Mortification personified! Just realised how many weeks and months have passed since my last blog post. Of course, I could bore you with tales of husbands (or rather husband – I only have one!) being made redundant, a succession of teenage/twenty-something offspring requiring moral support in their hours of need, various credit-crunch induced financial crises, and of course the ever-increasing demands of Yours Truly’s professional plate-spinning... but I won’t.
Suffice to say, life has simply been indescribably busy as I begin to meander towards the big 5-0 landmark next summer. It was perhaps the dawning of this realisation (just over a year of being 40-something left...) coupled with a recent fortuitous change in employment circumstances (no more 80-mile round trips to the big smoke – yeehaa!) that has inspired me to resume my virtual scribblings about life in and around the Square Sparrow smallholding.
And whilst I’ve been busy for the past 18 months burning up the country’s precious carbon resources by zipping daily up and down the motorway, Spot and Cocoa, our two ovine Casanovas would appear to have been equally busy, judging by the number of lambs (last count 11) in the paddock.
As ever, the lambkins are a motley but delightful crew, ranging from pure creamy white, via mottled grey (perfect for morphing into the drystane dyke and causing us to worry that they’ve been lifted by a peckish bird of prey) through to charcoal with white faces and/or legs and finally to midnight black. Whilst they cause their mothers almost perpetual angst by belting off with their similarly high-spirited buddies and running “lamb races” up and down the field, they certainly provide an endless source of amusement for this easily distracted writer as she sits tapping away on a computer, strategically positioned at a window that overlooks their field.
HunterGatherer has fewer opportunities to admire their antics, as his rural self-employment endeavours take him off at crack of dawn most mornings. Last week he was unfortunate enough to be digging drains and ditches in the driving rain, and returned home every evening muttering darkly about the miseries of working outside on the land.
Today, however, the rare yellow orb made an appearance in the heavens above, so it was Yours Truly who was muttering complaints about having to sit indoors seeking interesting things to say about oil and gas technology while he whizzed around on a quad bike in the open air, enjoying the warmth of the sun on his back. The rural worthy who long ago coined the expression about the grass on the other side of the fence always being greener wasn’t far wrong!
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