Half of August gone and links to old posts

August days are creeping by and Col has now been in hospital for 2 weeks. We hope by the end of this week  a lot of the nasty chemicals will have worked their way out of his system and he will start to feel much better. As well as not sleeping, stomach ache, sickness and diarrhoea, he now has sore mouth and throat and not even enough energy to write on his Facebook page. So  it's one thing after another just as the cancer nurses told us - they've seen it all before.
He's been trying to avoid infection by keeping all visitors, except me, away, but a text from him this morning say's he has a temperature so it will be antibiotics and all their nasty side effects added into the mix now. No wonder this is the worst part of the treatment.
 I've been plodding along at home trying not to worry and watching lots of Olympics .

On Friday the beach hut tempted me away from the TV and I spent over 4 hours down there including a swim in the flat calm sea. I read most of this while I was there.


Jan Struther is more well known for her book Mrs Miniver, but this is a collection of very clever and witty essays and sketches. Although written in the 1940's by a "upper middle class, lower middle age woman" the humour in the stories hasn't dated at all. You just have to love the writing of someone who says ".....and there are people to whom making lists is an end in itself, a pure, abstract and never failing delight". Oh yes!

Saturday saw me biking to the library, but going the long way round so I could call in at the  Emmaus Charity shop where I  found a pack of 3 Pairs of M&S pants - Col's Size - for £2 - handy. ( Question - in the States what we call trousers you call pants so what do you call the items of underwear that we call pants? )
Then I spotted this for £4,

  I'm a sucker for baskets,( I wrote about baskets when we were still at the smallholding) as long as they are cheap, I have no idea why I'm so tempted and the problem is .....................now I've got it what the heck do I do with it? I already have a smaller one with dividers for 4 bottles that I used to use standing in the upstairs bathroom for cleaning stuff etc........here it's in the kitchen holding shoe cleaning bits. Then I have a small hamper that I begged from Col's brother after he won it in a draw last Christmas. That's standing on the TV unit holding all the chargers and other bits and bobs. 2 big storage baskets are up on top of the wardrobes holding shoes and winter wear. My favourite from that old blog post is in the kitchen holding potatoes (on newspaper and covered over with black fabric to keep out the light).
I'm really an idiot for buying it as we are so short of space here and a bargain is only a bargain if you actually need it! I'm thinking it would be more useful if I took a pair of secateurs to the 6 canes holding the dividers in place and made a nice big oblong basket.

Sunday I did a bit of tidying in the garden, re-potted the thyme, shopped at Asda, visited Colin and watched more Olympics........ even the finalé of the golf was exciting!, then in the evening things got more and more enthralling with medals being won all round. Andy Murray's tennis medal was real fight.

Yesterday apart from a visit to Colin, I took a few more bits to the charity shop and started on unpacking and sorting another box from the shed. I didn't find anything we needed indoors but chucked a couple of bits in the dustbin and others into the charity shop bag and re-packed most into a sturdier box.

Thank you you for all the interesting comments about housed deeds and house prices. We've always been so lucky with buying and selling houses. I wrote about all our house moves HERE.
So many house moves in our married life, I can't imagine staying in one house for life like many people did in the past and a few do now I guess - Col's Dad is 85 and has only ever lived in 2 houses!

Back Soon
Sue






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Forgot the start date

Just realised I've forgotten to mark the 3rd anniversary of this blog.
I started it early April 2013 as a diary of our self-sufficient life on a 5 acre Suffolk Smallholding.
We had lived there since 1992 and for most of that time Col worked as a bridge inspector/supervisor for the County Council and I stayed home, milked goats, watched sheep, fed chickens, collected eggs, looked after the campsite and grew and sold fruit and veg. We had already cut down on animals before 2013 because of bureaucracy and lack of time. The most goats we had at one time after spring kidding was 8 and one year after lambing we had 14 sheep!  In March 2012 we decided we could earn enough from the smallholding and campsite and Col left full time work. We added a shower to the campsite and increased our growing-to-sell so that with a few days a month council work  and a day a week odd-jobbing we lived quite comfortably for a year and a half.
Then came Cols heart problems which made us cut down the workload and decide a move might be a good idea, followed by the Non Hodgkins diagnosis - when to live nearer the hospital became essential.

So here we are in town and the blog is completely different to when I started, luckily blog friends and relatives are still reading - thank you everyone.

People keep asking us if we miss the smallholding - well yes..............and no. We've not really had a chance to miss it properly yet and I certainly don't miss all the wood hauling, ash clearing, kindling chopping and fire-lighting/tending that I had to do, mostly by myself, all through this last winter. And I definitely don't miss the DUST! if you've not heated your house entirely with wood and coal you really don't know the meaning of the word!
I quite like the anonymity of town and the proximity of shops and all the other things we need. It's good to be able to walk everywhere and I can go out walking early morning without getting strange looks - which is what happened when I walked on the roads near the smallholding at 7am!

Anyway, enough looking backwards.

My sister and brother-in-law are finally moving back into Suffolk next Tuesday - May 3rd . They've had even more hassles in their chain than we did (their first date was mid March!) and if they hadn't exchanged by this weekend the owners of the house they are buying were going to take it off the market, thank heavens it all got sorted in time. I had completely forgotten that my sister could knit, she's not done much for a while, but she brought over a couple of little jumpers she'd made for our eldest's "bump" and has already started something for our youngest's. Then I remembered amongst my craft stuff I had a tube of buttons for babies. I bought them years ago from a car boot sale thinking they would do for card making but  the Post Office introduced the 'letter thickness thing', so they have been in a drawer ever since. Some are shaped like flowers, teddies or ducks and others have little pictures on, now my sister is all set for cardigan making and I'll  find some wool for her from charity shops too -should keep her busy - after they've unpacked and planted up their garden!

I'm just awaiting delivery of a wardrobe and hoping they'll be able to get it in the house and Col is up at hospital having a couple of bags of rejuvenating blood. We should be out for a meal with all our children and their OH's on Sunday.

Back after the weekend
Hope you all have a good one.
Sue





 

We didn't get where we are today...............................

We didn't get where we are today by standing still and waiting for help!

I'm not sure if I've ever explained how we came to own a 5 acre smallholding.

It all started back in 1978 when, for £8,000,  I bought a tiny 2 bed Victorian end terraced house in Stowmarket in Suffolk using a £2000 mortgage and half the house money I got after a very short marriage and a quick divorce.  The house had no bathroom, just a shower which had been chopped off one of the small bedrooms. The kitchen and toilet had been built onto the back of the house and were a bit tatty. What the house did have was a long narrow vegetable garden and some gooseberry bushes and a rhubarb plant. That was when I started growing stuff and making jam, and luckily it was only a short cycle ride to the library where I was working.
When C and I got married he moved in and used a moped to get to work where he was  a council road man. They did things like sweeping paths and clearing out drainage channels at the edge of the road. The pay wasn't much and my pay as a library assistant was also a long way down the County Council pay-scale too. We had gas connected to the house as it was already along the road outside and tidied up the kitchen.
Then I had our eldest daughter, so we were down to one small pay cheque.
Once I stopped work it made more sense to move to the village where the council depot was, so C could bike to work. We were very lucky because house prices were beginning to shoot up and we sold it to a single bloke who wanted to get on the housing ladder for £14,000. That's how mad the housing market was, almost double in 2 and a bit years!
We found a modern 3 bed end terrace that was going cheap because it Stank! The lady bred cats and cooked up fish and liver all the time, the neighbours had complained and the worst of it was she was a health visitor! It was £16,000 so we had to have a bigger mortgage but mortgages were easy to get then.
We also had to have a bridging loan to give us time to strip all the wood from the house and re paint everywhere. C and my dad did all the work and Dad helped by putting in a Parkray fire with a back boiler and a couple of radiators as there was no heating in the house apart from an open fire. We had an allotment and then two because by then we had worked out the only way to manage was to grow all our own stuff. C worked overtime in the summer doing road resurfacing and in the winter on the gritter lorries. During this time he had changed to a being a ganger, which meant being in charge of a three man gang and driving the lorry which gave us a few extra pounds a week.
Our next move was 3 years later, just 2 miles to the next village, by which time we had a son too. We sold the house for £20,000 and everyone thought we were mad as we took two children under 4 to live in a caravan while we did up a house. The house was so bad that it had been declared unfit for habitation but a council grant of £10,000 was available for anyone restoring it. We paid £10,000 for it and got a mortgage which they paid out a bit at a time as the work was done. C did a lot of the work, and I helped when I could. The house was stripped back to timber beams, we had to dig out 2 foot of dirt floor to get the room height and all the walls had to be underpinned.
When our daughter started school I would bike the 2 miles there and back with 2 children on the bike because we couldn't afford very much petrol for the car.
C got a better job in the council as a supervising foreman, looking after all the gangs who looked after the roads. He was now supervising the winter gritting so we had to live within 8 miles of the council base to be available for emergencies.
By the time our son was 3 and going to playschool  I was biking up and down that 2 mile road 6 times a day ! So we decided to move back to the village where the school was. The house sold for £40,000 again doubling in 3 years because house prices were rising so fast.
We found a bungalow with half an acre of land in the village for £42,000, so we had to stretch to a bigger mortgage again. Cs pay was still very average and we always had to make do with what we had, no foreign holidays etc. etc. We built a utility room on the side of the bungalow and an extension out the back- again C did most of the work and then I had our youngest daughter. The bungalow was tucked in at the end of a cul-de-sac with several noisy neighbours, it was OK but not where we wanted to stay.
But then we had 2 bits of good fortune. One was C got the job of County Council Bridge Inspector, which was based in Ipswich and didn't have to be tied to where we lived in Mid Suffolk ( one of the reasons that he got the job was because no -one with engineering qualifications would take it because the pay was too low!) and secondly we realised that the back garden which had a way into it from a small lane could be sold for a building plot. So after 5 years we sold the house for £71,000 moved into a rented place back in the town we had started from and looked for a smallholding. The children were 11, 9 and 4 by then and for 6 months I home educated rather than change schools twice.
We soon found this smallholding owned by a mad woman and an alcoholic! It was a tip! and cost us £85,000 in 1992, we've been mending, making, repairing and modernising ever since. We had to have a bigger mortgage again but by scrimping and saving we managed to pay it off about 10 years ago.
Then my dad died and left us some money, some of which we used to have a big kitchen and bedroom extension.
So that's how we came to own 5 acres in Suffolk and a 4 bedroom Chalet bungalow.

Thank you to Em, Karen, Sarah, Lucy, My shabbychicfrugallife, saverof surburbia, Bob and Kris for comments yesterday.

Back Tomorrow
Sue