouted to ask me to check their feet as she wasn't convinced Fred was checking them properly because he'd only popped in to feed the calf and have a cuppa and wanted to get off as soon as possible. M couldn't check them herself because she was being crushed against the gate by two sheep desperate to get through it. I just stood there are grinned the grin of an idiot. Me? Check the feet? Sure, I could check they had feet but I wouldn't know if they were problematic feet or perfectly fine feet. Looking into this narrow passageway containing two farmers, five sheep and a lamb I decided my helping would just make things worse, so I did and said nothing, and nothing else was required of me.

Two hours later the sheep were processed and all that remained was a shitty pile of shitty wool. On Monday the shearing lady comes to shear and the mucky bums syndrome will be over for another year.

Here is the recent news from the farm...

• Millie the cow has gone back into the field. Last week one of the other cows was sold so the total number of cows out there is still four with three calves. The calves look very small next to the monstrous bull. I'd gotten used to seeing Millie in the context of her calf (which is still in the shed) so it's odd to see her with beasts her own size. It's also odd that I can recognise her very well while the other cows are more anonymous.
  
• The orphan lambs are slowly getting less afraid of the big outdoors, crying out less and venturing into the rest of the paddock rather than just hugging the fence nearest to the house. I was confused by their fleeces turning a light brown colour until I realised they spend most of their time sitting by the gate on the soil rather than on the grass like the other sheep. So they are dusty lambs.
  
• The weather this last couple of days has been somewhat overcast though still very warm. This has had the unexpected effect of making the farm very quiet for some reason, especially as the baby animals are growing up and making less noise out in the fields. It gets quite serene in the afternoons.

Okay, so I've been away and come back. While this is only the second time and it's not very scientific to base assumptions on a pattern of one, I am experiencing something of a variation on the "once bitten twice shy" motif. Nothing on the scale of May 21st's breakdown as yet, but you'll not be surprised that fretful musings have been taking place in the dark recesses of my mind.

On Saturday I did something I hadn't done for over two months. I made myself a meal. I was in Winchester uploading this diary and getting my internet fix but the house was otherwise empty, my mum and step-day being on a house-hunting holiday. As you'll be aware, the WWOOFing set-up means I am freed from the tyranny of shopping, cooking, household chores, bills, all the normal day-to-day tasks of life. As a result I'm eating properly for the first time in ages, am getting healthy through the work I'm doing and my mind is free to settle down and move forwards.

The worry is that I might be getting institutionalised, or at least dependent on others. Little things are starting to bug me. For instance, when I run out of toilet paper I have to ask for some more. Same for tea and sugar. Not only is my day to day life prescribed, but I'm also working in a completely unfamiliar environment. A lot of the nuances of farm work just don't make sense to someone who hasn't lived with them for years and I have to accept a lot of things without fully understanding them, despite asking questions.. At the same time I'm constantly having to ask if I'm doing something right, be it digging up weeds or this week's job of building the mega-chicken run.

Now, this is not really a problem. In fact the humility of realising I don't know what I'm doing is quite healthy as I can be a bit of a pig-headed egotistical control freak in the workplace. No chance of that happening here thanks to the combination of being a guest on M's farm and not having a clue about the work involved.

I suppose what's worrying me is what happens when this is all over. Will I be able to cook? Will I be able to structure my day? Will I have any initiative left? I've got about 16 weeks to go here on the farm. Will four more months of essentially being looked after be a good thing?

Now, I should emphasise that none of this is the fault of the WWOOFing environment. I am 'contracted' (in the loosest sense of the word) to work 6 hours a day, five days a week. If I wanted I could start work at 8.00 and be finished by 2.00, have a big lunch, take a packed dinner and the rest of the time would be mine. As it is, I chose to do two shifts, roughly 9.30-12.30 and 2.00-5.00. Sometimes I go over that time, sometimes I take more breaks, depending on the work. This way, after dinner, I only have four hours to structure myself, usually taken up with Radio 4 programmes and writing this journal.

Now, if I switched to the earlier, single shift pattern I'd have eight hours to structure. That'd be, like, taking responsibility and stuff.

And there's the paradox. I really like this trade off of working hard and in return not having to worry about the structure of my day. But what do I do? I extend the comfort zone so much it becomes stifling. And then I think that the situation is the problem. It's not the problem. I, as ever, am my own problem. All I have to do is take control of the situation.

Eek!

Not being a seasoned cyclist by any stretch of the imagination I have, if not a mortal fear, a worry about the weather. If it looks like rain, I ain't going out. Yes, I have waterproofs but the sweat that would build up under them would defeat the object. My cycling around the island is usually pretty optional, but coming back from the mainland I can do nothing about. If it's raining on a Sunday evening then I'm going to have to cycle through it.

This morning, in Winchester, the dry spell broke and there was rain. By lunchtime it had cleared but as I got ready to leave the clouds were building. "Looks like thunder" said my step-dad and while I filed this under "Nah" I wrapped all my stuff up in plastic bags. The problem with having lots of gadgets (PDA, camera, mobile, CD/mp3 player) is they have to be kept dry. In a city environment this is not a problem, but an hour long ride through the countryside in the rain...

The ferry didn't bring much relief. I've developed an aversion to the inside of the boat. The vehicle ferry, while cheaper for foot passengers than the hover-jet-craft-thing, does tend to have a lot of families on it. Sartre was almost but not quite on the money. Hell is not so much other people than other people's families, especially in an enclosed space that likes to give the impression of a "cruise". So I sit on the outside deck where the families tend not to go, and if they do are diluted by the space and ambient noise.

There were no families outside today. The clouds were heavy and the wind was up giving a distinct chill to the air. Still no rain, but the threat was of something not very close to the general concept of dry. The boat pulls in and I set off on the last leg of the journey - inland to Godshill.

The first stage from Cowes to Newport was fine. As the sun started to set the clouds broke up a wee bit. Indicating some small progress in the leg muscle department I managed to stay in a high gear most of the way, whipping along the (quite wonderful) cycle path that runs along the river. Before I knew it I was into Newport and on to the second stage, a gravel cycle path to Blackwater. Here the legs started to complain, but more worryingly, I could distinctly feel moisture in the air. Emerging from the tree-covered path onto the main road I saw it for the first time.

Fog.

Well, at least it's not going to rain, I thought, but this was a thick one, the kind of fog that David Niven would get missed by a French conductor when jumping without a parachute, only to fall in love with Kim Hunter ringing alarm bells in the monochrome 'other place'. But I digress. Visibility way down, compounded by the sun setting. And here's me, not only without lights (didn't think them necessary at this time of year) but doing a fair bit of walking up those bastard, bastard hills. Still, I made it back okay. The traffic really does calm down on the Island once the tourists go home and the locals finish work.

Even though it covers the landscape there's still a beauty to the fog as it envelopes the hills of the Island like so much cotton wool. A similar weather system occurred at the start of the anticyclone last week and as well as acting as a cooling agent it was a joy to watch. Kept the buzzing airplanes and helicopters at bay, too.

I'm off to the mainland tomorrow evening to upload this journal and the photos. These regular breaks do seem to affect how I perceive my time here. Admittedly this is only the second, but I'm so stationary most of the time that to leave the island is quite momentous. Also, because I'm chronicling this here, each chunk of time really is a chapter. Interesting that how I've laid out the farmblog site has such an effect on my mind. Not that I think it's a serious effect, just notable.

And so this second chapter draws to a conclusion. I've just read through the three weeks of entries and it's been quite momentous, and yet it seems to have flowed by quite smoothly. The depression attack is still quite worrying but as time goes by it seems to have been a blip, a flashback. Of course, it might not have been. I'll be watching my mood to see if it might come on again. I did notice a similar thing coming on today as I got fed up with the weeding this afternoon, but rather than carry on I switched jobs and everything was okay. Variety, and all that.

One interesting thing about this journal is how it's drifting away from being purely about the farm with other subjects coming in. This is not a problem - the journal is about me being on a farm and how I'm living with it - but it's perhaps noteworthy that a lot of these non-farm entries would normally have gone on the main tradblog. I wonder, when I'm back with regular net access, whether I'll keep the weblog and journal separate (at least as writing projects - obviously they can be merged on the site). When I get back next week I'll be joining the library and making use of net access there. Obviously I won't be blogging my life as that's farmblog fodder. I've always mixed up the diary stuff with the blogging stuff so it'll be an interesting move to separate them, even if it is forced by circumstances.

I'm getting worried about the lambs, although I'm trying not to get too concerned. They've been out in the field-paddock for a few days now and are still hanging around in the corner nearest the house during the day and by my caravan during the night. They're not too relaxed, either. Their breathing is rapid and they're always so close together. Tonight they got a bit restless as the darkness drew in started jumping around, butting each other quite aggressively. I suspect the close proximity they've been keeping had gotten too much (or there's getting into John Peel's taste in music emanating from my caravan). I wonder how long it will take to get them used to the great outdoors? Lambs normally have their mother sheep to hang around with for security but these ones don't. Hopefully they'll get through it without being too scarred by the experience.

The bonfire is still burning. This morning there were flames coming out of the top which we took advantage of, adding some dry stuff I'd recently cut down. In an ideal world the fire will be the same when I get back from the mainland while the lambs will not. We'll see.

The summer weather broke through today most gloriously. I took my regular Wednesday morning walk into Godshill to buy some cigarette papers and set up a standing order for the Saturday Guardian and was sweating by 9.30am. Oh, glorious anticyclone, most beautiful of weather systems, how I respect and love you. Sun! Clear skies! A very slight and gentle breeze! This is what summer is all about. And it's going to last, for a few days at least!

The few people I've mentioned this too, okay the two people, didn't know what an anticyclone was. I think I came across it on a particularly informative weather forecast in my childhood and, while I've never heard about it since, the wonderful simplicity of it struck me so hard I committed it to memory. Here's the basics.

You know how a cyclone works - a tight piece of intense weather spinning around a small point very quickly. An anticyclone is, as you'd expect, the opposite. But if you think of a cyclone as being similar to a bath plughole draining, an anticyclone is not like playing a film of this backward. It's more the opposite in every way.

Rather than spinning in, the anticyclone spins out. Rather than being very fast, it's very slow. Rather than concentrating rainclouds in one place it disperses them. The end result is a massive spiral covering a huge amount of land which spreads whatever weather was in it thinly while not letting any new weather in. End result: clear skies letting in the sun and no strong winds to disperse the heat. Lovely!

And the ground is heating up nicely. Last night I threw off the two blankets I normally have over my sleeping bag and as I write this I'm not wearing the wooly hat, two jumpers and gloves I normally wear. It's a revelation.

(Definition of "anticyclone")

Done it - one field of about 7-8 acres has been methodically swept by me for ragwort. Yay! Now I just have to sweep it for thistles. Boo! But first I'm painting the carport (actually a corrugated iron shelter) green and planting some climbing plants in front of it. Yay!

In other news, the lambs are slowly getting used to their new home but still hang around as close to humans as possible. While they are currently still making their home for the night right by my caravan, at least they're asleep. Got a really cute photo of the little one just now!

The bonfire is still smouldering three days after starting. Smoke pours out in fits and spurts like a sleeping volcano. Unfortunately the wind has changed direction and it now passes by my window, but it's not so bad. There's plenty of stuff still on it, which is not such a good thing, but it does mean it'll probably keep going for a couple more days in this dry weather.

I went topless in the field today and wore shorts! Not only is this more comfortable in the heat (see next entry for more on the weather) but I'd like to merge my winter city-boy white torso with my countryside worker deep tanned arms. Currently it looks... well, it looks very odd.

The only downside to bearing skin is the danger of thistles and nettles, but it actually didn't turn out so bad. My legs are amazingly unscathed and the occasional nettle sting was soon corrected with a doc leaf. You don't see doc leaves around much any more and I suspect they've been the victim of over-zealous spraying. I remember them being everywhere when I was a nipper and a nettle sting was tantamount to being bitten by a dog. But there are loads here. Nuff said.

What happened today then. Well, I allowed myself a small jump of joy as the top three quarters of the field are now clear of ragwort. There remains one dense patch at the bottom and a general sweep and then it's all done, ragwort-wise. Should have the whole thing cleared by the end of the week.

You might be wondering whether this is really worth it. I've been wondering this myself a few times as this seems such a waste of time. But then you have to remember that what has been about four weeks cumulative work by me has prepared the hay for the whole winter feeding the cows and sheep as well as being used for bedding for most of them over the year as needed. So it's not that stoopid really.

I've been struck by the range of grasses up on the field because you don't usually see such a variety. Most lawns and parks have a single variety while most farms are a uniform dark green. Here there are lush thick grasses that don't grow too tall, very tall blades of grass, long stems with seed bunches at the top and many more varieties. Even within those descriptions there are numerous shades and densities maiking for a patchwork that shimmers as some grasses bend more in the wind.

I suspected that this was unique to an organic field and, yes, pesticides and weed killers do render a field of grass uniform. Interestingly, the mixed up organic field is not only better for the animals because of the lack of chemicals but also gives them a more varied diet. So for the herbivores these fields are like an infinite menu of every flavour under the sun (or at least the IoW sun). Add to this all the insects, and the animals that feed on them, that survive because of the lack of pesticides, and whatever else feeds on particular grasses, and, well, it's all nature, innit.

And to think, all of that would be wiped away with a day's spraying.

I didn't think that lambs could yawn, but then dogs and cats do so there's no reason why not. It would seem the lambs didn't sleep last night as they're sleeping on and off now, either in dozing sitting position, or more spread out. Then, when they're awake they stagger around all dopey with heavy eyes.

This morning M brought my breakfast to the caravan (her son's family are visiting for half term and I think the kitchen is getting a bit crowded) and as she carried it in the lambs got dead excited, having obviously waited alertly through the early hours for someone to come and see them. The two bigger lambs lost it slightly and jumped through the gate. I didn't see this but I wish I had. The bars of the gate are pretty close together but obviously about one lamb wide.

They weren't about to go back into the paddock so M led them to their old paddock and shut them in there. Problem was, the younger lamb was still in the new paddock. The only comparison I can think of it families or lovers seperated by Nazi German soldiers in a particularly emotive war movie. Little one cries, bigger ones cry back, little one cries, and so on with the volume and anxiety increasing. The gate had been left open and the littl'un found her way out and started towards the old paddock with me following to let her in. As she approached, the other two crammed up against the gate and I had to shove them all in with my knees as they did that lamb embrace before running off as a trio again, reunited after a fraught 10 minutes.

I keep forgetting about this, but Sandy the dog has been outside for the last couple of days. Considering a week ago she was in a critical condition at the vets after being run over, and that the vet had initially said she probably wouldn't make it, this recovery is quite incredible. There she is, bouncing around like nothing had happened with just a shaved patch on her fur to remind you. Wow.

11.30pm and the lambs are still sitting in the same place as before. Thankfully it's not too cold out with no wind so the poor dears won't suffer too much, but I doubt they'll get too much sleep. Me, I'm wise enough to know where my bed is...

A big day for the orphan lambs - today they graduated from the holding paddock in the farmyard to the other paddock in the fields. They've gradually had their powdered milk watered down and reduced and have mainly been eating a muslie-looking feed along with the grass in the paddock and now they're ready for the next stage on the road to becoming grownup sheep.

First of all, we got them desperate, leaving them shut in their shelter while all the other animals and me were given breakfast. Then, bottles in hand, we let them out, led them through the gate and, with some difficulty, led them to the new paddock. As the grass in their old paddock was pretty sparse they immediately made a beeline for a particularly lush clump and had to have the bottles shoved in their faces to distract them away. I get the feeling they don't really want the milk any more but the habit of getting excited about seeing a plastic container with a yellow teat is so ingrained they can't help acting on it. There wasn't any urgency in getting them in - they're not about to run away and could probably be allowed to roam free around the farm if they weren't likely to hurt themselves on something - but the job had to be done so after five minutes they were in there.

After getting excited about all the grass everywhere they suddenly got a bit confused. While they've had the run of the old paddock they've tended to hang about either in or by the shelter and now they have no base. All afternoon they've been hanging around the bottom edge of the paddock following us as we walked near it. While I was strimming and M was planting vegetables they sat in the corner right by the fence in a trio with the small lamb in the middle, watching us. There is a shelter in the paddock but it's a curved corrugated iron arc, very different from the square shelter I built for them, and while M put some food in there for them just like she used to, they haven't quite accepted it. Currently they're sitting by the fence with a view of their old home and I can see them through my window. I wonder if the noise of the radio (which is audible through the caravan walls - don't worry, I have no neighbours) is comforting them.

It's interesting how close they stick together. Obviously they've been together pretty much since birth and constitute a "flock", but they stick so close it's uncanny. But then I saw the same kind of attitude when the other lambs died last month so it's not a surprise. They are incredibly social, supporting creatures.

I think one of the disorientating factors is the sudden change of scale. Where they were before they were buildings on every side of them. Suddenly there's a great expanse on two sides and they look so small in comparison. On top of this most of the animals have been moved back to the top field because of the calves (more later) so they really are alone. The other animals will come back soon and once they've got used to them, and are big enough to sleep without the shelter (the other lambs sleep with their mothers - one sleeps on top of her apparently) they'll run with the rest of the flock. In the meanwhile it's an awfully big adventure going on out there.

Yes, the other animals. Stuff tends to happen over the weekends when Fred-the-Farmer spends a bit of time with M and the beasts. While M does know what she's doing, she's been doing this for a few years while Fred has been doing this all his life. He is a Farmer, nothing more, nothing less, so he knows this work inside out. So here's the logic of what happened (and bear in mind I might not have gotten this 100% right...):

There are five calves in the shed. Three of them are ready to go out with the rest of the herd since the weather is good and they're nearly grownup. BUT! One of them is to be sold. Now, apparently, trying to separate a cow from some other cows is very difficult . Why, I don't know, but it is and I'm content to accept that. So, until the calf is sold, the three of them are on their own.

Breeding animals is a bit of a filtering process as you gradually move them from location to location depending on the stage they're at (even the adults - Millie is still "drying out" her udders in the shed on a hay diet and is getting very pissed off about it all). Actually, this only applies to the chickens, ducks and cows. The non-orphan lambs just stay with their parents all the time. Speaking of which, I just checked out of the window and the orphans are still there staring back at me. Part of me thinks I should do something, the other part knows they'll be fine. Just let them get on with it. Sigh...

Oh yeah, summer is here. It's lovely and hot and the sun is shining, and the weather forecast said those hallowed words "anticyclone" meaning no wind and no clouds for a good week or so. Which means the ground should warm up. Which means it won't suddenly get cold as soon as the sun sets. Which means hopefully I won't be sleeping in my jumper soon!

I just heard on the Shipping Forecast that a couple of bits of weather (I missed where or what) will be "moving north and losing their identities". In all my years as a Shipping Forecast fan I've never heard that turn of phrase.

When I was a kid (there's a lot of this in my journal at the moment for some reason) I knew the value of a bonfire. Living in Croydon in my early teenage years we had a long garden of about 130ft and, either by design or default, the last 20ft were mine to do as I pleased with. In other words it was a wasteland of junk, randomly dug holes and a fire. I would sit by this fire, often alone but sometimes with friends, into the evening. Why, I don't know, but it cemented a love of fires for life.

Today we burned the hedge branches I cut down a week or so back and then the ragwort-to-date. I was not expected to work today but there was no way I was letting the construction and execution of a big, long fire go ahead without me, especially one right outside my caravan. So I joined in. (photos of the fire) Mike and I mainly managed the fire while M dealt with the animals, occasionally joining in. At one stage Fred-The-Farmer came by to help with the calves which have gone from the cow shed to the field for the first time. As we were talking, he joined in the loading of foilage onto the fire. There's something satisfyingly social about a fire. People are drawn to it as some primal gene kicks in taking us back to our caveman sensibilities. And it's also a good environment to talk.

I joked to Mike about my idea to get Fred in the same room as a tape recorder and let him talk, or to replicate those Radio 4 programmes where a presenter walks around the countryside with a couple of local experts, recording the conversation that ensues. As Fred came back from the field Mike asked him if he wanted to be on the radio and I explained my idea.

To my amazed pleasure he was well up for it. His eyes lit up at the idea of getting his stories down and dramatically recounted some of them as we worked. He's obviously been thinking about this as he's got 56 stories ready, three about pigs, and so on. So I need to get hold of some kind of recording equipment, preferably something digital so I can edit and upload it with ease. 56 stories. This is what the world is waiting for!

The fire is still burning. After the branches were all piled up and burning away, the ragwort was dumped over it like a damp green tea-cosy. This keeps the heat in and the core of the fire under control while drying out the weeds and slowly burning them. It'll last all night and probably keep smouldering through tomorrow. I keep popping out every couple of hours, ostensibly to redistribute the weeds that have fallen off, but really to stand there watching the flames escape through the gaps and the smoke whistle through the weeds. Ooh, I do love a good fire!

I don't normally give two hoots to the Eurovision Song Contest but that the UK, for the first time ever by all accounts, got NO votes from ANY country in Europe is quite interesting. It can't be about the music - this is Eurovision - so it must be something else. It's interesting to note that voting is done by the population of each country by phone vote and so gives a wildly inaccurate picture, but a picture all the same, of that country's attitude to it's European neighbours. According to this measure, everyone in Europe, both East and West, hates the UK enough to slam our entry so completely.

Could it be about Iraq? Is it significant that ephemera-loving, pap-pop fans of style-over-content dirge music have allowed politics into their hallowed world of empty meanings and pointless smiles? I texted an (abbreviated) version of this question to my Eurovision-junkie friend Sarah and she replied:

Yeah,the headlines will be a big pic of blair with caption nil points!

Question is, could this be the one piece of public opinion that he listens to? I have a horrible feeling it might be...

(Just heard on the radio that Terry Wogan reckons it's an Iraq protest too. So that's official then.)

----

The Art On The Green exhibition at Rookley is on June 14th as was signified by a wonderfully stark sign on the green in Rookley telling the locals and anyone who passes (and this is a major road across the Island) that there will be Art here. No other explanation is given. Lovely!

Photos for this post

On the cycleway from Newport to Cowes (which comes highly recommended, both as an access and for the views) there's a factory that makes what they call "blades". These blades are up to 40 metres long. I'd call them rudders, but what do I know. As the cycleway cuts between the back entrance of the factory and the river where the blades are shipped off, they obviously get a lot of people stopping to look and probably asking questions. At least that would explain the noticeboard. When did you ever see a FAQ by the loading bay of a factory?

That said, the information doesn't actually tell you what they're for, leaving you to figure it out. Maybe it's supposed to be obvious, but the bizarreness of seeing these massive tubular structures that look like a cross between a shark and a cruise missile, parked in rows behind an anonymous looking warehouse does make you question your own logic. Surely these can't be the rudders of oil tankers and cruise ships? It's a bit like seeing the Eifel Tower lying sideways on Mars. Okay, not much like that, but you get the idea.

The notice reads as follows (punctuation and grammar preserved):

N.E.G Micon

• Blades currently under production are 26m, 31m and 40m, these are all radius lengths.
• These are being shipped to locations all over the world including India, Spain, Australia, Germany and the USA.
• Some of the blades will have different colours these go where the blades need to be highly visible.
• The blades currently have tips, these act as air breaks to enable the turbines to be stopped.
• The height of the towers range from 50m for a 26m blade to 80m for a 31m blade. The 40m blades are due to be put on an 110m tower.
• The blades are shipped to Southampton 3 times a week where they are shipped around the world.
• One 1.5Mw turbine, which has 31m blades, will generate enough power for 500 homes.
• The process currently takes 6 days from the clean mould to the finished article.
• We currently produce 12 blades a week

What are they? Blades. What are blades? Between 26m and 40m long, radially. What are they for? India, Spain, Australia, Germany and the USA. No, what are they for? Towers. C'mon, give us a clue! Sometimes they're in different colours.

I wonder if they're really pleased with their public noticeboard and information sheet and I wonder if they realise that to anyone outside the Blades industry it's gobbledegook
cunning disguised as information. Then again, if I tried to explain the workings of the book publishing and retailing trade in 9 bullet points I'd probably be reduced to saying "sometimes books are in different colours".

[Update 31/5: Just been talking to friends Dave and Anita and they've also witnessed the Blades by a warehouse on the mainland and it's all become clear. They're for WIND TURBINES!! It all suddenly makes sense!]

The Search for a Saturday Paper escapade was a good motivator and took me off on the bike to Newport. Having secured my Guardian (Guide? check. Magazine? check. Review? check) I strolled around for a bit thinking about buying things and then deciding I didn't need them. Having no money is quite liberating sometimes. I did however treat myself to the luxury of some powdered milk and it has revolutionised my evening cup of tea. Oh, and a top up card for the phone.

I've been thinking about getting a new mobile. Now that I'm here for the period the issue of contractibility is creeping up. In the past I've used my mobile for txts and the odd emergency phone call, using work or home lines for anything over 30 seconds, so a £10 top up card lasted a long time. I'd assumed the same would be true here but even though I've made two, maybe three calls, the £10 has gone in six weeks and I've been using the pay phone in the village. This is about to get tedious, so feel free to skip to the next entry...

The problem is, the tariff I'm on means that phone calls cost about 50p a minute for the first three minutes, resetting every day. Fine if you never use your phone, but I'm probably going to need to use it more and more if I'm going to look for a job. Now, a standard pay-monthly contract with 'free' minutes and all that jazz is £15 a month. This means I can make 30 minutes of calls a month for that sum. Now, am I likely to need that much? And can I budget for £15 a month?

The other thing is the handset - my current one is on its last legs - the battery life is down to under a day, the signal is erratic and generally poor and the buttons temperamental. A new one, all swanky and only-slightly-dated looking, will cost £25-30. So, for a year, we're talking an extra £210. Hmm...

I guess the real issue is, if I'm supposed to be living the minimalist life with no distractions, what do I need a mobile for? Currently I make do with the very occasional call or txt and use letters with stamps, just like we used to in the early 90s. Do I really want to be carrying a mobile around the farm taking calls from friends in London and holding the phone up to the lambs? Well, put like that...

In other news, since I visited them a fortnight ago the library has installed new computers and are offering free net access, as opposed to the old computers with dial-up connections costing £1.00 for 10 minutes. Only problem is I have to be a member of the library to use them, and to do that I need proof of address. All my official documents, well, my bank statements, are going to my mum's in Winchester. I explained the "working on a farm for a few months" thing and was told a letter from my employer would do. I wonder how a hand-written note from M will go down...

Interesting that they only let people use the net whose details they have. I guess this is so they can check back on what sites people have visited should they prove to be international terrorists or something. Interestingly, the library on Camomile St in The City lets anyone use their computers, even if they look like me (and compared to a suited businessman of London's financial district I do look like an international terrorist of sorts). The implication is that people on the Island are more likely to use the net for nefarious means than folks in EC2, and no, I'm not going to bring any Badlands style, redneck isolationist stereotypes out of that. No sir.

It's not often the news brings a flood of reminiscences so I was slightly taken aback when the Radio 4 news reader announced, in that required solemn tone they use regardless of the optimism factor, that the schools funding crisis had reached such a level that a south London school had sent it's pupils home early. "Edenham High School in Croydon..." Huh? That's my old secondary school.

I've done the friends reunited thangdango twice now with good results so there shouldn't be much more to float to the surface, but today the Guardian (yes, I managed to get a copy in Newport, thanks for asking) ran a photo of kids going home from Edenham - three boys with those sack-on-string backpacks runing away from the camera down a path. As I looked closer I realised I knew exactly where the photo was taken, on the school grounds looking towards the entrance, car park to the left, playing fields to the right. Suddenly my mind filled in the edges of the picture spiraling out back into the school grounds and building and forwards to my way home, a memory buried but imprinted through four years of walking it. (here's a map)

I moved from Croydon to Winchester straight after my GCSEs in 1989 and while I went back to visit mates I never went back to the school or the local area. Edenham is in an area called Shirley in the north-east of Croydon bordering West Wickham, a similarly suburban area of Bromley. As you'd expect, there's no reason to go there unless you live there. I suggested to my fellow friends reunitees that we could meet up in a pub near the school but no-one wanted to. While slightly disappointed I think they were right to veto - the novelty would have worn off rather quickly.

That said, I have this urge to revisit the place and cycle the route "home". Maybe when I'm in London next month a homage to Edenham will be in order. The question is, will I be able to actually go into the school or will a scruffy, bearded lone 30's male hanging around trigger the alarms? Maybe I'll phone first.

I'm used to there being a big pile of Daily Mail's and a small pile of Guardian's in newsagents but it does concern me when they run out of the latter so quickly while there is still excess of the former at closing time. I've often thought there is some kind of conspiracy afoot, that Associated Press (Mail) or News International (Times and Sun) own or put pressure on the distributors and don't give the shops a chance to change their orders. If I was running a shop and a regular stock item kept selling out quickly I'd increase the order - if I didn't then I wouldn't be doing my job.

That said, I often get to the newsagent quite late so I can only blame myself. This morning, however, I got to the shop in Godshill by 10.30. It was full of locals picking up their weekend papers but no copies of the Guardian. I asked and was told it must have sold out. I cycled to Rookley - same story. Now, it might be that it never actually arrived, quite literally missing the boat, and it wouldn't surprise me if it was the worst selling paper on the Island, this not being a bastion of metropolitan liberalism. But still. Rather tedious. I'm going to have to set up a standing order at the shop methinks.

I'm going to Newport this afternoon so hopefully the WH Smiths will have some left. I hope so anyway - I need my Jacques Peretti fix...

Asked M if it would be okay to stay here until October, maybe longer, and she's fine with that. And I can move into the cow shed caravan as soon as Millie goes out in the field in a couple of weeks. I was right to suspect she wouldn't deal with my presence very well and I don't think the sounds of John Peel of an evening is conducive to happy bovines. Then again...

Cracking on as ever with the weeding of the field. Some good news - it turns out that, after digging up all the ragwort, I won't have to dig up all the thistles as I'd though. Only the really mean spiky ones need to come up as the others can be eaten by the animals with no ill effects. Normally the sheep and cows ignore the ragwort (poisonous) and evil-thistles (too spiky) but when they're dried up in the hay they won't be able to tell the difference. Hence my current seemingly never but soon to be ending job.

The ragwort has to be brought down the farmyard to be burnt as it will re-seed itself if left in the field, but the thistles will just die off so I can throw them to the edges. For this reason I've been concentrating on the ragwort first but today started doing the thistles as I went. Even with thick-ish, mud encrusted gloves I had to be careful as the spikes kept driving into my fingers and like harpoons staying there. No wonder the animals don't try and eat them. Unlike the ragwort, which has a wide root-base which entangles with the grass, the thistles tend to just pull out in one movement, if you can get a decent grip on them. Swings and roundabouts.

The back of the job has definitely been broken now and there are satisfyingly large areas of grass that look more like the pesticide-treated fields of a 'normal' farm. I feel like I've really be using my back this week but there's no pain there, just a tingle of muscles having been used and adjusting to the potential to being used again. Nice.

I've no doubt been doing this for years, but I just detected a pattern that I suspect is somewhat universal. What do you do if a good rocking tune comes out of the stereo and you're in a low-key environment (ie, one where jumping around like a monkey just ain't gonna happen), but you have to react somehow to express your allegiance to Planet Rock? What you do in this situation is the Shoegazer Air Bass Guitar. And here's how:

1. Stand with your feet slightly apart, but not stretching.
2. Stretch your arms down to the sides of your body with the hands about six inches from the thighs.
3. Cup your left hand as if holding the neck of a guitar. Cup the right hand the other way as if to strum. If you're left handed reverse this position.
4. Lower the head down and nod in time to the music. You can mutter "oh yeah" or "fuckin' A" at this stage if you desire.
5. Wiggle the thumb of your right hand in time to the base line of the song.
6. Get on with whatever if was you were doing.

Hope that's of some use.

You'll no doubt be relieved to hear that today consisted on no crushing doubts, morbid contemplations or sometimes-I-like-to-curl-up-in-a-ball moments. Instead, this morning I learned French.

About a year back I got hold of a 6 hour French language course, mp3'd it and completely failed to find the time to dedicate to it. Since I wanted to guard against my mind drifting off while out digging it kinda made sense. And it worked. On average I'm spending three hours in the morning and three in the afternoon digging so I was able to work through the first two hours twice. Since I can't really pause and replay while I'm working I've decided to just do the course over and over and over until it sinks in.

Once I figured I'd done enough French I went back to the music, this time Spiritualized who have not just been growing on me but infesting me. I don't like to say stuff like "that song really represents all that I'm about" but there's a lot in the lyrics of Mr Spiritualised (and I can't for the life of me remember his bloody name...) that, you know, really speak to me. Or at least raise a broad grin of recognition.

By five I should have been winding down, and normally would be getting ready for dinner at six, but on Thursdays M has a class in Niton, a town on the southern tip of the Island, so I get a big lunch and sandwiches for later. The weather was cold-ish, but not too cold. The wind was blowing quite hard, but there wasn't any rain coming from the total cloud cover. And I was in a good mood so I kept on working harder and harder as the music drove me on. At one point I sat down for a fag looking at the view over Godshill as a particularly soaring Mogwai track rang through my ears, the quite parts merging with the early evening birdsong. I thought to myself, yup, I could spend a while here.

At lunch time I checked out the other caravan. Previously I'd never contemplated living it in. It's very dusty and dirty and was more dumped than parked in the cow shed right next to the cows, at a slight angle with a pretty bashed up base. But it occurred to me that, being in the shed and thus protected from the never ending Atlantic winds that roar through the vents in my current abode, it might be a bit warmer. It is. Now the animals are all going out into the fields permanently for the summer I think I may well spend this weekend making it hospitable. Then I can seriously consider living here for a long period of time, maybe through to Christmas even.

Okay, I just went to the check it out to see what it's like at night (9.00pm) and while it's much warmer, Millie the cow got a bit freaked out by me being there so late and started jumping around. Since she's living right outside the door I might wait until she's back in the field before moving it. (She's currently on a hay diet to dry her udders out before going back on grass.) I'd also not be too happy about waking up to the sound of her emptying her not insubstantial bowels outside my bedroom window of a morn.

So, much better today. Why? It's risky to try and explain it but I think I tend to only confront a troublesome thing when it gets too big or heavy or painful to ignore. This one was relatively minor and being in a controlled environment I was able to get through it, or deal with it, quickly and effectively. Of course, it happened and I'm not brushing that under the carpet. Maybe a new credo would be to learn stuff rather than plan to learn stuff. Stop running away.

It's at times like these the life of solitude comes rather unstuck. I would kill for a massage. My back has been working overtime and while it's still not seriously painful there's some serious unknotting in need of execution.

Today was one of those days where, if I was a fundamentalist Willing Worker On Organic Farms, I'd feel rather cheated as most of it was spent, um, mowing the lawn. But I'm not a fundamentalist and as far as I'm concerned the deal is I work and get fed and housed, no matter what the work is as long as it's within the realms of fauna and flora. The lawn is part of the farm and thus needs doing. I wonder if there was WWOOFers out there that would object to cutting it. They'd technically be in their rights.

Anyway, I was still learning stuff as most of the lawn had to be done with a 2 stroke petrol driven strimmer, something I'd never used before. With the goggles on and a small motorbike buzzing behind my shoulder my world shrank into a tunnel vision as I guided the strimming end over the lawn. The hours passed by, with occasional breaks for water and to let my hands recover from the vibrations, and apart from the sore back, it was a very satisfactory job, so much so I'm rather annoyed there's nothing else to strim.

A very distressing day which I'm reticent to write about but it's either than or dwell on it. Today the black cloud came back with a vengeance.

It started after lunch. I had a headache but couldn't think of a reason why. After suffering it for an hour I relented and took a paracetamol. Then at about 3.00pm I pulled on a weed in the field. Rather than coming up with the roots it snapped off. This happens often and while annoying is nothing ostensibly bad - it just means I have to get down and dig it out. As it snapped, I snapped and a surge of anger rushed through me taking me by surprise. I stopped working and sat down in the field for ten minutes. A familiar weight fell over me and my mind drifted to the suicidal thoughts I'd not had for over two months

As this passed, I got up and carried on digging, thinking this was the best way to deal with it. As I did so I thought through what had just happened, and stopped working again. This time I just stood there as I realised that the situation and environment is irrelevant. This is me. As this sunk in I got teary and my throat lumped up. I thought I was going to break down there and then.

I went back to the caravan for a cup of tea but wound up lying on the bed curled up foetal-like. Again, something I haven't done since handing in my notice at work. I stayed there for an hour, occasionally drifting off into the comfort of sleep, before getting up and going back to the digging. The last hour I spent getting angry with the weeds like it was the only way I could do the work, slamming the spade into the ground and ripping the ragwort out, until it was time for dinner. Food over, back to the caravan, lying on the sofa listening to the radio until now.

I stopped taking my medication soon after coming to the Island. I don't have a GP at the moment and just ran out carefully, lowering my dose over a period of weeks. Rationally, I wanted to approach this experiment in living with a clear head, but there was also a lot of irrationality going on. I didn't want to explain my situation again to a new doctor and go through the whole process of diagnosis, trying to put into words the inexplicable. I also knew that I was in a catch 22 situation. If I admit that I have a depression problem, then I allow myself to play up to that and become a victim of it. And many more things I can't explain here because I can't put them into words that make sense.

Whatever, I now think I've made a mistake. Or if not a mistake, then I've put back my treatment quite a bit. Before leaving London I was about to start Cognitive Behavioural Therapy at the local hospital, finally, after 13 years, doing something about this. I was also a year into my medication, a course which I knew had to last 2-3 years in order to work in the long term. I'd been on these pills (paroxitine/seroxat) before and had come off after 6 months, so you'd've thought I'd know better.

But my circumstances at the time were not conducive. The job was getting harder to deal with with each anxiety episode as I felt myself being categorised into a problem to be dealt with by employment procedures which then increased the anxiety. Meanwhile I was without a home. It was commented that what I needed was some stability in my life, and I agreed. So what did I do? Went off to work on a farm giving up nearly all the support networks around me. Nice one.

Of course, I'm being very negative here, but you'll forgive me I hope. Yes, this is a very stable environment. I commented to a friend in a letter than it's almost as if I've admitted myself to a mental health retreat.

Maybe what's bothering me, what's triggering this off, is that I'm not allowing myself any stability. As soon as I'm settled I'm making plans to move on to another farm. Maybe I should come back here in July and see the first six months out in one place. I should also register with the doctor in the village and get back on the pills. Maybe I could get a job in Newport over Christmas and see if M will let me pay some rent to stay here. Maybe I need to spend the year in one place.

When I started all this it was something of an adventure that would hopefully lead to interesting things, taking me out of the rut and putting me on a road to goodness. I'm starting to think that maybe I need to just stay put for a bit and sort out my inner self before taking on more stuff. I've been dashing about, mentally and physically, with no plan or idea for most of my life and this was supposed to be a chance to stop all that. It worked for the first four weeks and I should hold onto that.

Lots of 'maybe's and 'should's. Funnily enough I feel much better now having worked through this in writing. And a lot better for having considered not moving on in July.

The last couple of days have been spent exclusively in the hayfield digging up the dreaded ragwort. It might seem like the job has been dragging on for ages but it hasn't been a constant effort until now. The job started off a little dispiriting - so much ragwort in such a big field and all of it to be methodically removed - but I now reckon I'm at least 50% done. I brought my CD/mp3 walkman over last week which seemed like a bit of a luxury but which has proved invaluable. 1980's American punk tends to be the best soundtrack to digging up weeds. Big Black and the Dead Kennedy's in particular, although I hope I'm not singing along too loudly. "Chemical warfare, warfare, warfare!" is not what one would expect to hear coming from an organic farm after all.

Whatever the weather, the job is growing on me, at least once I get into my stride. There's a nice structure to mentally sectioning off bits of the field to clear and a nice feeling of isolation. And when the sky clears and the sun comes out the view over Godshill is total picture postcard.

There's also a lot in the detail. When you're looking down at the ground all day you notice the intricacies of grass and mud. And you're going to have to take my word for that. Okay, I find myself dreaming about looking for ragwort. Happy now?

Recent news from the farm...

• Sandy's getting better by the hour. Today she's been out walking around the farm on a lead and spends most of her time inside looking out of the window. M has to keep leading her back to the bed to relax, which she still needs to, but the will to get on out there is strong. Saffy, the hunter tomcat mentioned before, is spending more time inside at the moment checking up on her. Also, Saffy climbed on my lap today at lunch for the first time, so she's accepted me finally as something not to run away from. This meant quite a lot!
  
• The ducklings are getting bigger rather rapidly, though they're still endearing. If they're out without their hen-mother (quite often if it's raining) they tend to run inside when someone approaches their run. I put a couple of steps up from the ground to their "home" after seeing the chicks have a problem with a two inch step. The ducklings move a lot slower than chicks do and waddle up these steps one by one. Soddit, I can't describe this properly. I'll have to try and get a short movie with the digital camera sometime.[Later: Oops - forgot to do this. Maybe next time.]
  
• I noticed that some of the ducks have a bald patch at the back of their heads and that other ducks often attack them here with their beaks. I mentioned this to M and she said for me to use my imagination as to what was going on. Randy buggers.
  
• Since the cows and sheep have been moved from the field behind my caravan to the field to my left I get a good view of them while sitting here. On Sunday it was raining and I wasn't feeling up to going out, so I spent quite a bit of time listening to music and watching them.
  
  • Cows can run. Bloody fast. Never suspected this before.
    
  • The bull, which I'd experienced before close up when it walked past me in the hay shed, really is huge. When he runs... Well, I'm amazed the ground doesn't shudder.
    
  • Sheep are a bit like fish. One moves and the others around it move to. They can run pretty fast too.
    
  • Sometimes the flock of sheep moves off slowly and a lamb might not notice. When it does notice it runs after the flock crying out for its mum. Because all the sheep look the same from the back it tries them all but the not-mums bash it away.
    
  • They are very therapeutic to watch. I recommend it.
    
  
  
• The other chicks are really getting large. Most of them had just hatched when I got here and in the last 5 weeks they're becoming small hens/cocks. They don't sleep under their mothers any more but tend to line up in the box facing one direction.
  
• The two chicks that survived the fox attack have bonded strongly and often perch on their box together. One is probably male (it's got the start of a cockerels floppy red crown thing on it's head) and M reckons they'll stick together for life now. Isn't that incest?
  
• The smallest orphan lamb still looks very different from the others with a more stubby nose and black markings on her face.. Apparently she's a different breed so will keep some of her characteristics into adulthood. This pleases me.
  
• Finally, a proper explanation of what was going on with the hen and the duck eggs. The hen had decided to sit on her eggs. Problem was she only had two eggs and wasn't laying any more. This wasn't worth it (most of the hens have 5-8 chicks and some of their eggs didn't hatch to begin with) and M reckoned she had enough chicks for this year, but the hen was insistent that she wanted to hatch something. Someone from another farm had some fertilised duck eggs so these were given to the hen. The same goes for the peacock eggs under the other hen.
  

This morning, over breakfast, I mentioned to M that it was a good job the weekend had happened as my work shoes were finally dry after Friday's downpour. Don't you have wellies, she asked. She dug out a pair in my size (probably belonging to Mike, her partner who comes down at weekends) for me to borrow. They fitted snugly, with thick socks, and I set to work digging up ragwort as the rain started pouring. And it was a revelation! Why hadn't I even considered Wellington boots before? Was I mad?

When I was a kid, aged 8-12, I live in the small village of Weston In Gordano near Portishead (yes, as in the band) near Bristol and this was the last time I owned a pair of wellies. They were black, or blue, with a red, or maybe tartan, lining. Then we moved to Croydon and I became a teenager and nothing was going to get me into such things. After that I discovered the joys of army surplus boots and thus never needed to consider them again.

So when I was kitting myself out for the farm I went for the traditional working boot option. They're good boots. Brand new, under twenty quid with steel toecaps and they've served me well this last month but they do take a while to dry.

Now, consider the Wellington. It's made of rubber and completely waterproof. Not only this, but it dries quickly even if water gets inside. You can tuck your trousers inside stopping them getting muddy and pull you waterproof trousers over the top so the rain runs cleanly to the ground. The sole is hardy so good for digging, although you have to be careful about ramming the middle of the foot onto a spade - this leads to some pain. They also slip on and off with ease, having no laces. This is important if you're constantly going outside the caravan to use the loo, as I am. And, as long as your socks are thick, they're actually quite warm. And if they fit they don't fall off (if memory serves the wellies of my youth always fell off).

That said, after a day of being impressed with them I did stumble over the style into the paddock to fill my water bottles and landed in the sheep poo, so they're not quite as agile as a good pair of boots, but otherwise I'm sold on them. Who'd've thought I'd become a signed up member of the green welly brigade?

Before I came out here I obviously explained the whole WWOOFing thing to friends and family. A recurring, but by no means universal, comment was that accommodation and food for 30 hours hard work a week was a pretty poor deal and was I worried about being exploited. At the time this wasn't an issue - I'd have been happy to shovel shit from one side of a field to another, and back again, from dawn til dusk in return for a bowl of soup and a Farley's Rusk. Okay, maybe not, but exploitation wasn't a concern.

I have to report that if anyone's being exploited here it's the host. They take people with little or no experience and let them "help" on the farm. Sure, stuff like digging is not a problem and anyone can do that, but it took me a day and a half to make the chicken run for the ducklings, and even then the door was too small. I started the lunchtime they were hatched. After four hours the basic frame was constructed, slightly narrower than I'd intended, but probably big enough. The next morning I "finished" it, but then M pointed out there wasn't a door at the back to put the birds in, as there were on the others I was copying. So I made a door. The birds went in okay, but when it came to let them out the front into the caged area, the sliding door I'd constructed was too small. The hen could stick her head out but nothing more. With the birds already in the construction I couldn't start hammering a new thing onto it, nor could they really be moved for fear of traumatising the newborn ducklings. And they had to be let out soon to eat. This was my mistake and I had to sort it out.

Fortunately I figured out a bodge - a large lump of wood on a stick to be placed over the doorway. This worked okay, but I noticed today that the stick had fallen off the lump.

Now, if I was being paid for this I'd be sacked by now. It took me, ooh, 8-10 hours to make the thing and even then it doesn't really work properly. Fred-the-farmer commented on how good it looked but when I told him how long it took me he was rather taken aback.

When I'm doing the simple stuff, such as digging up ragwort or cutting the hedges or moving compost (which, it turns out, came mainly from the cow shed last year so really is shovelling shit, albeit shit that doesn't smell too bad) M's getting her money's worth. However, I'm not learning much. While I'm getting the exercise and fresh air, in the long term that's not really why a lot of people do this kind of thing. They want to learn stuff.

So, while the WWOOF host gets cheap labour, the people they get, while enthusiastic, know nothing and need supervision when doing jobs that aren't mindless. In return, people like me get the chance to work on a farm and get away with being useless, at least some of the time. The duckling episode was one of the most humilifying (in the sense that I felt serious humility) episodes in my life for a long time, and yet I "got away with it". It's interesting that it took me a few days to write about it in this journal, so keen was the embarrassment. But the fact is I learned something, not only about building chicken runs but also about my approach to doing things. I suspect the lesson will come in handy with this computer programming lark. I keep finding more and more parallels between the two activities - probably because I'm discovering them both at the same time, but it's an interesting thing. For me anyway.

When I was growing up The Archers was a regular feature, always on in the kitchen of an evening and my sister and I being forced to keep quiet for the critical 15 minutes. Obviously, I didn't get it. Neighbours was more my thing, but since my 20's I've found myself slipping more and more into the world of Ambridge as burried memories of characters from the 80s, especially the Grundy family, piqued a curiosity whenever the program came on. Listening to more Radio 4 didn't help matters much, The Archers being something of a mandatory ritual for that strange breed of listeners.

And so, here I am with nowt but a radio for company and I find I'm listening to it every evening after dinner and again on Sundays. Not just in the background, but lying there, starting out of the window at nothing in particular, intently paying attention. I even snuck off for an hour the last couple of Friday mornings to listen to the rediscovered archive recordings from the 60s.

The problem is, other than the Grundy family, I haven't got a clue who anyone is or how they relate to each other. What I need is that little pocket guide the BBC published a couple of years back, or access to the Radio 4 website. So, other than a confession, this post is a reminder. Next time I'm on the computer, go grab a character list. It's all or nothing on this front.

When I first got here I was amused to hear people talk of "the island" and "the mainland", as in "I've been on the Island for 10 years now but my brother, he's over on the mainland." To me, the Isle of Wight was just another area of the country. I would say I'd been in Birmingham for four years and carrying this through, would talk of living on the "Isleawite". But to think this misunderstands the psychology of living on an island, one where it costs about £50 to bring a car over, which is big enough to live on without leaving, but small enough to have a keen identity. I find myself talking about "the Island" and popping over to "the mainland" to visit my mum. And today I was wandering over to Godshill, which is really known as "the village" where there is "the shop" and "the church". Then I thought about how there aren't house numbers in the countryside, just names. A lot of them are spurious modern inventions, but the tradition probably comes from the same idea - you live at "the spinny" or "the manor" or "the whojamaflip".

Does this happen in cities? Not so much, but think of London and the financial district, known across the world as "the City"...

As I walked into the kitchen for my lunch I was expecting to see Sandy, back from the vet after being run over last Friday, but was still surprised to see her there, standing in the doorway wagging her tail. Sure, she soon went back to her basket and collapsed, but that she had the strength to get up and say hello was very good to see. She's now spending at least a week in the house recuperating and sleeping as her body heals itself. She'll probably be okay being young and healthy but it's sad to see her so drained of energy.

Picture the scene. It was a rainy Friday and you were working in the field in the mud digging up weeds. Not having Wellingtons (are they named after the Duke of Wellington? And if so why?) your work boots are sodden wet. They've been stuffed with newspaper and are on the way to dryness, but the sun hasn't been shining and it's not exactly warm in the caravan. It is windy though, the caravan occasionally rocked by gusts that pour in from the channel and roaring over the island. You notice that the air vents, designed to stop off-guard relaxing holidaymakers gassing themselves, are feeding mini-gales into the caravan. Maybe they could be blocked, or at least have something put in front of them. Then something clicks. Stick the shoes there.

And so he did, and his shoes started drying while the wind chill factor was reduced. For every predicament there is a low-tech answer in the minimal living world of the WWOOFer.

Yes this has got nothing to do with the farm, but it's Saturday and it's been raining so I've been sitting in the caravan reading the paper.

I've always had an arse-backwards approach to the weekend papers, starting with the frivolous supplements and working up to the main, serious broadsheet if there's time. The Guardian on Saturday has always been the weekend paper of choice because they have tended to have the most interesting cartoonists working for them. Currently Posy Simmonds' masterly Literary Life and the admittedly past his prime but still entertaining Steven Appleby rule the roost, along with proto-b3ta cut-up king Graham Rawle. Other 'toonists such as Ros Asquith and my chum Tom Gauld pop up and there's always the somewhat deranged visions of Andy Watt illustrating the deranged visions of Julie Burchell and, the subject of this post, Jacques Peretti. Compare this to the comics-free desert of the Observer which remains only worth buying for Chris Riddell's editorial cartoon. Oh, and Babara Ellen, if you're that way inclined (and I am...).

I could go on, but there's another reason for plumping for the Saturday Grauniad, and that reason is The Guide. For the uninitiated, and there can't be many of you amongst my enlightened readership, The Guide is the thick A5 supplement created as The Guardian's entry into the deregulated television listings magazine market 10 years ago. It has remained pretty much unchanged in style and format ever since. At the back you have the TV and radio listings which is what 99% of people buy the paper for. The other 1% of people buy it for Jacques Peretti's clubbing column.

Ten years ago Peretti was no doubt a regular on the club scene, but unlike many scenesters he seemed to appreciate the absurdity of the the whole thing along with its disposable idiocy. Like most of the journalists working on The Guide he seemed to realise that writing for this publication meant you could get away with any old tosh but over the years has refined this to an art. Other columnists in The Guide write about the subjects assigned to them but Peretti hasn't written about clubbing for years, as well he shouldn't, a man his age. The occasional exception that proves the rule is usually some weird club-type environment in the middle on nowhere-Britain where his main observation is how much weirder, and more interesting, straight society can be than the try-harder cool of clubland.

He's also laugh out loud funny, tying together acute observations from the seedy-pathetic underbelly of modern urban life with throwaway pop-culture references through a hallucinatory self-depreciating Gonzo rant. This week this gem had me cracking up:

The Metro was the first feminist car (or should I say, Ka). Though patronisingly intended as a "little run-around for the wife", it was quickly co-opted by teenage daughters, giving them the freedom to go wherever they wanted, do whatever they wanted (ie shag in any lay-by in the UK). It was, to quote George Michael, freedom! Tampax, in effect, on wheels"

This column is classic Peretti, talking about the evolution over 20 years of the Mini Metro car to its current status as gheto car for "smack-addled teenage boys mounting the pavement under the paranoid impression the cops are on their tail, or the road is melting and turning into cheese." Clubbing references? None.

Peretti represents the late 80s Aceeed heads now in their mid to late 30s wondering what the hell is going on. But, like the intelligent post-punks who moved the DIY scene onwards from just being about music, he doesn't look back with wistful nostalgia for the better days of free raves and pre-superclub clubs, but tries to apply what he learned for clubbing to the rest of his life. Only there weren't any lessons to be learned and just a comedown bemusement to be taught.

But this speculation and analysis is not the point. The column is disposable tat bashed out weblog style once a week by someone who knows their editor isn't paying too much attention. However, it's my opinion that Peretti has produced a scattershot cultural history of Britain from the late 90's to the present day, a Britain that the rest of the newspaper, and the media at large, have ignored to their peril. Ernest social affairs columnist Polly Toynbe slums it in a minimum wage job for a few weeks to see how real people cope with modern life and the media world (at least those that didn't notice her copying Barbara Enright) cheer her bravery. But Peretti has been doing this for year with, in my view, sharper insight and a lot more fun.

I suspect The Guardian know what they've got here but they know that to launch it out to the world would ruin it. They've collected the Tapehead telly criticism of Jim Shelly and know the value of fellow box-baiter Charlie Brooker of TV Go Home fame so they must be aware of the subversive breeding ground of The Guide. In some ways I really want these columns bound up and pushed to the masses, but at the same time they are of their time and of their place, out of time and out of place. Rather like modern Britian, in fact.

Jacques Peretti - The Hunter S Thomson of the millennial UK. So there.

Been reading the Guardian Review section, as I tend to do every Saturday, taking advantage of the fact that I have the time and mental space to actually read most of it. Was struck by another Iain Sinclair article (Unreal Visions) which looked interesting but proved impenetrable to actually read. Since this is an ongoing issue between Sinclair and writer and me the reader I wondered if cutting the whole thing up into sentences might help. If the whole really is greater than the sum of the constituent parts, maybe these lesser parts would be more on my level. It worked, if only because as I carefully worked the scissors around each full stop I spent time enough on each sentence for it to make sense, or at least some sense. I now have a pile of sentences, some long and rambling, some just a word long, scattered across the table. On their own they're a lot less threatening and, interestingly, more enlightening. Here's one describing East London, although that context is obviously absent now:

The walls of agit-prop cartoons, with contradictory slogans, are like flickerbooks waiting for their animator, some disenfranchised psychogeographer.

This sums up my feeling about London quite well.

Here's another one, picked this minute at random:

We don't know how to behave: churchy or cool, sit or stand.

Not sure about that one. Again?

American directors (such as Raoul Walsh) sported piratical eye-patches and had difficulty with rolling tobacco.

So, now you know!

Unmediated video slurry.

Indeed. Thanks Iain.

As I'd kinda expected, I've been unable to start another novel since finishing Don DeLillo's Underworld last week. The Raymond Carver short stories are great but I'm just reading them one a night before going to sleep rather than absorbing myself in them as I should do. The only reading I've been doing is the Perl manual and The Wizard Of Oz on the handheld. I keep dwelling on DeLillo's masterwork and almost regret leaving it at my mum's house last weekend - the urge is there to read it over again, which never happens to me normally. Comics I re-read over and over but novels are read once and stuck back on the shelf, even mind-warping ones like The Wind Up Bird Chronicle or The New York Trilogy.

I said when I finished it that I was almost, but not quite, disappointed by the ending. Partly this was his use of the internet to illustrate a closing point - not only was it written five years ago, a eon in internet terms, but his familiarity with the net was obviously lacking - a cackhanded URL for one - compared with his rich knowledge of American society which permeated the rest of the novel.

But that niggle aside, it was the structure the really led to this feeling. After the opening 50 page prologue, the book runs backwards, starting at the end of the cold war in 1992 and working towards its post war beginning. Characters are introduced in late middle age and their back-stories and relationships to each other is systematically revealed as the decades are pealed back. The result is slightly disorientating as a character which you thought you had pegged turns out to be more complicated and multifaceted, but still consistent. And he pulls this off perfectly. This technique keeps the book with you for days as subtle connexions become clear in your mind and new layers of meaning become apparent.

It occurred to me today that the book has some similarities to a weblog. While those of us in weblogistan don't really notice the reverse-chronological layout of the medium because we write and read most blogs sequentially, someone reading a blog for the first time could, conceivably, read the whole thing backwards since that appears to be the right way to read it - even archive pages are reverse-chronological.

I wonder if a fictional novel written in the style of journal-weblog, ie printed reverse chronologically, would work. I imagine it wouldn't be as revolutionary as I'm making it out to be - many books have been written backwards through time - but the daily short entry style of the blog would make this more striking, I feel. There's a gauntlet for my writer / publisher friends. I'll be happy to authenticate it, for a fee, or a few beers...

Speculation about Sandy is constant, and her absence from the farm is sorely felt. All was fine this morning at the vets but she had a relapse late afternoon. Internal bleeding, and her lungs had filled with fluid which had to be drained. If she goes 36 hours without another relapse then the vet reckons she'll be okay, so 6.00am Sunday is the earliest we'll know. In her favour she's young, still a puppy in many ways, and an outdoor dog more than happy to run about in the rain for hours on end, so her constitution is strong. Hopefully her body will be able to mend itself now the shock has worn off.

As news of an injured farmdog spreads, concerned phone calls and visits become more frequent. It's apparent how seriously this is taken within the farming community. M seems to be dealing with it well, being stoical and getting on with jobs rather than fretting, but the cordless phone in the kitchen has moved from the sideboard to the table and is answered within one ring.

M picked up the hen from the tea-chest where it had been sitting on the eggs. The hen murmured a warning but didn't protest too much - she was weak from days without food or water, her main preoccupation being to sit on the eggs until they hatched. I held open the back door of the chicken-run which we'd carried into the shed and as M lifted the hen in through the door I saw two bright yellow bundles hanging on to the hen's underbelly. Then the rest followed one by one. Ducklings, little fluffy balls of yellow with bright orange beaks and webbed feet. Seven in total, with two more eggs left in the tea-chest. Through the opaque shells you could just see the form of a duckling just waiting to burst out. M carefully pocketed these and we gently carried the (5ft long, 2ft wide, I should know, I built it) chicken-run back to the paddock.

The BNP should take note and Osward Mosely should be forced to eat his hat, for here is a proud mother of good chicken stock, only her children are all ducks. But she doesn't care or know any better. Sure, she's confused as to why they don't come in out of the rain, or why they seem to like standing in the water bowl rather than just drinking from it, but she'll let it go. She might not have laid these eggs or been molested by the drake that fertilised them, but by god she birthed them.

As I watched the newborn ducks stumble around the place trying to eat everything to see if it was edible, it occurred to me that the guys who worked in the American animation industry in the 1940s must have been brought up in a farming community. I'm thinking Loony Tunes, obviously. Orwell might have used the farmyard more effectively for political allegorical purposes but in doing so he missed the surreal, anarchic joy of the interaction of animals within and across species.

The cockerels with their posses of hens, strutting around like Harlem pimps. The drakes running around like Daffy Duck hadn't been invented and needed to be, now. The month-old lamb staring down the seasoned hunter tom cat and winning. And the mother hen with her brood of seven ducklings.

The other two eggs, well, she didn't want to sit on them again having been moved. But she also had to eat, as did her new charges. Another day in the tea chest and they'd have started dying, so it was lose-lose. Then again, the eggs are in the airing cupboard. They may yet make it. [They didn't]

The novelty of working as a WWOOFer is definitely wearing off and I'm beginning to see that maintaining this with a postive attitude for a year is going to be harder than I first thought. I've been beset with questions about why I'm doing this, who I'm doing it for, whether I'm trying to escape something, etc, et-bloody-cetera.

I seem to be applying the same old criteria to my life that probably lead to the big hole I couldn't dig my way out of before coming here. Obviously it's hard to explain accurately (otherwise it wouldn't be a problem!) but it seems to be a combination of negative speculation about the future coupled with a lack of confidence about my decisions and abilities. Maybe.

It's no coincidence that this current blip comes after I started planning out my year on the farms. Before this I'd just thrown myself into the life without thinking about it at all - going into something blind is easier and safer than depending on my planning because, after all, I'm then culpable, and while I can forgive others for their mistakes it's harder to forgive myself.

I feel like I'm going round in circles writing about this here, probably because I'm used to the weblog medium and my style of writing for it that I phrase things in the same way time after time. So maybe this isn't the best forum to go on about this.

One thing I've decided to try and do since quitting my job is to employ a bit of cognitive behavioural therapy stuff, specifically taking ideas and situations which seem negative and making them positive. The convincing example was when I decided to go WWOOFing: I was in a big black hole and thought to myself, fuck it, I'm going to get rid of all my stuff and just run away, don't know where or how, just go and get out of here. Then I thought about it and realised I could do just that but in a positive way. So I did it and here I am. The trick is going to be to do the same thing with less drastic problems and thoughts. To do that I need to actually write them down. Looks like I'll be investing in a small pad to carry around the place.

Bad news this afternoon. While out for a walk Sandy, the young sheepdog, was hit by a car. She's at the vet in a stable but critical condition. Not much to say really. I wasn't there but it seems a gate was left open and the car was going too fast.

This afternoon we were going to go back to the coppice to coppice more coppice but as I was getting the saws together M announced a change of plan. One of the hens had hatched her eggs, only the eggs were duck eggs so she's got a wee brood of ducklings under her. Because she's been incubating them all this time as far as she's concerned they're hers, and the ducklings have immediately identified with her as mother, so all is fine. Apparently the only confusion occurs when the hen doesn't understand why the ducklings want so much water.

This was a surprise as it wasn't really expected to happen. For reasons I'm not 100% sure about (it's interesting how I seem to accept things on the farm and it's only when I come to write about them that I realise I don't fully understand the reasons behind them) the hen was broody but wasn't producing fertilised eggs, or insisted on sitting on the eggs but was still laying, or something. So M placed a few duck eggs under her to keep her happy. This meant that the new chicken eggs could be distinguished from the old duck eggs thus removing the possibility to taking the wrong egg and having someone boil up a chicken foetus, which no-one wants to happen. One of the other hens has peacock eggs under her for the same reason, so we'll have to see what happens there!

So I set to work building a new chicken run, or duckling run I guess. This time I went for the triangle model which took a lot of mental maths and figuring out. It's not finished yet but I should have it ready for them by tomorrow lunchtime. More building things out of junk = happy Pete.

Today I felt drained of energy and lethargic for the first time in a while. This was not nice. As far as I can tell, I was brooding somewhat about my future. Yesterday I told M I'd be leaving here at the end of June which means I have a specific amount of time left here - six weeks - and plans can be made for the next stage. So far I've been living in the moment with no need to think random thoughts for the future or worry about stuff and, within the realms of responsibility, this was very good for me. One little announcement later and I find myself in a funk. As the day's progressed I've gotten better - the trick is to balance the two factors and find a middle ground, which seems to be a good solution to a lot of stuff messing with my head. Anyway...

Here's a word of warning should you be doing the minimal living thing and not have a nail brush. Mud gets under the fingernails. I've been using various implements (nails, small screwdrivers, bits of cardboard, etc) to remove the mud because I don't have a nail brush. The problem is, using something sharp and hard like a nail to scrape this muck off creates a bigger space between the end of the nail and the finger. The next day even more dirt is to be found. Repeat this a few days and the nail becomes bite-able (which I have a tendency to do) rather quicker than would normally be the case, thus moving the end of the nail back up the finger. This then exposes more of the finger to the general bashings of a day, meaning sore fingertips. So, bring a nail brush with you. Or leave your dirty nails alone. You have been told.

The postman has a neat trick around here. He gives chocky-drops to every dog on his round, which is probably quite a few in this farming area. This means all the dogs are his friends and don't bite him. Of course, the dog owners don't really approve, but I guess it saves his trousers.

Something strange happened with the chicks last night. There was a bit of a racket which I noticed but thought it sounded like the geese that fly over now and then. In fact it looks like one of the mother hens had turned on three of her chicks and pecked them to death. This morning there were three little corpses in her chicken run with no sign of a break in (and a fox or cat would have taken the bodies away). The hens can be pretty vicious, pecking at anything that comes into their runs and making a racket when someone comes close to them, but to turn on their own was a bit weird. The chicks are getting bigger and maybe it was an animal version of teenage rebellion that had to be quashed. Whatever, nature works in strange ways. Maybe she's happier with just five kids rather than eight.

Okay, it's May, not April, but these are very typical of that phrase. For half an hour it's sunny and warm, then suddenly it's pouring with rain. By the time you've got your waterproofs on it's sunny again. Great for the plants as they get the best of both worlds, but hard to plan for. We got some more bamboo today and despite intending to dig up two or three small clumps I surpassed myself with an even bigger wadge of the stuff. The root base was so big we couldn't lie it flat in the car so drove home with 3-4 metres of bamboo waving around in the wind with me sitting by it holding on tight. The lump of mud around the roots kept it very steady and once we got moving the wind blew it backwards, but I kept checking for overhead power lines. I suggested we could fill the boot with soil and plant bamboo in there permanently, but M just laughed, as well she should.

Driving back with the roof down (obviously) meant we had to be careful with the weather. Before setting out it wasn't looking good so we spent an hour harvesting stones from one of the fields. We needed the stones to fill in some holes in the farmyard, but they had to be collected anyway as they can damage the blades of the combine harvester come hay harvesting time. Searching for stones was quite a nice job, though. Wandering around a field with a wheelbarrow piling up stones is quite a peaceful activity.

This morning was quite the adventure and I keep forgetting about it. I got up at 6.30, two hours earlier than normal. This wasn't so hard as I've been waking up at dawn anyway - I actually pre-empted my alarm clock this time, which was rather strange as anyone who's ever lived with me will attest. Then off over the field to Godshill for a bus to Newport, then Cowes, to pick up the bike. The ride back to the farm was harder than the ride on Friday which took 50 minutes with no break. I think there's an imperceptible incline, which makes sense as I was following the river upstream, so no cruising. My thigh muscles aren't quite up to scratch yet, and I had just woken up, so it took me 90 minutes in total (including a 10 minute lie down on a bench).

So, not too many insights today as I'm rather droopy, other than to record for the techy-comics record the idea of using trackback to aggregate TRS2 and Zum reviews, which will mean understanding how trackback works (what does a ping consist of, how is it interpreted, can it be manually sent, etc). Maybe a central notification centre (like weblogs.com) would be the best idea so that anyone writing reviews on their site can ping it.

I might have mentioned it before, but I've set myself a budget of £5.00 a week spending money and £20.00 a month travelling cash. Despite the fuckup with the bike lock key meaning I spent £8.00 more than necessary I'm only £2.40 over budget currently. Since I tend to just buy a newspaper at the weekend out of my fiver I should be back on track. The trick is going to be saving up a few pounds so I can not only get to London at the end of June for a week but also do a few things while there. But this is all future stuff - I have to get back to living in the moment, and at this moment I'm about to learn about Perl subroutines.

Back again on the Island after a weekend away in Winchester. In fact, I could have been anywhere. Other than seeing my mum for meals and chats I spent nearly all the time on the computer, first formatting this blog and uploading the photos, and then diving headlong into the mighty webernet. Funny, while I didn't miss it, once I was on it I couldn't get away. I came down on Saturday night with total screen tunnel vision.

Then on Sunday, after a quick tutorial for mum, it was back to Southampton for the ferry. Because of the bike fuckup (it's still in one piece, locked to the quayside - I'm picking it up tomorrow morning) I got the bus back to the farm. As it rolled over the hills towards Godshill I recognised the landscape and, walking through the fields to the farm, felt like I was returning to some kind of home.

This break was useful as it's helped put the farm into perspective. To go away and come back makes my being here seem more of a permanent lifestyle rather than just a thing I'm doing. I feel a comfortable sense of belonging but no edge of complacency which so often comes with familiarity. I've also started planning for the summer, writing to the farm near Banbury about working there for three months starting in July.

The brick that was Underworld has been replaced by two quite different books. According to Queeney by Beryl Bainbridge about the last days of Samuel Johnson, and Learning Perl, a programming manual. It might seem odd to bring a computing book out when I have no computer (save this palmtop) but it's quite thin and, reading through the first chapter at the weekend, I should be able to get to grips with the theory here and then work through the exercises later. Speaking of which, bro-in-law Jeff said this weekend that he's got an old Windows 95 laptop that I can have for nuffin. If I can run Linux on it (which I should be able to do) I'll be flying. It'll come over from the States in July with his parents when they come to visit. There is a connection between the Perl book and Underworld. I bought them both while I was working at the then Dillons in Brum in 1999 (the reciept for Learning Perl is dated 28th July 1999 and also includes a title called "Infinite Riches" which means nothing to me). Looks like my purchases were four years ahead of their time...

As I went to unlock my bike I discovered I didn't have the key on me. Like an idiot I had the bike lock unlocked for ease of application and had just clicked it into place. They key is in the caravan about 10 miles away. So I've had to leave the bike locked to the quayside for the weekend and then figure out a way to get back to the farm, pick up the key, and get back to the bike without spending a fortune on bus fares, and bus fares cost a fortune here. Arse, arse and double arse. Bum. Still, it's a nice evening as I sit here at the front of the ferry looking out into the bay. Not much I can do about it really. (Bet the key turns up as soon as the ferry disembarks...)

Currently writing this at East Cowes ferry terminal waiting for the boat to come in. I set off from the farm at 6.00pm and cycled non-stop through Newport to Cowes in 50 minutes. No break other than to check the map. Go me!

This week has been something of a revelation in that I am not knackered by the end of it. I feel like I've worked hard but I haven't killed myself. In fact I don't even feel the need for a couple of days off, though that's what I've got. Tonight I'll be in Winchester staying with my mum to upload this diary onto the site before returning to the Island on Sunday.

The ride from Newport to Cowes was very interesting. I'm going to have to do it again but stop and take photos on the way. There's a purpose built cycle path, tarmac rather than gravel, which runs alongside the River Medina. Unlike most paths of this ilk it's nowhere near a main road and passes through nature reserves - at one stage I found myself suddenly riding across a wooden bridge way up above a marsh before which was quite a shock - and past derelict industrial sites which have a similar but totally different beauty. And all along the river are rusting boats. As the sun was setting they took on a wonderful colour. Photos must be taken.

Boat is here. Time to go.

This afternoon I finally finished trimming the hedge. I've been periodically working on the side not facing the house which doesn't need to be quite so tidy but it still overgrown. It had to be brought back in case animals went into that field (currently it's set aside for hay) as the trees are poisonous.

I'm off to Winchester this weekend to upload this diary and stay with my mum, and because of this I'm much more aware of where I'm at in this whole thang. I noticed today that I'm working steadier and with more purpose, not throwing myself into jobs but working through them. Jobs like fixing the chicken run required thought which I applied, while clearing away the branches (which is a bigger job that cutting them down) is a steady, mindless task. I feel like I've built up a reserve of strength now where I'm able to work without getting exhausted but also a state of mind where I'm able approach the job in the right way, again avoiding exhaustion. The state of mind was most striking today as M had a friend to stay who is obviously not used to the farm. As I made pleasantries I realised that her attitude was similar to mine when I first got here. I've adapted to this way of life and it only took three and a half weeks.

Another interesting thought was aroused by telling Fred I was off this weekend. He asked if I was visiting my girlfriend. I told him I didn't have one right now and he said I should get out more in that jokey way folks do. I said I was enjoying the solitude at the moment and he understood, I think. But it got me thinking that I have no desire whatsoever for a social life right now. That's not to say I regret the one I had in London which by comparison to now was positively Bacchanalian (though never quite Bacchanalian enough...), but that this busy but alone life is just what I needed. I could go to the pub in the village but I can't afford to, and while I could get a weekend job to allow me to do such things, I don't want to because it would increase my potential to do stuff that would stop me being in solitude, is one way of looking at it. One plan for future WWOOFing is to go to a much bigger farm where I'm more likely to live and work with a wide range of people, the idea being I can bounce ideas off them and new avenues might open up, but right now I don't want to do that. New Guy (don't know his name yet) is arriving tonight to WWOOF here for a week and I'm slightly uneasy about this. It'll be fine, of course, but it'll mess up my routine. I've never had such a routine before and I'm not sure it can survive someone else. Heavens, we might get on well and go to the pub! That would never do!(Update: we got on and went to the pub...)

More death on the farm today - it's becoming something of a pattern. The exhausted lamb finally gave out this afternoon. After crashing out this morning he was up and about before lunch but (probably) drank too much water so that when the bottles of milk came he didn't have room for them. Being very thin he didn't have room for the food. By the afternoon he was dead. Hopefully this is the last lamb to succumb, but you never can tell with sheep. I find I'm getting slightly immune to lambs dying. When Blackie died I was quite distraught even though it was completely expected, whereas with this one I almost shrugged it off despite thinking to the last moment that he'd pull through.

Fixed up the chicken run this morning with a new roof that is so fox-proof it's like Fort Knox. Doing this put my mind at rest somewhat. I felt quite bad that it was my construction that had failed but the fact that it was the first thing I built meant making it better now was satisfying. Had a chat with Fred T. Farmer about foxes which was quite illuminating. I really want to get him down on audio. His take is that foxes have to eat so he doesn't begrudge them the occasional lamb or chicken, but they take advantage in a way that isn't 'natural'. Interesting that this percieved human trait of greed is what marks them out as bad creatures. I find myself in a strange situation. I'm very aware of city foxes which actually do a lot of good and don't interfere with human lives in a way that requires controlling their numbers, while country foxes are out and out pests, maliciously so. Then again, foxes seem to be the only uncontrollable factor out here on the farming frontier, everything else having been brought under control over time. No wolves, no birds of prey.

I suggested to M that the cats could protect the farm from foxes. She said they probably wouldn't be able to do much. I suggested an army of 500 cats, which created an entertaining image in my mind of cats parading around the farm with burning torches and hats on.

Got up and left the caravan just now and M called me over. During the clear, calm night with a new moon, a fox had gotten into one of the chicken runs and killed a mother hen and five of her chicks. Worse for me, it was the run I'd built. While the chickens couldn't get out, the fox was able to get in by standing on the roof lid, forcing it down. It then got into the box where they sleep and killed the lot of them. Actually, two chicks escaped and M caught them just now. So I'm going to have to fix the run making it fox-proof and then check the fence of the paddock - foxes can't jump over things so there must be a gap somewhere. Sigh...

Just finished Underworld by Don DeLillo and wanted to record that fact. I was actually a little disappointed with the last few pages, but then it isn't the sort of book that ends on a thrilling high-point. It's more the kind of book you want to go back and read again in more detail taking notes and picking up on the subtleties and connections you know you missed. The 827 pages don't seem enough to contain it all. I pity the poor book I chose to read next - it has a lot to live up to.

Actually, I know what I'm reading next because it's the only other book I brought with me - Will You Please Be Quiet, Please, a collection of short stories by Raymond Carver. Yes, more late 20th century American fiction, but on a different scale. 22 stories over 181 pages, though what what I've heard no less intense.

Before I started Underworld I read the newTim Lott novel, Rumours of a Hurricane which covers a very slightly similar theme, this time how life under Thatcher changed people through the 1980s. Such great potential and I was hoping for something along the lines of Jonathan Coe's What A Carve Up!, but was left slightly wanting. Now it's shown up for the shallow effort it is, making me wonder if a novel of Britain can be written as well as DeLillo writes of America. But then I did just namecheck Coe which negates that thought. I hear the second part of Coe's trillogy, which began a couple of years back with the stunning 70's Brummie semi-auto-bio-novel The Rotter's Club, is out this year. And here's me without a contact at Penguin no more for a freebee...

Millie's calf no longer sounds like an elephant. It's now moved up a few octaves to a high pitched screech like a tropical bird. Heaven only knows what pitch it will adopt next. The lambs are curled up to sleep - the young orphan is wrapped around the exhausted twin (which doesn't seem to understand why) in the same way she wrapped around her dying friend last night. Too emotional for words really.

Maybe I should re-name this project LamBlog or something... The dying lamb died last night, as expected, and the other young lamb was looking pretty lost today, following around the other two older lambs. All three were pretty quiet, which is strange for them. Meanwhile, the other sickly lamb, the smaller twin from the field, once again collapsed of exhaustion and had to be brought in after lunch (which he had evidently not had from his mother). As I passed them just now he's been accepted by the bereaved young lamb as a new friend, being nuzzled and nibbled and welcomed into the junior flock. He's going to stay in the paddock until all four of them are old enough to join the sheep. So everything works out well in the end.

As I write this, a lamb is dying outside in the shelter I built. There are four lambs together in there who have pretty much been together since birth. They paired off, the two older ones and the two younger ones, and in the complete absence of adult sheep have formed their own mini-flock. When Blackie died they didn't seem to care too much, but he was always a lost cause and never really played around with them. This time it's one of their buddies and the three of them are visibly worried. The other small one either lies next to her or sniffs around her face while the other two sit nearby. None of them bleat at me when I pass them to go the loo as they normally do. Meanwhile the dying lamb is lying on its side, head outstretched, breathing quickly and noisily but not moving. Today she managed to make it out of the shelter but collapsed immediately before M carried her back in. I don't expect her to make it through the night.

Another lamb is also in trouble - the smaller twin I mentioned earlier who keeps falling asleep in the field and isn't feeding properly. I was sitting outside my caravan after lunch watching the sheep distant in the field when I saw what looked like a lamb fall over and periodically wave it's legs in the air like it couldn't get up. I asked M if this was normal behaviour and she immediately got the lab down the paddock with the orphans. He was completely exhausted so was given a bottle of milk and put in the shelter to relax. After a snooze he got up and staggered towards the gate on the other side of the paddock, obviously not happy to be in a strange place with strange lambs - like I said, they pair up and it's buddy was bleating from the field, looking for him - and stood there, Eventually he got knackered again and lay down to sleep. I've noticed that sheep sleep upright with their legs tucked under their bodies unless they're poorly in which case they lie on their sides with legs stretched out. Smaller Twin was doing the latter and didn't flinch when I stood over him, which was very odd. M picked him up, put him back in the shelter and give him more milk. This lamb will probably be okay as long as he gets enough food. He's way smaller than the other twin and very thin and weak, but should recover in time.

One thing I've discovered is you can never tell which lamb is going to live or die. The dying lamb was bright, beautiful and bouncing until a week ago. Apparently the same thing happened before I got here - one of the perfectly healthy looking lambs just suddenly died. M implies that the lambs aren't doing so well this year so I don't know if this is normal, but on this farm no runt of the littler goes without care and attention so a bit of 'attrition' is kinda to be expected. Still very sad though.

On a more positive note, Lala and her lamb have bonded fine and are both doing well. Go Lala!

• Millie's calf now sounds like an elephant when she tries to moo, which is very odd coming from a small cow-shaped thing.
• One of the orphan lambs is on the way out. She's started off as the beautiful one with the most energy and has been looking poorly all week. Today she stayed in the shelter lying down despite the warm sun and no wind. She took all of her bottle of milk but looks pretty bad. "The start that shines twice as bright burns twice as quickly, and you have burned so very brightly wee lamb".
• One of the non-orphan lambs is having a bottle now and then as it's mother isn't caring for it. It's one of the twins and way smaller than it's sister so loses out on the battle for the teat. Has developed a habit of falling asleep in the field and waking up when the flock has moved on, then panicking. She'll be okay but needs checking on.
• On a more positive note, I had the lovely experience of being nuzzled by a lamb on my bare knee as I collected water from the tap in their paddock. Sure, the lamb was seeing if my leg hair was edible, but it was still really, really cute.
• A fire was had yesterday to burn the hedge trimmings. Still smouldering out there. Took some photos.
• Rode to Newport on the bike yesterday to spend some time in the library looking up arts funding re: the BugPowder library idea. Today did nothing but sunbathe in the field and read Underworld. Only 300 pages to go (of 825) and I want to finish it by next weekend when I'm visiting my mum and can swap it for a new book from the pile I have stashed there.
• Was offered a job by Fred-the-farmer today. Decided not to take it up - too soon and no need - but an interesting idea. Will ask him for more details next time he's here.
• Turns out M's partner Mike, who lives on "the mainland" (as it's known) and comes over at weekends, is a geologist by training, just like me dad.
• Touch wood, but the nights are getting less cold. Might be able to sleep without wearing a hooded jumper or wooly hat soon.
• Did some hand-washing of pants and socks with normal soap today and they came out fine. I was wondering about getting clean clothes and this was the blindingly obvious answer. Who needs a machine? (Yes, this does mean I've been wearing the same clothes day after day, but it's not really a problem when I'm working in the mud and living in a caravan. Let's not pursue this.)
• Mille the cow is generally outside my caravan in her own paddock. It seemed that every time I went outside she urinated for the longest time. Delightful, but nice that she's comfortable with my presence.
• Finally, a nasty reality thing. Sheep, you might have noticed, have flithy bums as traces of their shit collects on the fleece around their arses. As this builds up flies are attracted. If not attended to the flies lay eggs and the maggots can burrow their way into the sheep's bum, requiring, well I'm not sure exactly. M and Mike dealt with it yesterday when I was off in Newport. Thankfully. Wasn't looking forward to that job to be honest.

Let's take a quick look at why I'm here. The brief, official reason is I wanted to quit my job, found myself 'homeless' and realised I had nothing holding me back, so I took the opportunity by the horns. But why a farm? Why for no money? Why put all my stuff in storage? Originally I was going to just get rid of it all but a mate talked me out of it, suggesting storage as a half-way house in case I wanted to 'come back'. Why did the idea of living out of one bag on a farm in the middle of nowhere (relative to London at any rate) appeal so much? Especially as I was ardent that I wasn't escaping the city due to burn-out as so many friends supposed. I loved London, and still intend to return at some point. So, finding myself in a bad situation but not really wanting to run away from it all and hide, why do this?

The answer was nicely illustrated by an unlikely article in today's Guardian Review supplement (which I can't find online...). Composer Michael Berkeley is ostensibly writing about how he started using a computer to create his scores but brings in the story of his daughter being diagnosed with Dyspraxia. As his daughter responds positively to the treatment, mainly centred around a computer, he looks back to his own childhood and notices patterns.

"At school I, like Jess, had been reasonably bright and flourished in the arts but was less than distinguished in the academic field. I had never been able to understand this inability to retain and process information, and even now I have to look up some embarrassingly famous dates...

In my 20s, I did postgraduate studies with the composer Richard Rodney Bennett, who told me that my problem would never be a lack of ideas but too many - particularly too many undeveloped ideas. I needed to be more selective and organised."

Ding! Sounds familiar. Ish. A few months ago my mum told me about a girl at her school who had also been diagnosed with Dyspraxia which was new to her. Looking at the symptoms she was struck by how I fitted some of them. I looked into it and, yes, I did seem to show traits of dyspraxia, but only about a third of them. It was nice to see these things I'd thought of as stuff-I-was-crap-at written down as accepted symptoms of something, but I was pretty sure I was not dyspraxic. Even so, I could now identify these things as traits rather than failings.

I generally hold the opinion that mental disorders are just hardcore manifestations of normal mental activity, sometimes taken to an extreme, sometimes filling in gaps left by missing traits. This has been backed up somewhat by looking at milder forms of Autism and Asperger's syndrome where sufferers function in normal society, often unaware of their affliction and often specialising in fields such as Mathematics. That there are different degrees of Autism, et al, implies that, while not needing treatment per se, pretty much anyone out there with a slightly off-kilter head could be diagnosed with it, albeit mildly.

Mark Haddon's new book The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time , which I read an advance copy of last year and highly recommend, is written from the POV of a teenager with Asperger's. An interview with / feature on him struck a chord with me. Despite being a writer for years involved in many, many projects, he never 'broke through' to the respectable author house "I felt for years that I had my little cold face pressed to the windowpane of the House of Literature and they were all in there: Julian... Martin... I felt very much on the outside for a long time." Kate Kellaway, the author of the piece, suggests that it's his versatility and spreading himself thin that lead to this. In other words, too many ideas.

Too many ideas, an inability to focus on one thing and see it through, to concentrate on a job without daydreaming or drifting off the subject. Rather like this post I'm writing here in fact.

Back to me, then, and my farm decision. In the Banbury pre-farmblog-blog I concluded that mindless manual labour was better than ever-so-slightly mentally taxing labour because it left my mind free and able to relax. Or something like that anyway. And I am happier doing simple, repetitive jobs that don't require too much thought beyond simple practicalities.

Another way of looking at this is I'm a victim of too many ideas and an inability to knuckle down to one exclusively, so having little or no stimulus means I can function without being distracted. This explains why I preferred working through the night at a computer - no people around, no emails, no things-to-do like shopping, and no feeling that I should be doing something. I was never really content at those times when my life was 'sorted out', seeking refuge in drunken nights out to dull my senses, or at least focus them in a dark pub with a specific activity to hand. No distractions in a pub, which is what makes them great. Time passes, none of it consequential. Keeps the ideas in check.

But that lifestyle couldn't continue without some kind of psychosis kicking in, so I took the other extreme. Cut out the distractions completely, but this time in a healthy way, and here I am with a big book (Underworld by Don DeLillo), a PDA-keyboard combo for writing this stuff, and a job which passes the time with no consequences which leaves me too tired to ponder my crazy ideas.

That's not to say I haven't had loads of ideas this last month, too many to list here even if I could remember them all. But, and this is the point, I haven't actually been able to do anything about them which means I'm actually forced to think them through properly rather than just diving in. No just throwing ideas out and seeing if they stick because there's nowhere to throw them. I've found myself, for the first time possibly ever, actually concentrating on things properly. Kinda. This post has taken me three hours to write. Half that time was spent faffing around with other things that crossed my mind. But then, I am, very slightly, but not really, or maybe I am, Dyspraxic.

The trick is to work with it not against it, and try and control it while letting it work its magic. After all, you can never have too many ideas!

Another of those nice afternoons spent building stuff, this time a gate made out of a futon. The original idea was to use a third of the futon as-was as the gate but it was the wrong dimensions, so I took it apart, cut the planks to size and nailed it back together into the sturdiest motherfucking 3x3ft gate you ever did see. This was all done in the shed sitting on a broken chair surrounded by tools while the wind blew beating rain down on the roof. You cannot beat the feeling of sitting in a shed working while it rains. Maybe it's a bloke thing, maybe it brings back ancestral caveman memories, but it's brilliant. And the gate works. Go me!

Millie's calf has been quiet all day, but not for trying. M confused me by saying he was a horse. I didn't think there were any horses on the farm. Turns out the calf is hoarse and can merely utter a dry grunt rather than a bellow. In some ways I feel sorry, but not really. Damn thing should grow up and leave it's mother alone. And it's amusing to watch it try and moo. Head up, mouth open, but all that comes out is steam.

The silence of the calf does not mean the caravan is quiet tonight. The wind has picked up even more and is bashing into the side of my mobile home. Every gust makes a racket through the boiler flue (not that there's a boiler attached or anything) and the caravan rocks ever so slightly from side to side. It's a bit disconcerting at first but you soon get used to it. Rather like being on a boat.

I've been sketching down some ideas for net ideas, based around the notion and decentralisation and syndication are the way forward for the comics community - a two pronged project using the BugWiki for the academic side and developing a plug-in for Movable Type to make it easier for Stripblogging.

The idea for the BugWiki is something Jez was discussing - integrating it into the BugPowder weblog to give definitions integrated automatically into posts. My idea is to open the Wiki to anyone who wants to use it through various means - an MT plugin, a simple script to parse the page and a basic manual system. The idea is the page will dynamically query the BugWiki and create links to any words on the page (within a specified area) back to the Wiki.

On the Stripblog front the basics are simple - developing templates and standards for doing comics on weblogs - but the interesting part is developing an XML standard for syndicating strips, or samples of strips, or simple notifications that strips have been updated. The first stage is to implement it and get techy-minded cartoonists to try it out. Then make it more accessible to non-techy cartoonsts, who make up the majority.

So I need a laptop computer to learn how to do all this. Which is something of a stumbling block of course. Doesn't have to be fancy - just able to run Linux really. The bigger issue is lugging the thing around...

That aside, with all this and my proposals for a UK underground comics library, I think Caption, the small press comics convention in Oxford this August (there's a classic example of how a BugWiki definition would work), will be more interesting that usual for me this year.

Been doing a bit of gardening today, planting around the raised beds and putting in some paving stones leading to a new bridge over the drainage ditch. Nice work and satisfying, creating a garden. I'm going to have to come back next year and see how it's established itself. Could get into this lark - poss career move?

Part of the job was digging up some turf from the ditch and dumping it in the paddock to cover up the chalk. The lambs, especially the older couple, made a beeline for this fresh grass and chomped for England. I dunno if it's connected, but tonight they're very boisterous, head-butting each other and leaping around like lambs are traditionally supposed to. Up until now they've been on powdered ewes milk, hay and a kind of muslei mix. The lush grass seems to be acting like an injection of amphetamine to them. As lambs mimic each others behaviour the two younger lambs are trying to join in and while they're getting bashed about a bit they've giving their best. Great to see them all bouncing around as if the paddock is a big trampoline but I hope they don't get hurt!

Mille and her calf have been separated again. The noise wasn't too bad this morning but all day today the bleeder has been making a hell of a racket. I clicked as to why this noise bothers me while the rest of the animals don't - the calf moos on the same frequency as my vibrating mobile phone. Even though I never have it on, the sound make me flinch every time. It's the same as my reaction to helicopters after numerous Reclaim The Streets and Mayday protests and I suspect I'll be haunted by this calf for a while yet.

Speaking of which, I didn't realise it was May 1st until I heard the news that there hasn't been any violence in London yet, though reporters are hoping for some later on. Feel quite distant from it all, though I suspect bugger all is really going on. The time for that kind of action has passed now. It's school kids against the war these days. (Reminder: great feature in the Guardian weekend magazine last week - try and find the link. Kid Power by Libby Brooks)

I feel this week I've really settled into this life, so much so I'm reluctant to write in the reportage style of the last fortnight, though I'm unsure how to continue, hence no entry yesterday. That and listening to the final, excellent Reith Lecture on Radio 4 last night. I went to M's Tai Chi class for the first time on Wednesday morning and, while I'm not 100% sure it's for me, I enjoyed it a lot. It got me thinking about something M goes on about - living in the now. I've been quite resistant to this notion thinking it to be somewhat short sighted and hedonistic, but I'm starting to see it from her perspective. Maybe I'll write about it some more once it's settled in my mind better. That said, I'm reticent to turn this into a psyc-blog. Or maybe I should, since I'm WWOOFing partly to get my head sorted out. Maybe I'll just write less often but in more depth. It's not like I have to write regularly to keep my audience.

One thing I wasn't expecting to be involved with on an organic farm was bamboo, and to be fair it's not really part of the farm. We're establishing a row of bamboo to hide the more practical parts of the farmyard from the house and getting them to stay upright in the wind has been something of a chore this last week. Today we went to collect more bamboo, my first time doing this. I approached the bamboo forest looking for a section that would be easy to dig up and set to work. As I dug down the clump refused to move, so I dug further down. Eventually I had dug almost all the way around and completely underneath and still it wasn't budging, hanging in mid air like a surrealist painting. Eventually, with the help of a saw, I got it detached. The clump was massive and refused to split due to the tight root bundle, so with the help of a wheelbarrow we got it back to the soft-top car. I sat in the back surrounded by bags of plants and this huge stretch of bamboo hanging over the back of the car, holding it down. Back at the farm I dug a big hole, made it bigger, then bigger still, and planted the thing. Only then did I realise what a huge clump I'd dug up compared with the others there.

This morning was a bit rough. I was woken at dawn by Millie's calf crying out. As I said yesterday, they've been separated so Millie can recover and the calf ain't too happy about this. 5.00am and the bleeder starts - about 10 moos a minute by my reckoning - and doesn't stop, at all, ever. Later he manages, some how, to break into Millie's paddock and peace breaks out and I should get a decent nights sleep tonight. But I'm dreading tomorrow night...

Before dinner M knocked on the caravan asking for help. One of the lambs had not come in from the field. I haven't written about them much, but there are four lambs with their mothers out in the field. Every evening they come through the paddock and into the shed for the night but tonight one of our lambs was missing. So off we went around the field to try and find her. She was asleep behind the hill and when M woke her up she happily trotted to the shed. I say happily, but she's the smallest of the four lambs and one of twins. Her sister is bigger and probably gets to the udder first, leaving the small lamb with an impatient mother to feed from. She's survived this far being the runt and all four lambs are always bouncing around the field, but falling asleep in the rain is not a good portent, especially after Blackie dying soon after falling asleep in the rain. Still...

Millie the cow has had her calf taken away from her. The calf is ready to go it alone and Millie needs a break having had two babies in a row, so the calf has been put in a pen with the other calves while Millie is on her own in the cow-paddock by my caravan. M warned me that they will probably make a racket tonight and the calf has already started crying for it's mum

In other infant news, the chicks are well behaved and the cats still aren't pregnant. And Sandy the dog is mental.

Last night it rained a lot which was, or course, a really good thing. The fields look a lot greener and the ducks have their pond back and loads of mud to mess around in.

The first job of the day was to sort out Lala and her lamb which she'd rejected and was refusing to feed. M had shut them both up in a small pen and cut away the wool from Lala's teats in the hope that Lala would let the lamb might be able to get a sneaky suck and then everything would be okay. Obviously, if Lala had completely rejected the lamb it could be bottle fed but it makes sense to use a fully grown female sheep rather than a costly powdered milk preparation.

Lala was bleating like a good moaner and the lamb was curled up in the corner looking intimidated. You forget how big sheep are, especially with a full coat of wool, until you see them next to newborn lambs. We made a bigger pen for them by cornering off part of the sheep-shed and moved the two of them into their new home. Lala still wasn't having any of this new lamb so M essentially shoved the lamb onto Lala's teats while holding Lala against the wall. It looked rather like M had fainted on the sheep and the operation took a good minutes or two. Eventually Lala was letting the lamb feed with no complaints so hopefully... well, we'll see.

After that adventure I set to work cutting back the other side of the hedge. This wasn't such a big job as last week as most of the topping work had been done, and I got half the hedge done by lunch.

Over lunch the black lamb, Blackie as I quite originally named him, died. See the previous entry for more on that.

The afternoon was spent digging up ragwort and thistles from the hay field. You dig up a largish ragwort plant, bash it against the shovel thus covering your trousers in mud, and throw it in the wheelbarrow. Then repeat 1000 times until a cup of tea is needed. And then the rain started again, heavier than ever, or so it seemed. As the rain lashed down my waterproofs I continued working, actually enjoying it more. It was like getting caught in the rain without a coat (or if you're one of those strange people, an umbrella, though I've never liked them myself) and you pass that point where it's not worth worrying about getting wet any more. Suddenly being wet is great and you're stomping in puddles deliberately and grinning like a kid. While I wasn't deliberately getting wet, I certainly wasn't worried about the rain. It was fun.

As I was enjoying the mud and rain it occurred to me that I would never be able to capture completely what it was like to be out there and I should really be doing some kind of audio diary. Maybe I've been listening to too much Radio 4 the last fortnight, but the idea of doing a radio show/documentary from the farm took hold. With some kind of small recording device (minidisc or digital dictaphone) and a clip-on mike I could record my thoughts as I go about the farm and then edit them into a show once a week. Obviously this would need a fair bit of kit plus the ability to get the damn thing online weekly, but it's not out of the question. Something to think about and maybe do next year - Radio WWOOF.

Interesting wound time - wearing gardening gloves in the rain is the same as working underwater and so when you take them off the skin on your hands is all rubbery. If you've already got teeny little cuts on your fingers, the skin around the wound flakes off, and then spreads. It's not painful at all, but it looks pretty gross.

The black lamb just died. He took some food from the bottle this morning but not much, and then refused the bottle before lunch. His body got cold, he didn't move and in the last 15 minutes he died.

He lasted for a fortnight, which was a fortnight longer than he would have done out in the field, and there was a lot wrong with him. But he was a good kid.

Showing the balance of how these things work out, one of the sheep, Lala, gave birth yesterday and after refusing to feed her baby finally accepted it this morning. Win some, lose some. Life, as it were, goes on.

Walking back from dinner I popped my head in on the lambs.. Blackie is asleep at the front of the shelter, flat out and shivering as the rain dampens his side. I woke him up and moved him back into the shelter. He looked bedraggled and very old, for a lamb. He might make it through the night but there's not long to go for him.

Update: M's taken him back inside. He's currently standing in a blue plastic box looking a bit better. If he tries to get out she'll put him in a dustbin. He's not taking his bottle of milk very well and after feeding coughs like an old man. Maybe the warmth for a few days will help.

Now I've been here a fortnight and gotten used to the whole notion of whatever-it-is-I'm-doing-with-my-life, and have finally gotten this cold under control (touch wood) I've been thinking about what to do next. I think I'm going to be here on the Island for another two months at least - while I havn't talked to M about this explicitly she's said how she'll be able to build on her Yoga and Tai Chi classes now she's got help on the farm - and then I'd like to experience a different farm. There's an interesting looking one near Banbury which, while being an organic farm (albeit a small one), is run by a theoretical physicist looking to open a conference centre in a barn on site. Different to what's going on here and potentially leading to something interesting.

By October I'll be out of cash and in need of a job. Maybe I'm wrong to do so, but I'm thinking of the easy option and getting a job at Waterstone's in the run up to Xmas should be no problem. London is a possibility but the cost of living would be too much to save anything, so I'm erring towards either Birmingham or Southampton, both of which have branches where I've either worked or know people in.

Then, come January, back to the world of WWOOFing, though this time definitely somewhere with accommodation inside the farmhouse. No caravans in winter for me! Assuming I can save about £500 over Xmas this will take me to Easter and a year of this-kind-of-thing. After that, time and experience will tell.

All this stuff is supposed to be leading somewhere or to something, that something being the rest of my life. Now I'm here I don't think I'm going to be WWOOFing or similar for the rest of my life. This is not a means in itself but a means to something else. The main impetus for going to a farm was that there would be no distractions and no wants or needs, giving me a chance for the first time in my adult life to just stop and take stock, while also getting my health back on track. It is also a chance to see what life outside the ratrace is like. My interests in comics and the net have involved me with non-profit communities and I think this is where my future lies. How, I'm not sure.

I'm pretty sure I want to get involved in computers and web culture as this has been an important part of my life over the last three years or so, and as such am keen to learn programming skills, so I'll be looking to invest in a cheap-but-light laptop so I can put this isolation to some use (writing this journal is going to get far to insular in time I'm sure! That said, I've finally made serious inroads into Underworld for the first time since I bought it four years ago) so if anyone has any good leads in this area (or wants to sell an old one), please let me know.

I think the things I'm learning on the farm will be useful away from it but in an abstract sense. I'm currently daunted by the task of clearing ragwort from the field by hand next week, but I was daunted by the hedge, and before that the lamb shelter. It's interesting that on the farm the whole job is in front of you and you can see the results of your labours. In 'normal' life things aren't so clear so it's easy to perceive jobs as being bigger or smaller than they actually are. The point here is that the size of the job doesn't actually matter - you just get on with it until it's done, and it never takes as long as you thought it would. Two weeks and that seems blindingly obvious to me now. What else will become second nature over the next year?

After my rather daunting first go on a peddle bike last weekend it was with some trepidation that I went off today with the intention of possibly reaching the bottom of the island. In the end it was okay. Yes, I walked up a few hills but it's not like I was racing anyone or in a hurry to get anywhere.

Five miles down to Chale wasn't too bad, though I did stop a couple of times after a particularly gentle incline, and I found myself overlooking Chale Bay. Ah, the sea, the sea. Just what I came here for. Buoyed up by making it this far without dying I checked out the map for contour lines. The area around Blackgang was pretty daunting, heading up to 170ft, but it was only short, and then, joy of joys, downhill all the way to Niton, so I puched tghe bike up the hill, found the bridleway, and pelted hell for leather down the hill.

In Niton I discovered I'd come out with no money, not having had much use for it of late, but I did have my cash card, so I found one of those modem-powered cash machines that charges you £1.50 for the privilege, bought a paper (I've found the Saturday Guardian not only lasts a week but is invaluable for radio listings), and went to the pub for a pint. Whether it was the beer or the rest or the lack of upward inclines, but the ride home was a doddle. I can particularly recommend the stretch between Bierley and Fairfields, though not necessarily between Fairfields and Bierley. And then, after a lovely sunny afternoon, half an hour after I got back in my caravan the heavens opened.

Eleven miles and no problems in the thigh departments at this time of writing. Touch wood, this could lead to something interesting...

Saturday morning, and M's doing the grandma thing - there are four kids, all under three foot, running about the place rather obsessed with the lambs, as you would expect. Got me thinking about how city farms do this kind of thing, which suddenly gave me the revelation. There are city farms. If I'm not sick of farming by the end of the year this would be a perfect way of combining the farming life with my desire to get back to London at some point. So I'm writing it down for future reference.

Today was the first full day of constant rain I've worked through. It wasn't so bad, being cocooned in my waterproofs and while I do have a bit of a sniffle, that's nothing new. In fact, I'll be amazed when I don't have a runny nose on this farm. Finally finished 'trimming' the hedge. The pile of fir tree branches looks like a market the week before Xmas - I think I've cut down the equivalent of 15 trees, all from the top of a ladder, sometimes on tip-toes from the top rung reaching at full stretch to slice through a rogue branch.

While it was a damp job today, the job got quicker as I got more comfortable with the saw and less reticent about whether or not to cut a branch off. The hedge looks pretty abused at the moment, as if some giant has taken large bites out of it, but being a fir it'll soon grow back, which is part of the problem of course.

I finished the hedge with an hour to go and started work on next weeks big job, to clear a field of ragwort. The field is about 7 acres and ragwort is a small-ish weed which has to be dug out, roots and all. It's poisonous to the sheep and cows who will eventually go into the field. In an hour I cleared a small fraction filling a wheelbarrow. This is going to be a big, long job, but so far not an annoying one. Find, dig, remove, find again. Nice and easy does it.

Black lamb update. While probably not blind, he definitely has something wrong with his eyesight. On the whole he follows the other lambs around but this can be a problem if they suddenly run off leaving him alone. At one stage they had all left the shelter in a rare break in the rain. When I passed again half an hour later, all the white lambs had returned to the shelter, but Blackie was still outside, looking away from the shelter, in the rain. So I went in and led him back to the dry. Then, at the end of the day, I heard a slight bleating as I smoked a cigarette outside the caravan. There, in the pouring rain, was Blackie on the other end of the paddock from the shelter looking the wrong way, his head waving around randomly as if his spine was a broken spring, which it might well be. At least he's got his voice, I thought, as I again led him to safety. The lambs are always making stupid mistakes - it's how they learn quickly how to survive - but Blackie is making more than most, and he's still so small. When he's lying down in the shelter he looks smaller than a cat. I suspect I'll be looking out for him for a while yet.

I never thought before I got here that I'd get really into lambs. They really are the coolest things. Yeah, they're cute and funny, but there's more to them than that.

I'm particularly taken by the black lamb which isn't blind after all but definitely "not right" as Fred so bluntly put it. His head is often pointing up, he's very small and far too unsteady on his legs for a week old lamb. All of the lambs went outside yesterday as the box they were in in the kitchen was leaking wee and every time I went past their shelter, which is often as it's by my portaloo, I checked in on him.

The first time I did this he's managed somehow to get his head stuck in the bottom of the fence and was struggling pathetically to get out, so I went in and gently eased his skull free. Last night he was fine, but this afternoon he was seemingly asleep. Actually, he was asleep, but his breathing seemed very shallow, so I popped in to make sure he was okay. On waking him up he was fine. I spotted him trying to clean himself and failing, unable to co-ordinate his head. I don't think he's mentally defective, for a sheep anyway, and when he's got the energy he's wandering around the paddock sniffing and nibbling things, but he's very weak and probably physically disabled around the neck area. M's plan is to probably keep him separate from the other sheep and keep him for his wool, which should be plentiful as he's got very woolly legs already. So, more of a pet, which is probably for the best. Any other farm he'd be dead by now, poor little runt.

The other four lambs don't take up as much of my sympathies, but they're still cool. First you've got the moaning twins, both the same size and indistinguishable, these are the ones that bleat constantly, crying out for food, attention, the sheer hell of it. They're kinda pathetic and to be honest are setting a bad example to the younger lambs. They're looking more and more like sheep as their fleece puffs out around their necks. They've also finally figured out what grass is, so not long before they go in the field.

The next lamb along size-wise is actually the youngest. While she's got bulk to him she's still got afterbirth on her fleece. While she's big, and will be a huge sheep, she's less than a week old and hasn't started bleating yet. Physically and mentally she's growing fast though. Her friend is the third oldest lamb who was born before I got here. She's the beautiful one who was going to be lent to the church for the Easter service (but it didn't pan out that way). Small, but perfectly formed with a lovely face and a slight, high pitched and almost attractive bleat (at least, as much as a bleat can be attractive).

Now that all five orphan lambs are outside in the paddock together, going to visit them in quite an adventure. Because they've been brought up from birth by humans they're totally tame and run up to you expecting food. As I don't have running water in the caravan, I use the tap in the paddock to fill my water bottle and they all crowd around me, nuzzling the bottle and nibbling my clothes. They don't actually climb on me like a cat or dog would, and they tend to flinch at sudden movements, but there's a definitely identification.

This is the same for nearly all the animals on the farm, at least those that aren't birds. Most of them were brought up by M from birth and know here. She told a story of when Milly the cow tried to play with her. Cows play by jumping up on each other, and Milly wanted to do this to M. M thought she was about to die! Every evening the sheep with lambs (not the orphans) knock on their gate asking to be brought in, and M goes up with a bucket to lead them into the shed, and they all follow her, some leading the way. No instruction, no dog, they just wait for her and do what she asks them to do.

I haven't had much experience of the other animals on the farm, the sheep and cows in the upper field, but I did go for a walk in their field yesterday evening. The sheep kept their distance, not knowing my face or body shape, but the bulls were really keen to say hello. I've often had a problem with cows, not really trusting a large mass of muscle with the brains bred out of it, so I got a bit worried when two bulls and a cow came running towards me. I headed for the fence, ready to jump if they went for me, but they just stood there, a few metres away, staring at me. I tried waving my arms, but they just stood there. I slowly moved away, they slowly moved forwards. Eventually I reached a point where the fence turned into a hedge which I couldn't climb over, so I stopped. They stopped. 20 minutes later they got bored and went away. I know they were just being friendly and wanted to see what this human in the field wanted, and I wasn't exactly scared, but...

For the record, today was spent working on the hedge. This is going to be a long job. I also did a couple of posters for M's Tai Chi and Yoga classes on her computer and discussed her plans. I said I'd be willing to help as part of the WWOOFing thang, which I would. If I can eventually get a WWOOFing place doing computer stuff it'd be perfect, especially in the winter and especially if they have net access, so getting some experience of 'client based working' is no bad thing.

Thank god Wednesday is my half day. Yesterday I was too tired to write or even read more than a couple of chapters and went to bed before 10pm. This morning I didn't have to be up and at work as M had her Tai Chi class, but I didn't even make it to breakfast and found my cereal outside my door. Rising at 11.00 I popped into Godshill to post some letters and met M for lunch.

I was feeling a bit of a failure and didn't want to moan, but she was already understanding and said I only had to do a couple of hours work today, which fitted her plans as she had some guests over later, had to pop into town, and I really shouldn't be up a ladder chopping things with no-one else on the farm for obvious safety reasons.

So I just chopped a tree down and finished. Which says it all. "Just chopped a tree down" indeed. Actually, it was half a tree at the end of the hedge. The tree had been left last year due to a nest being found and needed to be brought into line, so I had to climb up the ladder, cut through the foliage to the trunk and chop through it with a 1930's machete-thing. Then, once the trunk fell (I let the wind do the last stage) I cleared the other branches to bring it level. And then cleared the branches away, which is harder work that it sounds.

Having spent most of the day, other than that two hours, lounging around listening to the radio I'm feeling pretty good right now, but it's been aches all over the last 24 hours. Mainly in the shoulders and arms, thanks to the hedge work. As with the cycling, I'm using muscles I don't usually use and they're moaning about it. In time they'll get better I'm sure, but it's taking time.

I think, hope, this midweek has been a turning point as I build up my recovery time. I've had 10 days of a steady level of work after which is probably the longest I've had in a while. The prospect of it continuing is rather daunting, but it has to. Push forward, relax back, push forward. That's the pattern methinks. Or I could be talking shite.

Today was spent cutting back the fir trees that form the hedge on the side of the farmhouse. Lopping, sawing and cutting, often 8 feet up a ladder. And then an hour of clearing grouse, which is spiky badness, from an area of the cow field. I am scratchy and itchy and tired, so no great entry tonight.

This morning we went back in history to get some coppice. Coppice comes from coppice trees and these trees together form a coppice. The act of cutting branches of coppice is known as coppicing. This linguistic simplicity goes some way to show how ancient this process is and while doing it I did feel like I was acting out some ancient rite.

Coppice is used mainly for making fences and reinforcing hedges (through the act of 'laying down' the hedge). Coppice grows quickly from the base in long, thin branches which are strong and flexible. As long as you leave some part of the tree to grow you can cut off any size of branch - a long thick one for the support of a fence or thin branches to weave between them. Coppice appears to be a universally useful tree. At every stage of it's growth it can be used for some form of construction in many ways and because it's so fast growing a small area the size of a tennis court or two can support a coppicing business.

The coppice we were in was not in great shape as it hadn't been maintained but it still had a beautiful aura about it. The thin, tall coppice trees reaching for the sky left a lot of space for bluebells on the ground and a small stream ran through the coppice. My job was to wander around the coppice looking for long, straight branches about 2 inches in diameter, cutting them down and removing the leafy tops. These could have been used for detail work, but we left them behind. Then, having made four bundles of eight foot long branches, we started lugging them across the field to the car which couldn't make it across the mud. Real medieval stuff, and tough work.

What we're going to actually do with our coppice is unclear at the moment. There are sections of the fence by the house that M wants to close up and a new section is to be built to hide the shed from the rear windows of the house. After that, the hedge behind me needs to be laid down to stop it thinning out. If it thins out too much the cows will get through and fall on my caravan as it's about 10 feet up a slope. Apparently this isn't so urgent, though I might beg to differ.

Map of the Coppice

For the first time in, ooh, 10 years or so I own a bicycle. The last one I owned was a racer which I sold when I got my first motorbike back in Eastleigh. I'd thought about getting a bike in London a few times but never got around to it. Today I bought one. It cost me £45 second hand plus about £40 in extras.

The day started with a lift into Newport, the main town on the island, for a day of wandering around. By 12.00 I'd bought the bike but had to wait three hours for them to fit the mudguards and rack, so I went to the Quay Arts Centre for tea. My main reason for going, other than tea, was to see what kind of Art things were going on on the island and while there was little of interest on the notice board, one thing did jump out - a mail art program run in Rookley, a mile or so north of where I'm staying. Art On The Green have their next exhibition on June 14th and submissions have to be in by the end of May. The theme is 'threes'. Not sure if I'll contribute, but if I do there are three lambs in the kitchen at the moment...

The main art exhibition at the centre was a painter who's name annoyingly isn't in the events leaflet I picked up. She paints trees and very beautifully with great texture. I was particularly taken by a small room of her source photography, one of which was blown up with a photocopier to approximately life size. As I used to do this kind of thing it was great to see and I took a surreptitious photograph.

Their next interesting show is by Abigail Hunt, running through June, which appears to consist of books and texts cut up, and appeals to me.

You can buy postcards from the Newport Tourist Information Centre for 14p. I felt that worth mentioning.

Picking up the bike I, with great trepidation, started to make my way home. After a shaky start across a park the road out of Newport was pretty steady going. A bit of a shock when I turned onto the bridleway - corners, gravel, help! - but steady going. It all kicked off when I got to the middle of the island and the joys of hills. This was when I realised how little I'd used certain muscles since 1993, and how damn unfit I've become in my adult life. Pain shooting through my thighs, lungs on fire, sweating pouring from my head, I struggled the four miles home in 45 minutes.

Still, nothing unexpected. With the digging and lugging on the farm and cycling at the weekends I should be fit in, well, some time or other. The advantage of this knackering bike ride is at least I'll get to sleep okay tonight. Insomnia would be a bad thing in this caravan cos it's so bleeding cold in here.

The weather has finally broken. It's been a cold day for the first time in a week with little sun and the wind has really picked up. The forecast is for a bit of rain but not much, which is not really good for the farm. The plants are dying and the ducks are getting desperate as their pond is dry as a bone. M's concerned - this doesn't normally happen until mid summer. As for me, I've been wearing my woolly hat constantly for the last 24 hours. I put it on when I went to bed and it stayed there all night - I think the same will happen tonight. I brought enough jumpers with me, but only just, and I'm kicking myself for leaving my gloves and scarf behind. Island + countryside + caravan = quite a bit colder than London, especially when the sun goes down. Remember that one.

Well, M decided she didn't like my design for the raised beds after all, so we went with the 2x2 square. I felt a pang of angry disappointment which I quickly recognised as something I often feel when an idea I have after getting enthusiastic about is rejected. It's a problem I often had in bookselling - a combination of being over-sensitive and pig headed. Thankfully I kept it under control, which was not hard to do really - this is her farm and I'm here to learn from her - but it was interesting to note a 'negative attitude' coming to the fore so early on. I think it's important for me to spot things like this which are obviously not context dependent and try understand them. Easier said than done...

More adventures on the orphan lambs front. Last night farmer Fred brought over a newborn but by the morning it was dead, so I was greeted to a small white corpse in a plastic bag before breakfast. M doesn't ostensibly breed her animals for food and definitely doesn't slaughter them on the site, so while I rationally know that the animals are all potentially food it's not part of the plan here. The dead lamb wasn't a shock but it wasn't nice either. But, well, it happens.

Later, at dinner, Fred brought another lamb over. This one had been born last night and had gotten its first feed from the mother but had since been abandoned or was not fit enough to keep up with the mother, so he brought it over. This one is huge, for a lamb, and is already walking around.

The black lamb which arrived on Tuesday is still looking very weak and can't stand well. We think it might be blind and M's not sure it'll survive. The other lambs flinch when you wave a hand in front of them, but Blackie doesn't and he holds his head in a strange way. I hope he at least makes it outside. The other baby lamb, the beautiful one, is fine though still quite small.

By the end of the day, having made the frames of four raised beds, I was knackered and really felt like I'd done a good week's work. My body was tired but my mind was good. I like this feeling and I shall sleep well tonight. It was sunny and hot again today but the wind is picking up. Where I was working it was very dry and dusty and I was sawing a lot of wood and everything was blowing around. The wind and the sun and dust really wore me down and while I got a lot done it was done steadily and at a good pace.

The eight beds I've made are not going to win any design awards and I doubt certain people would like them in their gardens, but they are made of random planks nailed together and are essentially free. I noticed that the more I made, the better they got (except the last one which was a total bodge using the last of the wood). Again with the learning process - all good.

The weekend is now mine to do with as I will. Rain is forecast and since this is an island it's likely the strong winds in the Channel will not miss us, so I'm heading off to Newport all going to plan. I want to buy a cheapo bike and pay a visit to the reference library, ostensibly to see if they have free net access but also to see what's going on on this island beyond the tourist traps. There's also an arts centre which could be interesting. One of my long term plans is to get some experience in this field to benefit the BugPowder comics thangdango.

A less busy day today, which was a good thing as it was achingly hot - shorts were the order of the day and my tan is coming on strong.

In the morning I finished the raised beds from yesterday. Interestingly my first bed was great as was my fourth. The middle two are a bit dodgy as I tried to get clever and improvise ending up in bodge upon bodge, but I got it figured out.

The next plan is to do more beds at the front of the house on a patch of dirt. The original plan was to do four beds in a square but then, while looking for planks of wood, we came across some roof struts left over from the house-building. It occurred to me these ready made triangles were perfect for beds in themselves. So I started sketching on the dirt with slabs of wood and came up with a more interesting design with three rectangular beds at the back, one in the middle at the front and two triangles on each side flanging back. M's okayed it and tomorrow they go into place. It's nice to think I've created something from my design that will be here for a few years to come.

No great revelations today other than I've been outside nearly constantly in daylight hours, which is a novelty. This was brought home when I had a shower in the house (yes, my first shower since I got here). Being newly built, the bathroom is very nice and plush compared with my mobile home (lots of 70s brown...). So far the weather has been great so being outside is not a problem. When it rains constantly for a week I might change my tune somewhat. We'll see.

Interesting to note the orchestra of the farm. The lambs in the paddock are constantly bleating at the moment, mainly for food (we're trying to wean them from milk to grass) but also for attention as we humans are their mums. Now it's dark they're quiet but I hear bleating in my sleep. Then you've got Sandy the dog barking at anything that passes the gate and occasionally wining for attention. Next to Sandy are the Bengal cats. Often they're quiet but they also want feeding towards the end of the day and the tom cat actively asks for cuddles, which is sweet. So they're making a racket. From the kitchen comes the less violent bleating of the baby lambs, and in the distance the occasional deeper bleat of a sheep or low of a cow. At 5.00pm it's a veritable cacophony.

When the chickens eat the food intended for the lambs because the lambs can't tell the difference between mud, string, my trousers and food and the chickens are opportunists.

I have a red neck. Doesn't hurt - I seldom get sunburn - but it's very red. I also have tough hands, workers hands, building up some nice calouses on my palms thanks to not bringing any gloves with me. Yes, I know I should have learned after blistering my hands so badly in Banbury but it's not been so bad, mainly because I've been doing lifting and fixing rather than repetative digging. Still, gloves are on the way.

I've been re-discovering the joys of letter writing. My mother, in a somewhat typical manner, sent me two self addressed stamped postcards to encourage me to write to her, so I bashed one out last night. Then I wrote a letter to Kate. I haven't written a letter like this for years and it was quite a nice thing which I think I'll keep up. Just got Kath's address through from her so will write another letter later.

Today was a half day. M had a Tai Chi class in the morning and I chose not to join as I was feeling a little stiff and fancied getting out of the farm for a bit. I walked into Godshill along the path through the fields, found the post office, and made my way back, pausing for half an hour to sit and look at the rolling hills. It really is beautiful out there.

After lunch, to work, and today I was building raised beds along the side of the house. Their main purpose is to stop Sandy, the young collie, running along the flower beds as she is wont to do. In fact most of the structures around the house are an effort to control Sandy's exuberance. M wants to train her to be a sheep dog but she's currently far too hyper due to her age. So we're putting up fences and gates so that when she's out of her pen (which is the size of a decent back garden) she won't keep running off and making a nuisance.

Like everything else I've built, the raised beds were to be made of random pieces of wood found around the farm - old planks, off cuts from when the house was built, broken posts - cut to size and hammered together to make rectangles. And like everything else I've built it was great fun doing so. I like having a jumble of 'rubbish' and making something out of it, and while the beds might not look as nice as the one I built in Banbury, they are essentially free and, in some ways, more stable, made as they are of solid slabs of wood. And once they're stained they'll look fine. Two done today, another two to do tomorrow.

Fred, the local uber-farmer, came round today. According to M he's always doing deals amongst the local farms that don't involve money, trading this animal for that hay, or these plants for that feed, or whatever. While I didn't really talk to him he looks a real character with huge lambchops for a beard and glasses. I said hello and he asked if I was on holiday. This struck me as strange and almost insulting, though I see where he's coming from. A 'young man' from the city working on a farm for free must be on holiday before returning to his real life. While I've only been doing this a few days, I feel like this is my real life. If we're going to label roles, I'm now a farm worker actively learning the trade at the University of M's Farm.

Already I feel I'm settling in here. I feel more comfortable wandering around the farm and M seems happier to leave me on my own to get on with stuff. All very positive stuff.

Not in the weather sense - it's been beautiful today with beating sunshine - more in an arse sense. The diet here is vegetarian and very nice it is too. Soup for lunch, lentil and carrot on the whole, and it definitely sets one up for the afternoon. But my bowels are having a bit of trouble adjusting. Lots of farts of all varieties, so it's a good job I'm working outside.

Another full day today, so much so it feels like I've been here for ages rather than just 48 hours. First job was to finish the shelter for the lambs, only we had to do this with two of the lambs in the shelter already. Last night one of the neighbouring farms' sheep gave birth to a black lamb and the mother rejected it, so the farmer asked M if she wanted it. As all her sheep are white some black lambs wool would be a good thing, so she's taken it on. Because the newborns live in a small box in the kitchen the two larger lambs had to make room for this pathetic bundle of black. The poor thing had been alive for about 12 hours and had barely opened its eyes. With some loving care it should be fine.

So the shelter was finished, the tin roof nailed down and the walls re-enforced . The bigger lambs were pretty unsure about the whole 'being outside' thing but they'll get used to it. They're my friends now - sheep are surprisingly intelligent although if you put on a different coat they get a bit confused.

After lunch we put up a fence to separate the garden from the rest of the farm. This was much harder work than I expected. First of all posts had to be put up which involved digging down a good half metre and hammering the damn thing in. Then the wire fence has to be stretched across and nailed to the posts. Lots of pulling, holding and hammering using muscles I didn't know I had.

I was introduced to the three Bengal cats in the cat-cage today. They're pedigree and M is trying to get them to breed. By keeping them caged up she can be sure who the father is. If his kids are anything like him they'll be great cats. I'd not really seen pedigree cats close up before - Bengal is a perfect description as they walk like tigers and have beautiful coats - and I don't know if it's because they're locked up in this cage (sounds a bit cruel but it's not really) but the tom is really friendly. Lovely cat.

I think the reason I feel like I've been here for ages is because I'm learning so much, way more than I thought I would. Little things like the correct way to put up a corrugated roof or how sheep 'work' or the correct way to do a fence. Stuff like that seems pretty simple but it's not really. Or at least there's a special way to do it to make sure it works rather than just being bodged. The WWOOF credo is "Your host provides you with bed and board and the opportunity to learn in exchange for your help" and, while M in no way an earnest organic proletyser she seems to take this part of it seriously, constantly asking my how I think stuff should be done and letting me do things from scratch. I designed the shelter and the chicken run. She guided me but I made the decisions. I knew I'd be learning stuff but I think I'm very lucky to be in an environment that encourages this. If I do move on to another farm at some point I'll definitely be 'skilled'.

I also feel a lot better than yesterday - still a bit sniffly, especially when we were getting a bale of hay for the lambs, but less 'coldy'. Must be adjusting to this environment.

Drat and blast, I am in snotsville. All day I've been sneezing and blowing my nose. Thing is, it hasn't affected my mind and body too much and I've been working fine - just sneezing a lot. Might be hay fever (though I don't normally get it), might be an allergy to the animals (never had one before), might just be a cold (was coming down with something last week) and it is pretty cold in this caravan at night. Maybe I shouldn't have shaved my head a couple of weeks back...

Anyway, nasal moaning aside, today was my first proper day of work - today I WWOOFed for the first time. Breakfast at 8.30 and then out to the, um, paddock? Not sure, but it's a good sized area of land fenced in. In it are the hens with their new chicks, each hen in its own chicken run. The job today was to build a new chicken run and start work on a shelter for the orphan lambs which are currently in the kitchen. Because they've been brought up my M on a bottle they're a bit scared of the big outdoors plus they haven't got a mother to protect them from foxes, so they need a transitional place, which I built for them.

Building temporary structures like these outside is fun because you don't have to worry too much about what they look like. First of all you hunt around the sheds looking for pallets and random pieces of wood that might work together and then, once you've got a vague idea about the structure, you hammer it together until you've got something that a) the animals can't escape from and b) the foxes can't get into.

And, of course, there's something very satisfying about building things. I could happily build random looking chicken runs for the rest of the summer.

Right now, though, my head is starting to ache from the cold. While then sun is just going down I think I'll retire to bed with my book. I suspect a good nights sleep with be more than needed.

Well then, here we are! This is me, Pete, on a farm. Yes.

The farm is, well, a farm. To be honest, I'm not sure how best to describe it because I haven't had a good walk around yet. Tomorrow is the first big day and this evening I'm just settling in.

I've got a caravan to myself with quite a bit of room - sofa, double bed, etc - a few yards from the main farm house. It's got electricity and such but no heating. Out of one window there's a field with sheep and cows. The farm is in a small valley. It doesn't do vegetables (yet), just livestock and M, the farmer, also does Yoga and Tai Chi lessons in the farm house which they just finished building. It's very impressive with a large Yoga room. In the kitchen there's a little box-pen with three lambs who are being bottle fed.

I feel slightly at a loose end right now. I'm used to having things to do. I will have things to do, lots of things, tomorrow, but right now I'm sitting in a mobile home. Reckon I'll read my book.