Category: LIFE

A wonderful fellow blogger has cleverly located my missing text from yesterday and very kindly drawn my attention to it…. thank you so so much, you clever girl, K M Allen. 🥂

I have chosen to re-publish the post as I am proud of Man of the Woods’ long hours of work recently and had wanted to share that notion when I started typing yesterday!

🌾🌾🌾🌾🌾🌾🌾🌾🌾🌾🌾🌾

Two to three more days should do it. Man of the Woods has harvested, in order:-

winter barley,

oilseed rape,

winter wheat,

spring barely,

We are cutting spring oats today which leaves just the spring wheat – the final crop to ripen in the season.

This dry weather has been helpful as in we have not been sat for days with the combine in the barn waiting for summer showers to pass and crops to dry. But many farms across the country have suffered horrible fires due to sparks from combines inadvertently starting fires on tinder-dry straw.

I dare not speak too soon but we have escaped such tragic events on our farm, yet have watched black smoke billowing skyward on three or four days last month on various neighbouring agricultural land, all in different directions.

As father in law (71) takes one trailer load of oats back to the yard, our son (18) brings the second empty trailer back to the field – and I’ll film the unloading shortly. Man of the Woods has been treated today to a lunch of stars- from Starbucks (I know… I’m a hopeless farmer’s wife, but I was wrapping and repairing horse rugs all morning and oddly enough cannot be in a kitchen simultaneously.)

Luckily, he doesn’t mind what he eats – I buy Starbucks healthy options, of which there are many. We are all thinking low-sugar diets these days (can’t think why).

If we are really lucky, and the ground remains too hard to plough post-harvest, we might steal two or three nights away. My heart soared when he said “We can go to the coast, find an Airbnb and relax and read; you can take your writing stuff…”. What more show of support is there than that? I’m very lucky.

(Mind the pylon)

Just a couple words on mother who, two weeks after release from hospital, is injecting insulin four times a day (yeah, I’m impressed too) yet still getting readings of between 8 and 18 for sugar in her blood. She can’t not test because dad hovers over her in order that he can complete the results log they were given on release, for sharing with the diabetes clinic every Friday.

The NHS saved her life three weeks ago. Simple. Her sugars were 57 and her organs were shutting down. She believes ‘a higher being’ saved her, she told me through a cloud of smoke the other day as she lit a third cigarette in a forty minute visit.

“She’s becoming aggressive again, so all’s back to normal!” dad laughs but the nervous twitch and his nail-biting is no longer lost on me. He’s reverted to the man he was before she went in; the one who will not rock her boat. The one who tries to say she shouldn’t drink Tropicana orange juice, but who relents when she shouts at him that what’s life for if not to enjoy?

I take homemade meals in twice a week, walk the dog for them if she’s not been out and maintain something between a dignified silence and some gently delivered honesty if I feel she’s trying to pull the wool over my eyes regarding the sugar content of stewed red fruit under her crumble topping she managed to make with candarel.