I used to be quite up to date with Internet and new media technology. Then I started to get a bit behind…now it seems I’m actually totally clueless. I only really discovered ‘vlogs’ this week - video logs. Of course I knew about podcasts and people making online video diaries, but the whole subscription to a channel on You Tube and the community feel of it sort of surpassed me. I’ve subscribed to a few vloggers and channels because they’re fairly interesting and some light entertainment. Some people are crazy, some people have something interesting to say.

It got me thinking though. I’d love to do some vlogging. I used to be a theatre studies student, and I suppose I still have a bit of a yearning for performing! I think being on You Tube, even if you are being yourself, is a kind of performance. I love the idea of reaching out to people and spreading fun, interesting, thought-provoking topics, or occasionally just putting something fun and stupid up, or perhaps completely and utterly bizarre.

One of the channels I subscribe to is called 5 Awesome Girls. They’re a bunch of girls from across the USA brought together by their love of Harry Potter. Their ages range from 17 or 18 to early 20s. For each day of the working week, they do a small vlog about why that day is awesome, what they’re up to, answering questions posed by one of the other girls. I like this idea, it’s good to watch something positive. There are other groups of people that form a group and take turns vlogging each day, it seems to be something I missed and something I’d like to get involved in.

So my thought it this. I would love to do something similar. I want to find 4 or 6 other young people that are into living a bit of the Good Life in their own way. I say young because I want people from my generation to fly the flag and show our peers they can do it to. I want us each to say hi, vlog about our day, what we’ve done, what’s on our minds, perhaps talk about projects we’ve got on the go. The videos can be funny, they can be serious, they can be whacky or arty, or just simple and straight to the point. Variety is good.

So if you’d like to join me in forming a group that gets green living, vegetable growing, home cooking - the simple, good things in life - out to an audience, and you think you can make it interesting and watchable (and you have a camera or webcam) let me know. It’s not hard to do! I really want to do this, and I think it would be great to have people from all over the country - or even from other countries - involved. I could do it on my own, but I would rather get a group of us involved in it.

Let me know!

Let’s say things have been a bit…..tight around here. Of course it’s rude to talk about money (apparently), but a couple of unpaid invoices, a backlog of work thanks to my back episode last week, and a few other factors have meant that Rich and I are…well…a bit broke.

I would love to wholeheartedly blame oil prices and rising food prices. I know that they have played a small part - after all, the cost of living has increased noticably, particularly the last gas & electric bills we had despite our best efforts to keep them as low as possible. But the simple fact is that having two of us self-employed has it’s downsides. And this is one of them. Work, and payment in particular, can be sporadic and unreliable. Especially when you rely on people paying invoices on time, and for whatever reason, it doesn’t happen.

Rich would be fine if he didn’t have me to contend with too. It’s me that’s the problem really.

I’ve almost cleared our cupboards out, trying to come up with meals using tins of kidney, cannellini or pinto beans, boxes of passata, potatoes, carrots et al. My store cupboard staples are diminishing. The freezer is emptying, now resident to unhelpful things like frozen filo pastry and 18 month old Quorn bangers. Even the car is running on fumes now.

But we’re getting perilously close to not having anything to eat, and not being able to go food shopping until next week. So far today I had to skip breakfast (not such a problem, as I was lazy and didn’t get up until mid morning), nicked a packet of Hula Hoops from my Mum’s house en route to see Nannie in hospital, came home and ate the remnants of some chewy bitesize shredded wheat, and to finish had a slightly stale roll with some spread in it. Rich ate some raw cabbage for lunch. It’s a bit desperate, but I can’t help but feel amused by it. If my Mum knew the exact circumstances she’d probably fall over with worry. Of course the animals eat better than we do. I can go a few days eating stale bread and ancient frozen food. I don’t expect them to ’suffer’ because of *my* lifestyle choice.

Anyway, this has all go me thinking about my vegetable plots and allotment. Nothing is quite ready to harvest yet, apart from some rhubarb (ooo…I have fat, sugar and flour, I could make a crumble) . I can’t wait until I can drastically reduce my food shopping bill and gobble my vegetables. I can make a meal out of almost anything, and when you have a glut of potatoes, carrots, onions, garlic and turnips, you’re forced to get creative.

With things being a bit brassic, I’m wondering if I could chance an early raid on the potatoes. My radar onions are almost there, they’ve got smallish bulbs on them (one bolted, mnargh!), but I’m holding off on pulling them just yet. A few rogue potatoes from last year’s Charlotte crop popped up amongst the onions. One has started flowering, so I think that could be of great help.

At the end of this growing season, I’m definitely going to look into successive growing and all year round crops. I just can’t be doing with extra stresses on top of everything else. Once we start harvesting our fruit and veg, a little weight will be lifted from my shoulders.

If you get your hands on a copy of this month’s (July 2008 edition) Home Farmer magazine, on page 14 you’ll see my mug (and Yoko the chicken) staring back at you. Scary!!!!

Home Farmer is a brilliant magazine - it’s relatively new and at the moment is only available in independent newsagents by request, or stocked in WHSmiths. It’s a mag for kitchen gardener, allotment holder, smallholder or veggie enthusiast, and a good read. Naturally, I suggest you go out and get yourself a copy! I basically wrote the article in order to give my perspective on how the whole Smallest Smallholding idea came into fruition. I also wrote about my take on trying to live the Good Life, what it’s like being a “not the norm” (despite the fact that being a bit self-sufficientish is en vogue now, apparently) 25 year old vegetable growing wildlife enthusiast, a bit about my ex-batt hens, and how the world of blogging has introduced me to so many like-minded people*.

Actually, the whole blogging experience so far has been brill. I actually feel now that I am far from a weirdo outsider, that there are actually others out there that are my age, doing similar things and enjoying similar interests. It’s not a case of looking to other people for confirmation that my hobbies, interests and take on life are OK. It’s about sharing experiences and being able to engage in some sort of dialogue - whether face to face, via email or just a short comment on a blog - with other people that I can connect with. And I love the fact that vegetable growing, gardening, smallholding, home farming - whatever you want to call it - reaches out to so many people.

A while ago I blogged about how Facebook depressed the hell out of me. How I felt like I was supposedly missing out on living the high life in London, questioning whether I was going to feel unfulfilled or lacking in some way for not going in that direction. But last week I had my school reunion, and I can safely say that I came away feeling fine. Great, in fact. And it had nothing to do with the (relatively small, compared to others) amount of alcohol I had drunk! It was just the fact that I didn’t feel like an ugly fat dag compared to everyone else. I didn’t feel boring. I didn’t feel outdone or rubbish. I just felt fine! I spent an evening chatting to two or three really good friends that I keep in fairly regularly contact with. I caught up with old school friends who were great. One even came bounding up to me and declared she too had an allotment.

I came home and sat there and realised that I pleased to be amongst my melange of animals, looking forward to a weekend prodding the vegetable patch (I’d had a nasty back incident earlier in the week), doing a bit of writing work, cooking, visiting my grandmother (she’s had a stroke but they expect her to make a very good if not full recovery) in hospital, seeing my sister, catching up on blogs. I might sound like a complete sad sack to most people, but who cares. Really - who cares? I’m happy and I think a lot of people are missing out. It might sound crazy or a bit out there, but I really think that growing vegetables, an interest in wildlife gardening and aspiring to live in this way, whatever it is, has given me a grounding and a solid foundation that I can lose myself in when everything else threatens to drive me stark raving bonkers. Or maybe I’ve just got past stark raving bonkers…

*The only thing is for some reason the word ‘cousin’ has been replaced by ’sister’ in the article. Deborah is my first cousin, not my sister! And please excuse my slightly dodgy wonky scanning skills.

I really wish I could say there’s been a flurry of activity here at the Smallest Smallholding. But the simple truth is, there hasn’t. The sleeping problems are getting better, however I suffered yet another setback, this time due to my back. I have the back of an incompetent 70 year old. When I was 14, I managed to land a bit funny after doing a standing long jump (as instructed by my P.E. teacher) on the hard school gym floor. My cousin (my osteopath too) thinks that it’s caused some disc damage, which still plagues me now. All I did was get up from sitting on the sofa. A few moments later, there were the rumblings of a bad muscle spasm, and before I knew it, my legs were collapsing and I couldn’t stand up properly.

It’s got better though, at least I can walk upright now. And thank goodness I finished all that ruddy digging, because there’s no way I can do anything like that for a while. It sucks. It really does. But I’ve managed to do a bit of pricking out and weeding for now. I’ve thinned the turnips a few times, and I can honestly say they’re probably one of the easiest vegetables I’ve ever grown. And fast! I got an early variety called Snowball, and they’ve needed next to no assistance from me.

I have a whole lot of transplanting to do, and I REALLY need to get down the allotment to earth up the potatoes and weed the onions. And sow things. But it’s just got to all go on hold again. So very very frustrating. I should be whizzing around doing a million jobs! And to top it all off, I have the dreaded school reunion that I organised tomorrow evening. A whole evening of “so what do YOU do?” and trying not to look like a crip. I have wedge shoes though, which actually helps. And hopefully eveyone’ll get so blotto that no one will notice. Not that they’d notice anyway.

So what’s actually been going on here? Well, Pattie and Yoko had a good run, but as ever one of them had to get a bit poorly. Pattie has got her re-occurring thing again. Her comb goes dark red, she starts drinking like a fish and her crop fills with water. She then has explosions of watery poo and looks a bit sorry for herself. We don’t know whether the course of baytril helped last time, but we’re trying to get her on another course to see if it helps. It’s all supposedly linked in with her sterile egg yolk peritonitis, but I just don’t understand why it affects her in this way. Twice she’s made a full recovery, and I don’t know if it’s just her getting over it herself, or the baytril. Thing is, I don’t want to leave her and chance the fact that it’s not the baytril doing it’s job. So what do I do? She’s the happiest, sweetest little hen otherwise.

Yoko has been sneezing a bit still, but despite that is marching and parading around, when she’s not dozing off to sleep in the shade. In the warm weather they all go a bit quiet and dozy. There’s a massive hedge by the shed that they gather under. They preen, they doze, they make small chatty noises amongst themselves, occasionally they’ll wander about but until much later on in the day they don’t do an awful lot else. What a life!

We’ve also had another round of hedgehog releases here from Bedfordshire Wildlife Rescue. At dusk we pick the carriers up, and leave them open so that the hogs can be merrily on their way to finding a new nest/mate/food etc. There were so many to be released that I ended up taking a load over to my aunt and grandmother’s. They live next to each other and both have 200ft+ gardens, both of which have dedicated wildlife areas and plenty of scope for the hedgies to move in and out to other gardens as they please. Last night I ran into two of my released fatties (they’re gargantuan!) that had met each other under the hollyhocks and borage. I have a feeling we’re going to have lots of tiddlers running around come mid summer…

I have to say I do not have a problem with slug munched flowers or veg at all. If you’re interested in encouraging hedgehogs into your patch, here’s a few pointers:

• Don’t be too tidy, leave piles of leaves in inconspicuous corners or against a sheltered spot, such as down the side of your shed. Leaves not only provide nesting material, but are home to lots of hedgehog food such as slugs, beetles and worms.
• If you have a pond, try to make sure that there is an escape route for hedgehogs. They are brilliant climbers but cannot really swim. If your pond has sheer sides (fatal for wildlife), try to provide ladders out of the pond. Even better, why not make a wildlife pond with shallow shelves (needs to be about 18 inches in its deepest part). This way wildlife can come and drink without the danger of falling in and drowning.  Likewise open drains can be an accident waiting to happen, so make sure they’re all covered.
• In dry spells and cold spells, hedgehogs struggle to find food and water.  You can buy special hedgehog mixes (such as ‘Spike’s dinner or hedgehog mix with nuts, fruit, insects and fat from noahsarkgardens.co.uk) or provide them with meaty chicken flavour cat food (without jelly, as it is too rich and can cause diarrhoea) and biscuits. Hedgehogs love to crunch! They also have a sweet tooth, so will appreciate the occasional bit of dried fruit, but don’t go overboard as like humans, they can suffer from dental problems. NEVER give a hedgehog bread or milk. Bread carries little or no nutrition and will cause upset tummies. Milk is far too rich and will cause diarrhoea, which can be fatal.
• Be vigilant with your compost heaps - never plunge your fork straight in. I’ve seen hedgehogs that have been impaled in this way, and don’t forget that female hedgehogs will abandon their litter of hoglets if they’re disturbed. A better way is to take small layers off and carefully turn your compost.  This method is better for your compost anyway!
• Never leave a bonfire pile for hours or days before lighting it. This one is pretty self explanatory.
• Make sure you have lots of places in your hedges or fencing where hedgehogs can get through.  You’d be surprised at how nimble they are, and how flat they can go to squeee themselves through the smallest nooks and crannies! Hedgehogs can travel up to one mile in an evening to find enough food, so obviously the easier they can travel, the better.
• If you ever see a hedgehog out in the daytime, it’s in trouble. It doesn’t matter how well it looks - it’s in trouble. Pick it up, bring it in, wrap a water bottle in a towel and place the hog on top if the towel in a box. Then call your nearest wildlife hospital or the RSPCA.
• Slug pellets are evil and should be banned. NEVER use them.

Rich and I went to a wedding on Saturday, not too far from the Suffolk coast. We decided to make a quick detour to the beach en route home (which involved going in the wrong direction, but nevermind), and as I was driving, I let Rich navigate and choose which beach we would visit. It was only going to be a half hour stop or so.

“Well there’s no yellow beach bit at Aldeburgh, but it looks like Leiston is on a beach. It’s got a visitor’s centre too, let’s go there”.

So off we pootled for 25 minutes or so. “Where’s the beach?!” Rich kept exclaiming.

A big dome loomed in the distance, and as we drew closer through the small town of Leiston, the sandbanks came into view and the distinct sea breeze wafted in through the car windows.

“What is that?!” Rich exclaimed, as the dome and brick fortress loomed over us.

“Rich, you’ve only gone and navigated us to the bloody Sizewell B nuclear power station. Well done,” I said.

I’ve known about Sizewell B for years, having visited Dunwich and Walberswick further up the coast since I was a child. We thought Dunwich - despite it’s award-winning chip shop - was a bit too far as a detour. Now I wish we’d gone there instead.

The beach was pebbly, the view was…well, tainted. Rich loved the strange oil-rig type structures around the shoreline, obviously something to do with pumping the sea water into Sizewell B.

Apparently the warm (not radioactive!) water that is pumped back out into the sea from the power station attracts lots of jellyfish to the area. So swimming around there really isn’t much of an option either.

We took pictures, marvelled at Sizewell B’s sheer presence, pondered nuclear power, and turned on our heels. I wanted to get home - Rich wanted a cup of tea. I allowed him a takeaway cup of tea (from the ‘visitor’s centre - aka slightly tatty beach side/nuclear power station side cafe), most of which he spilt on his lap as we drove through the wiggly windy lanes of coastal Suffolk. Well, he had to pay a penance, didn’t he?

I try not to kill anything. I don’t swot flies, I try to not provide ants with ideal nesting sites, and with 4 cats on site, mice don’t tend to make themselves known. I am with Chris Packham on this one - live and let live. Which means that things like aphids can become a real problem. I don’t like to use the word pest, because I suppose in some cases, one person’s pest is another beast’s fodder. Or something.

I suppose the answer to successfully growing vegetables and wildlife planting without using standard pest control is to implement and encourage natural predators. Ok, so this is me passing the buck and getting other wildlife to do my dirty work, but I think it’s the lesser of two evils. It also means that I can put more time into productive vegetable growing and gardening!

I’m a release site for Bedfordshire Wildlife Rescue’s rehabilitated hedgehogs, so naturally the Smallest Smallholding is a hedgehog friendly environment. And guess what - I don’t have a problem with slugs or snails. However, the aphids came out in earnest earlier this month, sucking away on the ivy and Paul’s Himalayan Musk rose, steadily making their way to the greenhouse. Well, in fact, they were in the (unheated) greenhouse until the hard frosts and snow came back. They’d sucked the life out of my chives. So this year I have to really look at ways to discourage them and the other munchy munchers both here at the Smallest Smallholding and down on the allotment.

A solution is to undertake some companion planting to deter unwanted beasties - things like marigolds and basil next to the tomatoes, planting onions and carrots together, bay leaves next to the beans (get away Mr Weevil!) and any alliums near the fruit trees. We also have dill growing here and there, a favourite for the aphid-eating machines that are hoverflies.

Another solution is to wildlife garden to enourage the natural predators such as hedgehogs, hoverflies, ladybirds and lacewings. Supplying them with shelter spots and habitats, as well as food is vital. At the moment we have buddleia coming through - the equivalent of an open bar to a butterfly - lavender and rosemary, cosmos to be planted (flowered through to Novemeber last year), and I imagine a lot of the attractive annuals such the borage, cornflowers and verbena bonariensis will have reseeded themselves this year. But I definitely need to do more.

The birds help - sparrows in particular love to pick the aphids off the orange blossom. And of course the hens are also a great help in this respect too. They go fly catching on warm afternoons, cluck and shriek with delight when they unearth grubs, and love to pick at the really small slugs. Last year I let them have the run of the veg plots, and apart from decimating my lettuces (my mistake for uncovering them) and the odd nip at a carrot top, everything was left in place.

The only solution I haven’t managed to find yet, is how to deter Mr Moth from my damson and plum trees. Not sure if alliums deter moths, and I certainly don’t want to put up any of those indiscriminate sticky traps either.

THIS WEEK, I HAVE MOSTLY BEEN MAKING COMPOST!

Rich finally managed to finish making our new wooden compost bin. It’s HUGE! I have no idea what the capacity is, but it’s around 120cm in width and length, and 120cm tall at the back. I’m rubbish at maths, so I’m sure that there’s someone out there that can work it out for me.

My new compost bin is yet to have a lid (we were thinking a wooden lid on hinges eventually), but it does have a gate at the front, the idea being that I could easily access the heap to turn it and fill it, and eventually empty it. It doesn’t really matter about the lid - there are both aerobic bacteria (need oxygen/air) and anaerobic bacteria  (don’t need oxygen/air) that work on breaking down the soil, and do just as good a job as each other.

Monty Don says it’s best to have two or three open compost bins, but because we bought the wood from a DIY centre, it did end up costing a fair amount. So for now I’ve just got the one. I’d previously advertised on Freecycle for wood odds and ends without success, and the compost scenario was getting a bit desperate.

What I’d called my compost heap beforehand was basically a 20ft pile of rotting matter that was never turned or tended to. It was just too big to handle. For really good compost, you need to keep turning it and there was no way I could access it properly. So I’ve taken the top layer off with the least rotted matter and put it in the new wooden bin. The stuff underneath, although in places full of sticks, is gorgeous. It smells divine - so earthy and rich, one of my favourite smells.

I still have to finish transferring part of the old heap into the bin, inbetween the really laborious task of sieving the good stuff through my garden riddle into the barrow. I’ve been filling some of my vacant (currently, not for too long) veg plots with the home-made compost in a bid to boost the nutrition and structure of our free-draining sandy soil. There’s PLENTY to go around, and the idea is that eventually it’ll all be used on all the veg plots and borders at the Smallest Smallholding, as well as on the allotment. A big job, but someone (i.e. me) has got to do it…

Either way, I’m sure that the amount of compost I’m going to have available will save me a tonne of money, even recouping the cost of making the wooden bin.

Here’s a little quickie for you from RD.com

“12 ways to become an environmentalist and increase home energy savings without changing your lazy lifestyle”

 1. Skip A Trip

2. Hire Someone To Seal Up Your House

3. Work from Home (check!)

4. Drive a Fuel-Efficient Car

5. Use Cruise Control

6. Cool Your Water Heating Bills

7. Don’t Wash the Dishes- use a dishwasher (check!)

8. Use a Laptop, Let it Nap (check!)

9. Drink Tap Water (check!)

10. Stay Married - live together (check! sort of!)

11. Consider Carbon Offsets, but Be Careful

12. Support Carbon Taxes

WOW!

Thanks largely in part to Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s ‘Chicken Out’ campaign on his Chan4 programme ‘Hugh’s Chicken Run‘, according to The Independent, sales of broiler chicken are down by 10 million. That’s an incredible amount. Still a long way to go, but what a start! It seems the move to more people buying free range has not been a kneejerk reaction or a flash in the pan, the change appears to be here to stay. Result!

In order for consumers to really make a choice about what they buy, they need to know all the facts, and see the evidence. That’s something you just don’t get from supermarkets. I do wish they’d try and source their meat more locally, so that not only butchers and farm shops are the ones to tell you where your meat comes from and the conditions it was reared in. People should care about the life of the animal before they eat it, they should give thanks for it’s life and what it’s providing them with but somehow our culture has removed itself from the reality of what eating meat really means.

Rich and I went to the cinema last night, and walked past a KFC that even at gone 10pm was still pretty full. Silly people stuffing their faces, not a care in the world. I wish I was brave enough to engage them in conversation about it (I resort to death stares and loud passing comments before I run off), but I think they’d just think I was attacking them rather than being constructive.

The Independent thought that Tesco’s £1.99 chicken was in part an attempt to try and clear the surplus broiler (’standard’) chickens from their shelves and warehouses. I can’t help but feel it was an underhand attempt by Tesco to stick two fingers up to the consumer behind their backs, and assert their control over consumer choice. As if to you “you think you can implement change, but you cannot, we’ll always do what we want, we control the market and the demand for certain products”.

The thing is we have a generation that’s so far removed from the realities of the meat industry and all that it entails, so should they be trusted to make a properly informed decision regarding their meat, and more to the point, do they really care? This is why in some ways, I think the Government forcing their hand and creating legislation to improve the welfare of farm animals should be a priority. Consumer choice is limited by the monopolising Powers That Be (Tesco et al) and their own ethics. Legislation by the government may lead to them being called a ‘Nanny State’, but let’s face it, that’s because some people do need nannying.

On Sunday I was en route to my sister’s house. She’s just rehomed a little kitten called Alfie, and I was desperate to see it. I love cats - I’ve always thought this a bit strange, being a vegetarian. But kittens make me go incredibly stupid. So I got up early, jumped in the car (sis lives about 8 or 10 miles away) and drove down to the end of the road. I had neglected to get myself any breakfast, so ashamedly I then jumped out of the car, nipped in the corner shop to get something to snack on, and then plopped myself back in the driving seat. I sat there, and turned the key. The engine turned over, but refused to start. Every time I turned the key it said “no-no-no-no-no-no-no-no”. I tried the battery booster thingy with the crocodile clips (makes me feel like A Woman In Control when I have the car bonnet up and I look like I know what I’m doing), but still nothing. I trapsed back to the house, got Rich to come and have a look. His verdict was that something had give up the ghost. He didn’t know what though.

So we have been without any personal motor transport for a few days. I did get over to see Alfie - I hitched a ride with my Mum and I managed to spend a couple of hours sending him loopy with a bit of string and a ball. But being without a car has made me think about just how much we use our car, and sometimes just how damned lazy we are. Our local supermarket is a Tesco (have a Waitrose near by too, pristine white aisles, more organic and for do-gooders, Tesco is a bit skanky and mean), and it’s only about a 6 or 7 minute walk from the Smallest Smallholding. We’re tucked away in an old road from the days of yore, when our town was a village wiith a train staton and nice little shops. Then Tesco came to town and it all went to pot.

Anyhow, I digress from my Tesco bashing. I shop there - we try to do the best we can if we’re not going to Waitrose (lesser of two evils?), and usually we drive. I have back problems and I physically can’t carry two or three of those re-useable bags full of shopping home. But we decided to do a basic shop, get all the things we needed - milk, bread, carrots (organic), catfood, tin of chickpeas, passata, olive oil etc. and then maybe return in a few days if we were running low on anything else. Everytime I put something heavy in the trolley (e.g. buy one get one free on desiree potatoes - was I being ethical? was it a good deal for the farmer???), Rich would declare that it was too heavy to carry. I would fob him off and he told me that I could carry them, if I wanted them in the trolley. Fine, I said. So we bought our goods, loaded up our two reusable bags to the brim, and off we set for home.

I tried slinging the bag over my shoulder, carry it from underneath, swapped hands, and tried offloading it all on Rich. I think my arms must have extended about 2 inches from the weight. I ended up carrying the shopping bag on my head, it seems the most comfortable way to do it. Luckily it was under the cover of darkness so I don’t think too many people saw.

My point is, is that Rich and I, with a bit of planning and foresight, could walk to do our shopping. We just don’t. We’re typically lazy and often jump in the car without thinking about it. Of course, you turn right outside of the front door of the smallest smallholding, walk for 10 mins and you’re in the middle of the countryside. That’s when you need a car. The bus services around here don’t ‘do’ rural. We’re lucky in that we can go in one direction and we’re in the depths of rural England. 5 mins in the other direction and we’re in the middle of TescoTown, with a train station directly into the heart of London. Milton Keynes is 25 mins away. Cambridge is a 45mins to an hour bus ride. The car makes it much easier, but I’m trying to stay local. But it’s hard when my local town has been drained of interesting features and is devoid of all sense of community and usefulness, save for a couple of banks, train station, a DIY store that has been here since time began, and yes - Tesco.