Tag Archive | The Scuttling Gourmet

The Life I Choose – female, 55 and living in a van.

Oct22
The life I choose

View of the farm over the valley. Janet and Rachel work the strip of land between the treeline and the houses. Theirs is the one white house.

Oh! Suddenly, it’s the 22nd of October, and I am just shy of being 5 sixths of my way through this ‘sabbatical year’. The life I choose is still something I live day by day, without a clear vision for my future. I thought it was time to take stock, and to update you on the unfolding of this life. Then, as always, where to begin? The Summer proved impossibly busy and expensive on the Caravan Club sites I had been using, so I went to spend a bit of time on Janet (my sister) and Rachel’s small holding. This involved parking up in their farm yard, and attaching to an external hook up point to

life I chooose

Wooden drum set in Plessey Woods, Northumbria

the house electricity. Plus I used their utility wash room, to empty my motor-home toilet cassette. This turned out to be a perfect arrangement for me, as I could write in the van for many hours, without interruption,  while being free from the distractions that inevitably surround you on a camp site. I also had people I love and trust close by, in case the need for help arose. In return, I paid a nominal amount for electricity and did odd jobs around the house.

With everything working so positively for all concerned, I changed my living pattern to involve travelling to the farm whenever I was free from the need to be in Newcastle for a week or more. As I have honed and refined the business, these expeditions to the Yorkshire countryside have become longer. It seems I can also ‘mind the farm’ (5 chickens, 35 sheep, 2 cats and 3 dogs) when Janet and Rachel are away. I’ve enjoyed the hands on farm work, though it’s not a life that I would necessarily choose for myself full-time. I love the peace, the really close proximity to nature, and the connection both with ‘family’ and ‘earth’. The hours of solitude to think and write is also perfect for me right now, and I have enough ‘busy’ when I am in Newcastle to stop me from feeling like I have opted out of living in the real world entirely.

The life I choose

The week Rosie joined me on the farm,

The dog care business is now primarily a walking business, and I gave the the girls who were already boarding for me, my boarding clients, apart form the few I am still happy to house sit for. I’m currently in the middle of a longish spell of sitting, and after a busy couple of weeks am now in the relaxed company of two horizontal retrievers in a lovely environment. My hopes for getting something more than dog care achieved, are on the rise!

The months since May, when Pete removed the possibility of relationship from our table, have been a time akin to grieving for me. I had truly hoped that we would overcome the ills of his past life enough to share a present, because the present we shared was – for me – well, I was happy… It’s hard to describe the coming to someone after years of relational disconnect and the internal turmoil and constraint that, that imposes, and feeling not only love, but ‘home’ and not only home, but ‘freedom’ in the face of them. It’s hard to find that you are not enough, even though you knew from the beginning that your were fighting monsters in pursuit of possibility. It’s hard to let go of that kind of love with one hand, while holding onto friendship with the other. It’s hard to miss someone when they are sitting in the

The life I choose

My daughter, Imogen beach combing on the beautiful Island of Tiree

same room. But perhaps the hardest thing of all for me, is the difficulty I have in believing that this depth of connection, this social compatibility (I’m so complex in that regard), this quality of relating, is hiding just around the corner in another possibility. I want the companionship of partnering… but I not yet ready or able to hope. The farm has been sanctuary, and finding this place of safety is helping me heal. Baby steps.

I should say that throughout it all, Pete – whose name means the rock – has been kind, steady and inclusive. I believe that he wants a successful, ongoing, meaningful friendship as much as I do.

With all that in mind and heart, I have turned my attention to myself, and am enjoying a journey of discovery in that regard. The life I choose right now includes working to lose weight, get fit, stay healthy, practice mindfulness, reconnect with my sensuality and with the earth. I have no idea of my future, or the life I will choose. But I know that wherever this journey takes me, I will be there. I want to be the best me I can, in order to be able to grab life by the throat – without limiting myself through things I can do something about. I have, for too long, been ‘unhappy’ with my size and shape, so now is the time to determine my own long-term well-being. It’s not really that I mind looking curvy, it’s that I want to be physically able, strong and flexible.

Living in a small space is easier if you don’t have to squeeze yourself through the available gaps, and there is a lot of climbing and stretching and reaching because the storage space is mainly overhead. Plus I noticed a marked improvement in the chronic hip pain I experience at times, after doing only a couple of sessions of yoga a few weeks ago. So I have subscribed to an online workout video programme for beginners, that mixes cardio, strength, balance and core strength, in 30 minutes sessions

that you do daily. The trainer is right up my street and it feels like a good fit. having it online means I have reduced the obstacles to doing it to almost zero. Giving me a fighting chance of success. Once it gets to be routine to do it, I’ll plan some extra yoga sessions too.

The life I choose

A day in Huddersfield at the Rat and Ratchet

I’ve been on a pretty clean diet for a few weeks now. Started off with just Purition shakes, and have since added in vegetables, a little fruit, eggs and beans. Am off caffeine, dairy, gluten and alcohol and feeling great. Eventually my heart will catch up, and when it does I want to be ready for the next adventure. For now I’ve made one easy, clear decision, and in that regard this is the life I choose. I intend to stay in the van for the foreseeable future. I do feel as though I have become more productive as the year has progressed, but there is so much as yet undone…

Essentialism, priorities and a potted history

Apr24
The life I choose

Delightful Poppy, my last holiday house-sit dog.

It’s been way too long between posts, but rest assured that I have been fashioning a path through some rather overgrown torrain. It’s beginning to settle in my heart, that living the life I choose, is not so much choosing a life I want and then living it, but rather choosing the life I want, moment by moment. At the beginning of April I finally ran out of house-sits, and managed to book a – 3 nights on site, 2 nights off site – rolling plan for the following few weeks, only to find that I needed to be in Newcastle for longer periods, to cover staffing problems. I cancelled the site entirely last week and have had to cut my stay down to only two nights for the whole of next week too. This push back towards house-living meant taking a look at my internet access, since Pete doesn’t have Wifi, and uses his phone to tether his laptop. Not wanting to use up all his data allowance, I have now subscribed to the same arrangement, but with Three’s new 30GB hotspot package, so my internet issues are completely behind me (I hope!)

Having finished the book on Essentialism and considered my own need to at least be aware of my priorities, I feel much clearer about the importance of noticing when work begins to encroach on the rest of life. I broke life down into the following priority categories:

  • Self,
  • Family (in which I include Pete),
  • Friends,
  • Work (Custom Canine Care),
  • Writing (which I am not calling work at the moment, because it is life-living and creative).

For most of the past four or five years, work has very much been the cuckoo that threw everyone else out of the nest, and then fed freely on my time, only to become enormous. A lot of my thoughts so far this year have centred on practical solutions to the problem of freeing myself from the day to day demands of the business. I want to keep Custom Canine Care running, not least because it provides a number of people, who are very dear to me, with work. But I do want my own contribution to become less, so that I can focus on other things. A couple of weeks ago, we had a staff meeting (the result of re-prioritising my co-workers in the business) to discuss this further and came up with a number of new ways forward. Typically, it has been the two weeks following on from this, that I’ve been needed to cover holidays and more recently, the death of Joe’s car. So as always – plans remain fluid, and sometimes work still needs to be prioritised!

brightest tapestry tattoo

My wolf print in snow tatoo

In respect of the other categories, I have finally set on a course of slow, steady weight losss, returning in the end to the high fat, low carb model, and that’s all going well, at a rate of about 1lb a week. I think it’s been so slow, because I have had a knee injury (now nearly healed) and haven’t been able too walk much without severe pain. I have also gained a tattoo! I went to a local tattooist, who Pete has used before, and who just happened to be across the road from the last house-sit that I did at the end of March. It’s on my upper right arm and is a wolf paw print. It felt odd for a while, but now feels like a part of me. A few people have asked me how it felt to get it done. The closest sensation I can liken it to is a kind of rasping across your skin – much as I imagine it would feel to run a metal file over the area in little back and forward strokes. It wasn’t so much really pain, as a kind of irritating soreness – but very hard to accurately explain.

brightest tapestry essentialism

Pete at the cheese and cider festival, The Brandling Villa

Prioritising family is a work in progress, though since Mum had the heart surgery in March, and I spent some time with both my lovely sisters (Fiona and Janet), I have definately felt more intertwined with their lives. I have moved all my website hosting over to Fiona’s long-standing hosting and web-maintenance business, and most of the sites are fully functional and beginning to flourish. Custom Canine Care (now a dog info-blog) and my old rat breeding site, now relaunched as The Scuttling Gourmet, have both had loads of time an attention, and are now starting to generate interest and subscribers. I managed to publish my first eBook from The Scuttling Gourmet series, and although it has some formatting issues, I did it and have sold around 15 copies in the past week, since it was released. I’m going to iron out the formatting problems as I prepare the second one, and then go back and revise the first one too. I have 7 planned in the series, plus two others on different aspects of rat life. So much has been happening in Janet’s life too, especially with the birthing of so many lovely lambs at her smallholding, and I have followed the stories avidly on Facebook. Pete and I have spent loads of time together, and have enjoyed various walks, pub visits, a cheese festival, a vintage fair (bought a great tie dyed velvety jacket) and a meal at Weatherspoons (on the back of an aborted attempt to go and see a live band at The Head of Steam). We’ve been a bit constrained because of my knee’s inability to walk far, or at any speed. There’s a lot of day to day stuff and Game of Thrones watching in between!

Imogen’s helped me along the road to spending time with family, by arranging a couple of get togethers for me and all three offspring (so good to have them all in Newcastle for a time). She’s cooked us some lovely food – and this coming week we get to play with her new Virtual Reality headset. I’m acutely aware, that despite all of this, I haven’t had much contact with Mum and Dad since she went home from hospital a few weeks back, and I need to prioritise them too. I managed a lovely evening with Lloyd while I was house sitting at Mak and Fern’s a couple of weeks ago, and he was up for the NERS show. We had a much needed catch up and enjoyed a chinese takeaway together. I’ve also made the first moves towards meeting up with a group of rattie friends from the south of England in the Summer. It’s good to record these things, not least because then you can hold me accountable, but also because it serves to help me realise that I am actually doing something about the principles I am re-learning.

Writing has been all I knew it would be. It excites me to learn new things and I am revelling in the progress the sites are making. I have learned so much, and have so far still to go, but I can see it beginning to come together – at least for the business site and the rat site. I have also been working on a new business site called Running a Pet Services Business, which is live, but I have yet to launch. This is a support and training site for people who are involved in pet care businesses. So that will be next to give wings!

Life between house sits and my first E-book

Mar2

Today I am back at the Durham Grange campsite and it’s cold, wet and quite windy. I did my monthly sit at Mak and Fern’s house last weekend, during which, I managed to get a large area of the inside of the van propely cleaned out. Pete dropped over on the Sunday and fixed the waste water drainage pipe, which had started leaking for the second time. The pipe dropped onto the road during a journey last Summer, resulting in the terminal tap having to be removed, as the friction from the road had worn a large hole in the pipe above it. After this episode, we removed the tap, shortened the pipe (to get rid of the hole) and I’ve been using it as an open pipe and just draining it continuously into a bucket ever since. Until last week, when it began leaking from the other end of the pipe, where it attatches to the van. So Pete took the whole thing off and attached a new length of waste pipe, then added back in the old tap to make it fully functional again. Yay! One less bucket to carry around!

I can’t believe how quickly time is passing. With one sixth of my year behind me, I came to realise how little I had achieved towards my writing goals. I am not unrealistic and I know that a year will only make a small dent in all that I want to fulfil, but at the very least I would like to

  • get a Scuttling Gourmet blog based website up and running in place of the current Shunamite Rats site and create some Rat Diet E-books on there.
  • start a blog based website on the subject of setting up and running a dog service business, along with creating some short E-books on the subject.
  • write some poetry.
  • develop this blog.
  • maintain the dog blog and Custom Canine Care site.

Today I spent preparing a section of the Scuttling Gourmet for publication as an E-book, essentially un-formatting text and correcting irrelevant references to other pages and chapters. I have the whole chapter done, and now just need to reformat headings and the like to make them compatible with a Kindle reader. Then I will publish Rat Diet – feeding for longevity, well-being and in old age on Amazon. I have spent some time in past weeks, reading through the whole publishing process and it doesn’t seem beyond me. Watch this space. Of course, I’ll have to employ someone from fiver to create a cover.

Tomorrow, I’m picking up Imogen from her place of work near Durham and we are heading over to Thursby to visit Mum and Dad, before the big op. It will be lovely to have some social “time out”. March is essentially house-sit-month. Not ideal to be doing three or four in a row, but I guess that’s how it will roll at times. Next time I find myself on a site – 22nd March – I’ll be staying North West of Newcastle near St Mary’s lighthouse at the Old Hartley site. I’m looking forward to having more choice, as all the sites open after the Winter break. Being by the sea, and in an area with some gorgeous walks might lead to Old Hartley being one of my favourites.