Home late last saturday having driven home through the fog after dinner, home from a week at annaghmakerrig (the Tyrone Guthrie Centre) where I was more than contented to just write, draw, collect a lot of branches for a work in progress, collect conkers because I can, eat well (too much), sleep very badly (brain not switching off), take the rowing boat out onto the lake, enjoy fellow inmates. Good to find my children again although I never ever feel they are far from me. Difficult to get back into the farming chores agenda, to become again that person that rarely sits down when I’ve let that other me out of the bag. The added seasonal bonus of daily stove lighting, fuel in ash out, and occasional extra of sudden leaking pipe (“white waste”, what can you expect ?) under kitchen sink. For a few days I am a little distracted. I have barely had time to unpack and I am even wondering if there is not another life for me. Funnily I realize I have arrived completely home one early morning walking to the goats in torrential wet and windy rain, and I feel pure joy at doing my job.
List of small jobs : not enough space here. List of big jobs : build a shed for the donkey, extend the wood shed, dig up potatoes and jerusalem artichokes and cover ground, prepare beds for next spring, negotiate more time with myself to sit and write or make things, art. I will Yes.