January Part 2

January is also a month for looking forward :)

This year, much like last year we are standing at the cusp of another life changing year. Last night Ady asked me if I was more or less nervous about the possible stuff ahead of us this year than I was last year. My reply was 'more'. More nervous, more excited, more aware of a feeling of 'forever' about it. Last year was the feeling that life was going to be an adventure. This year I have a feeling adventure will be our life.

We're back in limbo to an extent again - sort of WWOOFing here in Glastonbury, although because our hosts are now firm friends and we are that bit more experienced there is less of the learning aspect to being here. Next week we're travelling back to Sussex and will in a rather surreal twist spend a few nights 'camped' in our house. Our tenants are due to leave and we will need to get the place ready to go on the market. We have some stuff in the garage and in the loft, our chickens are there and from reports we have had from the agent and my Dad who did a landlord visit the place will need quite some licking back into shape before it is ready to call in the estate agent. We're planning a week or so based there to get that sorted before heading back up to Scotland for our Rum interview.

For now we'll work on the assumption that we will be successful and Croft 2 will be ours - we do have plans B and C in reserve but fingers crossed we don't need to call them into action. That leaves us with a few 'out of our hands' factors to get past which always makes me feel slightly wobbly - if we are offered the croft, if our house sells... in the meantime we are left homeless and penniless. We can't afford to actually live back in our house with all the bills that entails, we can just about cover the mortgage for a couple of months while it stands empty on the market. Our best option is to head off WWOOFing again really - either down in Sussex near our house, ready to deal with packing up our old life, or up in Scotland ready to start getting stuck into our new one.

We're scaring ourselves silly just now trying to price up house builds, moving costs and setting up a whole life again. The thing is we know that when we actually get out there and do it we can take on anything - I'm off to listen to Elvis singing 'little less conversation, a little more action' - it's where we need to be right now...

Here's how the others are feeling :

Ady: I was pleased to finish WWOOFing and come out of Willow at the end of last year as it was getting tough going into winter living in a van. I do miss the van though and when we visited her at Christmas I felt really sad to drive away from her. Coming back to Sussex was a bit of an anti climax really, we felt like we'd changed so much but everyone else was still living their same lives. I don't feel the same now about our next stage as I did at the beginning of last year. I was so scared we would stuggle with the level of hard work, that the van wouldn't make the journey, that we were all but destined to fail. It turned out that everything we set out to do we managed though and although I am nervous about the challenges ahead this time I have confidence that we *can* do anything we try. I do feel we have been back in conventional life for too long - we are shopping in supermarkets, watching TV, relying on home comforts. I have my moments of feeling terrified about Rum alongside really looking forward to it. I worry about fitting into the community, building a house, whether our business plan will actually be feasible. I am ready to just make it happen now, the anticipation is so difficult - I want to get there, succeed, or fail and work out how to try again.


Dragon: I'm looking forward to Rum for all sorts of different reasons - building a house,  fishing, bird watching, learning to ride a bike, having a home and keeping animals, having my own bedroom I can decorate how I like, having machinery and growing stuff, finding inspiration for my painting and drawings. This stage makes me feel a bit wobbly, I don't 100% know what is going to happen next and I'll feel better once we've been to the interview, whether we get accepted or not at least we will know for certain what is going to happen next. I hope I enjoy it all.

Star: It scares me a bit that we no real idea what's going to happen next. I think it will be so cool to live on an island, I'm excited about the wildlife - birds, animals, the scenery. I'm looking forward to taking some great photographs on Rum. This feels bigger than when we went WWOOFing because we are selling our house and moving somewhere else - more scary and more exciting.