The photo - yes. That’s me decked out so I don’t swallow a lungful of dust from ripping an old manky ivy down. Or swallow spiders as big as my hands that were emerging from it. The photo sequence audio goes something like this:- Photo 1 - dealing with ivy, Photo 2 - “Rich? What are you doing? Why aren’t you helping me?”, Photo 3 “Rich, stop blimmin’ taking pictures. Stop Laughing at me! What’s so funny? Right, you’re in trouble…”, climbs down ladder. Men. So un-useful sometimes.

Anyhow.

Wow, looking back to almost a year ago, apparently we were Busy Bank Holiday Bees. This Bank Holiday weekend, so far I’ve been up for an hour and a quarter, it’s well past midday and am still in my summer jimjams. I was up late working last night, after a last minute change to one of my articles, I had to rush around trying to find the right info and writing something decent. Still, managed it but didn’t crawl into bed until gone 2am, and didn’t nod off to sleep until gone 3. Poor Rich, who’d been working too, had to get up and do the chickens at just gone 6am. Needless to say, he’s still tucked up fast asleep upstairs.

You see, bank holidays just mean more crowds to me and Rich. I remember when I worked in an office, bank holidays were so welcome, such a relief and a luxury to have three days off in a row. When I left uni and found some temporary work at my local Next store (to keep the wolf from the door, good grief I wouldn’t do it now for all the tea in China), I didn’t get bank holidays. I was contracted to work, and only got time and a quarter for it. Disgusting really. So you can partly understand why I’m trying to do what I do. I don’t want that feeling of dread on Sunday night/Monday morning. I don’t want to have to look forward to a paltry number of bank holidays each year.

But that said, at the moment my days lack so much structure that they’re basically taken up thinking about work, feeling guilty because I’m doing something else and not working, or just working. So in a toss up, I’m not sure which is worse. I suppose having the freedom and potential to change things is enough. I really work a lot better in the mornings, but am a hopeless case because I’m such a night owl. I don’t know, I’ll have to try harder. Thing is Rich and I are both night owls so getting into bed and going to sleep at what other people would consider a decent hour is actually really hard work!

I know I’ve been lacking in the vegetable-department-type blogs lately. It’s just that I’ve had a lot of trouble trying to sort out what’s going on with my work. If I can’t make my freelance work happen, then I can’t really keep striding towards this idealised life I want. My life is far from ideal at the moment, as you know from my whinges about money, my whinges about how I live in a crap hole (we’re currently putting up with no electric lights in the dining room, kitchen or utility room, thanks to ancient wiring and really weird circuits and loops in the house), and my perpetual griping about how I just can’t seem to progress. But I think I have to give up on this idea that somehow I’ll be able to eke out some sort of notable career. Or should I? No actually, I won’t. I need something to keep me going if I’m not going to fall into something as droll and mundane as working in a the veal-fattening pens of souless offices and undertaking a stress-and-heart-disease-inducing commute each day. I’ve been there - I do not want to go back.

I know if I can just finish all my current work this weekend, I can stop feeling guilty about investing time in the projects that I want to take up - things like my henkeeping website, my online magazine website, my Daily Good Life blog and my You Tube channel. And not forgetting of course, the endless number of jobs that need doing around the Smallest Smallholding. I’m commissioning Rich to build me some herb planters near the house. He’s pissed off because the flies keep landing on his basil plants on the windowsill and crapping all over them, so we’ll have to think of a way to protect them outside too. Of course, there’s the ‘problem’ of protecting them over winter. It’ll get Rich’s creative juices flowing at least.

I’ve got to work on fixing the greenhouse for the winter, got LOADS of field-grown kale plants to transplant in, harvest more onions and try to persuade Rich that taking up some of his beloved expanse of open lawn to make way for more veg plots is A Really Good Idea. Also trying to persuade Rich that planting a willow hedge for small amounts of coppicing is A REALLY Really Good Idea. Might also consider a supply of winter lettuce too. Hmmm. Then there’s hedge cutting, mowing, strimming, composting, green manuring…blimey. The list just goes on. Oh, and the possibility of getting a few more hens. Still trying not to develop an irrational fear of vet visits and vet bills, given our track record with ex-batts. Apparently we’ve been very unlucky, and I do know of people that have had ex-batts and not had a day’s problem with them. I still feel good about the fact that Pattie and Cynthia had good lives here. And that Yoko, despite her condition, has a nice life too. Maureen is just a super hen. She’s had a dream life. Does make a difference in the end, that’s probably why we’ll still keep getting ex-batts (and poss. a couple of hybrids too).

But unfortunately on my List of Things to Do this weekend (I’m an avid fan of making lists), the majority of entries commence with the word “Clean” or “Tidy”. Sad fact is, housework has got to be done, there’s no getting away from it. Literally. When you’re living and working in a house most of the time, it’s a bit soul crushing dodging wobbly piles of junk, wading through heaps of mess, trying to find some pants and socks because you haven’t managed to do a clothes wash in over a week, no cutlery because it’s all still dirty and jammed into the dishwasher. hiding from the electric meter reader man because you’re too embarrassed to let anyone in the house. At least we have food. Ah, another problem. Yesterday I ate 6 chocolate brioches. Within about an hour. ‘Diet’ is a very dirty word, but I think I need to alter my eating habits. Crisps, chocolate, bread and cheese are all very nice, but endless consumption is not exactly good for me. Doesn’t really make me a very good example for living the Good Life now, does it?

I’m trying to move on from my whining session yesterday. I can only apologise profusely -and thank you to those that commented. Without sounding like a complete attention seeker, it really does spur me on.

So I managed to wake up in a bit more of a reflective mood this morning, the weather definitely helped in that regard. After letting the chickens out at just gone 6am, I pottered around with the camera in my hand. It was dewy and there was a subtle hint of Autumn-ness in the air. I don’t think we’re completely done with summer yet, I have a feeling it’s going to make one more big concerted effort to make a comeback. Watch this space.

I’ve decided to tie up all the loose ends with work today and this weekend. I’m going to tidy my working area, tackle the bits and pieces that have been hanging over me (dull, mundane things like the ever-growing pile of washing, clearing out the old rubble I’d pulled up earlier in the year from my new big veg plot etc.) and start next week with a firm idea of what I want to achieve, and how I’m going to go about doing it.

My work is mostly writing search engine optimised website copy - this blog isn’t my best work, seeing as I have to frequently hit the edit button and tidy up spelling mistakes and typos, as I tend to write as it pours out of my mind. Hence the usual jumbled mess. But my ‘work’ is much more structured - it tends to leer towards informative copy rather than creative. I would love to steer myself more into a features writing so I have to set myself a plan of how I’m going to achieve that.

It also helps that Rich and I have been working outside a lot today and reshuffling things. It helps me visualise how I’m going to take things to the next level, how to work and improve on what we have. So yes, moany moans are over! Onwards and upwards.

I’ve put a picture of my monster Snowball turnip up, despite the fact that it has nothing to do with this post. A more relevant picture would be my miserable mug staring back at you, but I took the executive decision to spare any Smallest Smallholding blog readers the horror of enduring that kind of imagery. Prepare yourself, this post is not going to be light relief.

Ugh. I’m basically in a pretty pissed off kind of mood. Again. And yes, it’s money again - bloody money! I’m the weakest link in the microcosm of Lucy and Rich. If it wasn’t for me being useless, we’d be comfortably afloat every month instead of having to bale ourselves out some way or another. I have work, but it’s not enough. I think I may have just lost a client because I wasn’t comfortable with what the work entailed and passed on it. I have no idea when my next writing job will be and it’s starting to keep me awake at night. Or when I finally get to sleep I’m having anxiety nightmares where I’m back working for my boss from hell and feeling extremely stressed. The result is I wake up feeling tired and stressed, spend the day looking for work and getting nowhere, feel very unproductive and a complete waste of space and go to bed, feeling tired and stressed still. My face has broken out so I look like a join-the-dots game, I’m pale and washed out, and I generally don’t look like someone you’d want to be associated with. Poor Rich.

I don’t know. I just feel like such a loser. I was destined for great things. Teachers at school and even at my crappy local uni told me I had so many avenues open to me, that I had lots of talent blah blah blah. And yet, here I am, not making anything of my life apart from keeping hens and growng vegetables, wasting every day that passes trying to find work that’ll fit in with the life I want to build. I’d love to be the Anita Roddick of the Good Life movement, spreading the message to the world. Or do what Jimmy Doherty does - enlightening people, inspiring them and getting people in the groove of the way I aspire to live. I just don’t know where to begin or how to do it outside of this blog. It’s been a bit of an enlightening journey for me, but sometimes it all seems so far out of reach.

I could jack it all in and just start commuting to London (if they’d have me, getting on for 26 I think I am past doing internships and couldn’t afford to do them now anyway, so would have to start all over again and climb the greasy, slippery bitchy career ladder), or get a job in one of my local towns and at least have money rolling in regularly. Thing is, I’d feel even worse I think. Like I was giving up on my dream and just joining the rat race and getting sucked in.

But I’m just SO pissed off with earning pittance and feeling like I’m furiously pedalling forwards but not going anywhere. I wake up every day thinking “right, this is it, this is the day I turn it all around”, and then just end up wasting my time browsing the web, posting on forums, trying to come up with ideas but getting stuck and getting very very downbeat about everything. I get fed up with living in a craphole too. The house is very slowly but steadily falling into disrepair and it’s amazing how much of an effect it has on my mood. Sometimes I just sit here and feel like crying because I just can’t see a way out. I don’t know how I’ll ever be able to contribute towards a mortgage.

I’ve tried getting part-time work, but I don’t want to have to spend mountains of money on petrol to get into town, only to be paid what equates to a crap wage when I could potentially be doing something here off my own back and keeping all the money for myself (minus, of course, Income Tax and N.I. - no escaping them!). I also have the big problem that my back problems mean that I can’t spend a whole day sitting at a computer. Nor can I do heavy lifting, or stand on my feet all day. You’d be amazed at how many jobs that rules out. I need a sort of happy medium, which is why freelancing has helped me so much in that regard. Employers in the past have said my back won’t be a problem, but quickly get shitty when you have to take a break to stand up and move around because your back muscles are threatening to go into spasm (it’s more painful than it sounds). Or you can’t lift something and aren’t seen to be doing everything your job entails, despite telling them before you took the job.

I don’t know. It all sounds so pitiful and I probably come across as if I’m feeling very sorry for myself. I’m not - I’ve only got myself to blame and finding the energy, the determination and the inspiration to work really hard on my projects is extremely difficult. Once you’re in this sort of loop and perpetually knackered and down in the mouth it’s hard to find a means to claw your way out. I guess it’s the difference between having strength of character to work under your own steam and not. The more you feel like a failure, the worse you get.

I’m just not in a good place at the moment and I’m struggling to push myself to achieve something that I’m proud of, and make a decent living for once in my life. I have no structure and no definitive goals, just these projects I want to get going but need a little capital to start up. Finding the capital - or even just staying afloat and not being charged £25 everytime I go overdrawn - seems like a mammoth task at the moment. I just feel like I’m in a total mess.

I’ve just realised, yesterday (August 2nd) was the one year anniversary of the start of my Smallest Smallholding blog.  So *cue party poppers, novelty hats etc*, HAPPY BIRTHDAY SMALLEST SMALLHOLDING! Thanks to everyone that regularly read my posts (sometimes I wonder why, I do tend to babble somewhat), love getting comments and feedback. It’s good to know you’re not blogging into a void!

If you’re interested in seeing my first ever post, click here: 8th July 2007: Gates Are Great

I wrote the post on the date in the title, but didn’t actually get going with the blog until 2nd August so it wasn’t published until then. Seems like a lifetime ago, but also just like yesterday…(when all my troubles seemed so far away la la la…)