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Andrew Howe who
lived in our flat has gone. He was here for three years and
kept hens, ducks, sheep and pigs.
He now lives by the roadside in a converted van. |
|
John
Moore has taken Andrew's place. John is a semi-retired
mechanical engineer with a practical bent & enthusiasm for
country living. |
|
NEWSLETTER |
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In the late 1960’s uncle Henry gave me a wrecked rally
trap. I spent happy week-ends restoring it. It was the
start of a chain of events that led to the purchase of
Westley Farm thirty years ago. A trap needs a horse. A
horse needs a field….You get the drift. |
 |
The ownership of a horse is an instant entry to a club. My
interest has never been in gymkhanas and the pony club but
in the dying embers of an era of horse transport. I
bought an old bread van for a fiver and was transported
back to childhood memories of the milk float that stopped
outside our house every morning in the late 1940s.
Sometimes I would cadge a ride round the block. The horse
hardly |
| needed
guiding, knowing exactly when to start and stop and when
he would have time to take a nibble from the oats in his
nose-bag. |
|
My new traveller friends, Dominic and Clarissa, invited me
out to their "flash" trailer. We sat round the open fire and
they told me about their years on the road with horse and
wagon. “Pooving the grai”, I learned, means putting
your horse in a field overnight without the farmer’s
permission. They taught me how to “line out” a wheel.
I was transported |
|
|
Wrecked
Westley Farm cart (1972) |
| into
a world of “felloes” and “strakes” and similar terms
now known only to students of the wheel-wright’s art.
Nostalgia and the romance of the past became my life. |
 |
I find it an anathema calling my interest in wheel-wrighting
(and later chair-making), a hobby. I hate the boundary that
is meant to separate work from play. My parents spent twenty years
wondering when I was going to get a proper job. The balancing
act has been turning |
| play and
a fascination with history into
a hard-nosed business, supporting a family and a handful of
ex-wives. |
|
Westley Farm cost forty two thousand pounds in 1972. It is
now valued somewhere between one and two million pounds. Yet
we live on a net income comparable with a Tesco
shelf-stacker and worry constantly about paying to have the
potholes in the drive repaired. How easy it would be to sell
up, buy an annuity and a villa in Spain. But that is
unthinkable because our life-style and environment is near perfect and beyond price.
Now
here is the dilemma and we welcome feedback. Orange
mobile phones are offering us a ton of money for a fifteen
year lease to erect an antenna, nine metres high behind the
barn. There is a half mile |
|
|
Sam plays
on the Wagonette (1973) |
| stretch
of Cowcombe Hill where their phones go dead and they are
happy to give us thousands of pounds a year to correct it
(and they want to repair the drive). As a graduate engineer
I naturally asked them for science to satisfy my safety
worries. There
is a mass of research on the subject leading to almost
no substantive conclusions. |
 |
There
seems to be general agreement that it is no more dangerous
to live 100 metres from a mast than having a
mobile phone stuck to your ear half the day. And yet we all remember
environment minister, John Gummer, trying to reassure the
public on the safety of British beef by feeding a burger to
his small child. I am happy that the mast can be located
discreetly in the woods without damage to the |
|
Delivering
parcels to the post office
in Chalford High Street |
|
landscape.
I think I am happy about the safety angle, but there is no
point in accepting the money from Orange if you are going to
cancel your holidays or worry about microwaves boring into
your brain. Is there perhaps a touch of hypocrisy in a
society that almost universally relies on mobile phones yet
rejects the technology that makes their gismos work? |
We
want you to have a stress free holiday in one of the most
beautiful spots in England. Taking Orange money means
getting the drive repaired and even putting proper central
heating in the cottages, opening the possibility of holiday
lets all through the winter.
What astonishing advances we have seen over the past
hundred years. Hege and I thrive on those changes, being immersed in
the IT revolution. Yet to judge
by the books on our shelves and the |
|
|
The
Witshire tipping cart |
| stream of information
that Hege brings back from her archeology course at Bristol
University our roots take sustenance deep down in the
past.
J.U. April 2002
What
do you think? E-mail me (Too late. It's built.
JU Aug 2003) |
| Previous
Newsletter (August 01) |
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