I'm sitting on a bus at London Victoria waiting for it to leave. My parents are on the pavement waving. My friends carry on drinking, back at the party in the bar where I left them.

This is where it begins: in the first month of 2007, in my first year out of art school; I am leaving London on an overnight bus towards the far north west of Scotland.

Then, from the the top of this island, over the course of the year, I travel South, making my way by increments, to the south west tip of Cornwall, which I aim to reach at the end of the summer. Each point, at the corners of the zig-zag line of my journey, is one of fourteen farms, land-based businesses and lives. I live and work on family farms, organic and conventional; a croft; in an eco-community; on country estates; in a stilton dairy; and at a multi-million pound salad and vegetable production business. There are detours: to abattoirs and cattle markets; art schools, exhibitions and parties; in a wandering, wondering exploration of place.

Why farming?

A farm, as a particular place on the earth, in which th earth becomes the site of one of the most profound relationships of human life: between people and their environment, in its widest sense. Farming, as it enacts and becomes a metaphor for how we live on the land, as cultivation of the land is our most basic from of culture.

In my first steps into 'the real world' after the bubble of the Ruskin and Oxford University, farming is a fitting metaphor and process by which to creatively piece together myself in life and work after art school. GB Farming is a joining up of the dots.

I'm reading a book about John Clare, a poet and farm labourer who travelled by foot out of the capital for eighty miles, 'To the Edge of the Orison'. He made this journey after the 18th and 19th century enclosures of the countryside. The story of Clare, in this book and others, is that in the profound refiguring of the poet's physical landscape, he went mad; its appendix is his death twenty years later in a lunatic asylum.

The megabus is emerging out of central London, into the suburbs towards the motorway. Streetlights race past my window, back towards the nucleus of the capital, a black hole. In my book, the author Iain Sinclair says that all journeys out of London are flights. I'm running away, like Clare.




Am I?

Eighteen months ago, in the summer between my second and third year at art school, I set myself the task of reaching the five furthest corners of Great Britain, of travelling to 'The Ends of the Earth'. I thought of it as a conceptual art project as I drew a star-shape across the island by my own journey-making, and collected a piece of whatever land (sand, rock, chalk) I found at each end point, bringing the pieces back, and displaying them along with a timetable, 'To the Ends of the Earth' in the gallery of a library in London.

At the end of one of my journeys, at the tip on the south coast underneath London, I arrived at Beachy Head. By the fence which keeps walkers away from the crumbling cliff's edge, someone had left a bouquet of flowers; Beachy Head is a place other people go, to throw themselves into the sea and find their own end. As I crawled underneath the fence, and further, as far as I dared, reaching out with my arm towards the edge, to snap off a piece of chalk, I felt tired of my mission, of art and of my self. I wanted to give up. I came back from the edge and sat looking at the sea, comforted by its placelessness and timelessness. I knew why people come to throw themselves into oblivion here; feeling this, I felt that there was something profoundly out of kilter inside me.

My third and final year at the Ruskin was difficult. I often thought about giving up, blaming art for the turmoil inside.

I started visiting my uncle's farm in Wales.



Each return to Oxford and the Ruskin was pained and uncertain, but I completed the course, and was awarded a first class degree at the end of the year. Throughout, the farm remained at the forefront of my mind; it was both a day-dream fantasy and a window into reality. On leaving, I returned home to Leicestershire and hatched the plan of this journey: to travail across the land, involving myself physically in the work of farming. Travelling this time would be a journey to, not from.

No, Iain Sinclair, it's not a flight. If the end at Beachy Head had brought me towards death and oblivion, then the soil and the land, mediated by farming, mean life and reality.

Editing this in 2009, I realise that it was in a sense a flight, a flight from 'Art' as I associate it with London. But I can also see how in running away, I found ways back into the things which I loved: about art, in a gap year journey which was not a gap year, farming throughout the UK. It seems you never can escape, who you are.

I have arrived.



Been sitting up with the daughter of the family I'm staying with. She's at art school in North Uist. I can't believe it; I came all this way, to the edge of the country, to test myself about who I am and the way I make art, and here is someone who's already at it. I thought I'd be the "only artist in the village" but they're bloody everywhere. Oh, and the other irony is that she's thinking of transfering to Falmouth to complete her course, so I'm not even the only one with the 'ends of the earth' thing.

I was going to write about the journey, but I'm exhausted. It's been a mental 24 hours, since having goodbye drinks in the Ha!Ha! bar at London Victoria, a sweaty Megabus ride and arriving here late afternoon. I haven't had much sleep anyway over the past fortnight, and my budget travelathon only put the icing on an already-collapsing cake, so here are some more photographs, and I'm off to bed.

I feel blissfully happy, blissfully and with relief like I'm an artist.

When I was in London, for about 10 days, I felt panicked about what I might do there, how I could make art. It's not as though I know what I'm going to do, on this trip, apart from this trip, but I feel like I'm an artist. I'm asking questions which feel natural and healthy, as I hoped I would be.


Loch Broom

It has been wierd though, being here. I tried not to have too many cliched preconceptions of what it would be like, but if I'd allowed myself them, they wouldn't have been shattered by a man wearing a kilt waiting for the coach (who turned out to be my host); or this lovely little house, with its picturesque view over Ullapool harbour and the water of Loch Broom; or the mountains today, tipped with snow under a big bright cold blue sky.

Am I really here? Did I really escape London on that long mad northern flight? It feels unreal, like a dream. The illuminated fishing boats in the window could be a neon painting on my wall.



No, my computer, as it takes power from this house, reminds me that I am here, and connected to London by that long thin string of a journey. But the memory of it is fading.

I don't think that life is easy anywhere.

The things that frighten you follow you wherever you go: boredom; the terror of your own ambition; desire you can't fulfill.

My emotion hinges delicately between awe and curiosity, and a thick lethargy which feels like the cold. The two change rapidly, like the weather, and are impossible to control.

The environment is astonishing; the colours extraordinary. In the morning light, the sky is a bright, light, towards-turquoise blue. Clouds rise in minutes and cover the sky to make an unbroken line of white from the snow on the mountain, upwards. You are astonished by all this.

You enjoy the easy aesthetic embodied by the coloured fishing boats and the reflections of their hides in the still, mirror-like water. You are irrisistably drawn to a long empty walkway into the water. You walk down it, conscious of your own image of yourself doing so, of yourself as the inevitable tourist. And as quickly as you were astonished, you become sick of this picture postcard scene and your own complicity in it. Then, as you are despairing of how you could possibly make anything meaningful in this place, you hear the tune of popular song, and seeing a group of smoking, lounging youths, impossibly bored, your faith in the reality of this place is restored.

I have so far avoided describing day to day life and appearances. Now to amend:

I'm staying with Paul and Helen Paisley on a wwoofing basis; I help with their small-scale organic gardening business, and they provide me with food and accommodation. Several vegetable plots and greenhouses around Ullapool generate produce for local hotels and farmers' markets, and provide the Paisleys with a semi-subsistent existence. January is unsurprisingly a quiet month so in the place of growing and selling the working week is taken up with: making structural improvements to the house (putting a window in) and allotments; general tidying and collecting tasks (seaweed, firewood); and the inevitable consequences of living in a small-town (a community radio, opposing a harbour development). A large proportion of life is taken up with living here.

You want to know about me.

I get up each day about 8. I wear thick lesbian tights under jeans or tracksuit bottoms, with waterproof trousers on hand. Over tights go thick socks. On feet, for general 'about town' business, footwear is Converse; otherwise wellies. Tops are: several, including a fleece. Optional extras as follows: waterproof jacket, wooly hat, lined wooly gloves when not gardening, and scarf.

Food: good. Porridge from oatmeal. Lots of tea; always lots of tea. Hot food for lunch and dinner: potato bakes, omelets, home-made deep-fried chicken and banana fritters :-) At night, a glass of wine. Occasional late night whiskey :-) :-)

I generally help in the morning and early afternoon. If I can catch the end of the day there's a surprising amount to do in the town: a very good library (in the high school); or I might make a trip to the computer shop to upload website changes. Evening is writing, work on the website, reading, or making a brave lone excursion to the pub. Last night I went Scottish country dancing...!

Art is photo surveillance, late night camera excursions. So far, it's been a perfect balance between having something to do - a job, to stimulate and provide inspiration and monotony - and time to deal with it. The weekend is for projects & excursions. Watch this space.

Is Scotland particularly colourful, or colourless?



My good collection of topographic books tell me colourful.

However, though Scotland's purples are remarkable, changes in the sky astonishing and the spectrum of brown so wide, I'm still preoccupied with the question. I can't help thinking that my fixation on colour in the landscape is a result of Scotland's colourlessness. It's as though I need all that I can get.

The snow is a source of frustration as when I take a photograph (I'm on automatic settings; not a photographer) it 'normalises' the white into grey. A way around this is to focus on a bright colour - a red-marked signpost - and the landscape is 'allowed' to be white again. By contrast with each other, colour allows white and white allows colour.

At what point do implanted coloured objects in the natural landscape, like this red sign, become attractive? Around Ullapool, they stand out like monuments: the picture-postcard painted boats; bright pink buoys in the water; coloured road signs (why are heritage signs always brown; to blend in?!); the bright yellow Shell garage roof and the neon of hidden away Somerfield. Representing a relationship between Man and the environment, they are a marking of place. The buoys, for example, declare someone's stake in that space, making place even out of the shifting territory of water.

I am reminded in this experience of viewing colour of looking out of a landing aeroplane at night-time, watching the tiny headlights of a car progress beneath me, thinking of the person in the car with whom I share the experience of being alive. It is like a flashing lighthouse, or the glittering display of camera flashes I saw on Chesil beach during the 1999 eclipse. It says We Are Here, In this Place, Now.

Travel is about going somewhere different. The Grand Tour was an education in alternative ways of living and great cultures; and you came back learned, educated, improved - different.

In a discussion about laptops with my host, buying one for his daughter (an outdated version of mine, which I thought slow), I felt an awkwardness and embarrassment about being here: my laptop, cameras. First wave of homesickness; guilt of privilege, as I am able to travel. I question the value & purpose of my project; its meaning - to whom?


A few things about difference, belonging and place-identity:

There is a Gaelic word for 'sheep-shagger' used for anyone further north: the lowlanders about the highlanders; the highlanders about the islanders

I get the feeling that Burns' night (spent with people at least over 40 years older than me, in Ullapool golf club), is better out of Scotland (what are the young Ullapool people doing? I remember fun Burns' nights in Oxford at college; Paul said something about his best Burns' night in Jamaica)

Americans of Scottish descent, are coming back to Scotland to teach Gaelic, apparently

None of the people I've met (who I see as local) have been born and bred, grown up and stayed here


A question:

Can you only belong to a place once you've left it?


A couple of ideas:

Being local is a state of mind, a commitment to a place, because you have a choice.

There's always someone more local than you. There's no need to be competitive about it. Or to hate tourists; life here not only depends but is made possible by tourism. People who can live here are themselves privileged.


A conclusion:

It's okay, to be here.

Accompanied by Pink Floyd soundtrack

Woke up late today after 12 hour sleep, knackered and aching from yesterday's wheelbarrow-ing of manure and collecting of seaweed from the shore. Enjoyed the work at the time (rich wet colours, the squelch of shit, the spray of the sea) but I'm reaping the rewards today.

11am, it being indoor weather, I went round to the art school An Talla Sollais for coffee. Nice to be back among artists. Tea and cake good too.

Rest of the day finishing putting in the window downstairs. Managed to fit in an indulgent afternoon nap, dribbling on the couch.

This evening to visit James Hawkins, an artist who went to the Ruskin (my art school) 30 years ago, just after leaving. Not sure what the Ruskin today has in common with his Ruskin (copying paintings in the Ashmolean; not allowed to use paint for a term, then only primary colours for another; nearly failing his anatomy exam for using an eraser) but maybe it's like Orwell's metaphor about Englishness: an adult who asks himself what the face in the mirror has in common with the face in the photograph, of him as a boy (the answer is nothing, except the name and of being the same person). I struggled to recognise James Hawkins' Ruskin, except for the fact that we had shared the same physical Ruskin, the building on Oxford's High Street. That really shocked me, to realise that 30 years ago, in the place where I'd experienced things of art and meaning, someone else had been having a similar experience. Shocking, but also humbling and comforting, as I heard it being remembered, and allowed myself to be in that bracket of looking back, having left.

Hawkins said, as though it meant nothing, that after he left, he came up here and it took him seven years to digest "what had happened to him". I'm not quite sure what to do with that.

Measuring the slow grey day:
handfulls of peaty soil are spread over baking trays,
finger squeezes down the black earth
like a hand up the back of a cow.
Golf ball pea pods
or ball bearing cabbage seeds
are deftly potted into the hole,
patted in from folded paper.
I brush soil over the grave,
mark the plant with a flag pole
and lay out the tray on the ground
like brownies.

Marinate with hosepipe,
Repeat until fade / run out of mixture.

I have been collecting more seaweed. Aside from the manure I've been wheel-barrowing around, Paul and I have forked up five trailor loads from the beach, dropping four of them over the wall into the garden and taking one up to a greenhouse by the old people's home.



You might think you know what seaweed looks like, but I venture to say that until you have spent whole days dealing with it, you will not appreciate its diversity. I can now enlighten you, describing the categories I have found in highly technical terminology:

DRY ROPE: typically wraps itself around driftwood; strong but brittle, and can be persuaded

LECH: clings to heavy stones and will not be pulled away; deceitful, initially very attractive but ultimately a waste of time and energy. Evil.

LASAGNE: thick strips of green sheets; many different shades available; appetising and generally very accommodating

CANCER: sprouts pods and in friendlier climes is known as BUBBLE-WRAP; attempts to pop invitingly squeezable puds however should not be made as the making of satisfying sounds will be declined and the plant will mysteriously secrete a yellow brown colour onto one's hands, reminiscent of shitting animals

SLIME: produces the most crap but looks like it will (black, wet, drippy) so more of a friend than CANCER

Now you know that seaweed is fascinating.

Sent back to the Ruskin, myself, and a few friends:

Ullapool is apparently on the West Coast of Britain, but the feel of the West Coast is that it defies you, extending out beyond your reach.

My next farm stop is to the small Isle of Eigg, an Inner Hebridean outcrop of rock as the land ducks under water and reappears.

First though, because I'm here, I'll make my way across the backs of the isles of Lewis, Harris, visit Lucy (Paul and Helen's daughter) on North Uist and reach Eigg via Skye and the mainland.

On the Isle of Lewis ferry to Stornoway, red pumps on hand to replace Wellingtons (in the event of the ship sinking, the girl in the red shoes will be saved).

Watching yellow-jacketed men standing below, waiting to throw, tie ropes. Like birds or sheep: bursts of heavy work, surrounded by long periods of huddling, conserving energy while the day passes.

In Stornoway, a shopping trolley sculpture lies above the smooth grey gallery floor of the harbour

Spending time, mulling through Stornoway charity shops. Returning from a short walk, hit by anxiety around 4:30 by the looming emptiness of my evening. Panic over closed shops, looking for a good book. 60p copy of Walter Scott's Ivanhoe to fill the void.

Unheated hostel, in bed at 9 alone in a bare room upstairs on Keith Street. Underneath duvet fully clothed plus wooly hat, gloves and slippers. Feeling sorry for myself, cold and lonely. Watching a DVD set in LA, the heat emited from my laptop warming me up. A bit.

Early morning (6:30) departure on 'bus' booked last night; turns out to be a taxi and me the only passenger. £4.95 for my own chauffeur (plus anecdotes) along 2 hour drive through Stornoway and Harris to Leverburgh ferry.

Dark. Black.

Frightening journey through northernmost Hebridean island: ice, dark, snow hurtling towards windscreen. Black long sheets of water, iced sea-lochs alongside the road. I can't see how deep the drop or how far the sea. I sit back and enjoy the snow constallation of white spots, flying towards us at great speed. We slide, spin around a corner: "Foock!" Driver swearing more and more. I reassure him: "Don't worry about the ferry (connection); getting there is fine". Lights of cars in the distance like lamps hanging in the sky. The sight of a road-gritting lorry is the most beautiful thing in the world.

We arrive at Leverburgh and it is pink-light.

Journey between Leverburgh to Berneray: on top of the world as the sun rises.

Small ferry (I the only foot passenger) noses its way through islands, floating animals. One with sheep dumped on it: 20 or 30, on an island in the middle of the sea, which doesn't from here look much bigger than a large garden.

The water is blue, enticing. Reepicheep comes to mind (C.S. Lewis' valiant mouse, seeking the end of the world in a rowing boat, going further and further, climbing out and disappearing into the distance). And the north pole (the horizon curves around the boat). Melted. And the sea levels rising. Here.

The boat slowly spins round, sliding a new landscape into shot.

Sun. Stillness. This isn't supposed to happen.

My is mother is texting me that it's cold at home. I have no idea if it's cold or not where I am; the only thing that I can observe is the brilliant sun, and the piercing blue water, and the reflections of the land in it. I try to write on the beach the next day and cannot hold the pen; yes, it is cold, but right now all I can feel is the glory of the sun on my face.

At Berneray (waiting room, a bus stop, a causeway to North Uist and a road towards the village) the cars and the ferry drive off and I am left alone, in the sun.

My bus comes hurtling in, empty, and pauses for an unquantifiable length of time. I make my way back from the causeway towards it. It turns around.

Before heading across towards Lochmaddy I am given a whistlestop tour of Berneray and its seal rocks. I don't know whether to talk to the driver as though he's giving me a lift (taxi, friend) or to sit in my seat quietly, belted upon request and be on a bus, a tourist, take photographs out the window.

The road is metal, a mirror, reflecting the light into your eyes. A silky grey ribbon, laid across a lacy landscape.

Meet Lucy and trudge up to her house just north of Lochmaddy. Over 80s rickety bridge (curves in the wind) and through cowshit (Highland neighbours) to Spoonish House, the factor's. Her's renovated, tacked on. Convenient cottage: spiral staircase, mod cons. Cat. Tea. Cigarettes. Walk.

Houses:

Island life?

More mirrors:

On Wednesday I hitch-hike in an anti-clockwise circle around North Uist, drawing together an almost-random cross-section of the island community: a game-keeper; nurse; farmer; hotel-owner. Across the roads, as they stitch together the land.

At the western edge of the island, sand dunes a wall against the violent motorway of the sea beyond. Water everywhere, mixing up edges. Old farm implements in front of a cemetery, monuments to passed time or David Smith sculptures. The fields, swamped; sunken ice pockets, cracks into the sky below. We are far up, a place close to heaven.

Swamp / David Smith sculpture:

Next day: leaving Lucy's house at 6:30 (is this a theme?) for first ferry. Reasonable winds hint of weather's more usual possibilities. Use 'phone to light way over bridge and beyond. Manage to avoid walking into cows and falling into water. Approaching road a steady beat of car lights (where are they all coming from?). Think of the ferries as the island's heartbeat and remember Lucy saying she knows what time it is, whether she's late for school by how far across the ferry is across the window above her kitchen sink. The traffic as the island's tides, rushing in towards the ferry's departure, out from arrivals.

A bigger boat to Skye. Weather warnings in London on TV; reporters in lots of clothes by railway lines, looking ridiculous. People worrying about not being able to get to work. A world away.

Skye:

Through Skye. Brunch in a cafe. Proper shops, people. Back onto the mainland at Mallaig I await tomorrow's ferry to Eigg.

Helen MacAlistair's The Roar o'Human Shingle

Chris Drury's Hut of Shadows (below)

Ettie Spencer's Metal House (bottom)

An exhibition of Helen MacAlistair's work at Taigh Chearsabhagh art school and gallery in Lochmaddy

In the visitor's book, a comment "The Emporer's new clothes?"

Exhibition throughout lower and upper gallery and stairs between the two. Painting objects are minimal and poetic; snippets of titles and quotes from plant names and Scots and Gelic poetry hang in the centres of canvases and on round door-knocker frames. Careful pencilling or painting make texts almost-printed.

Exhibition better than ghastly exhib. in An Lanntair on Stornoway (very, at best, average paintings and photographs; architectural muddle and views from gallery, crafty bits and pieces shop and confusingly trendy cafe). By contrast (TC exhib) space for contemplation.

In particular, a large soft brown canvas with words bruan air bhruan (poetry of Gaelic bard Sorley MacLean, the sea draining drop by drop). Words implanted into top right hand quarter, a reminder of (Scottish-driven) concrete poetry (Ian Hamilton Finlay, etc); text as physical object; words suspended in canvas like objects of their reference in the natural world.

Chris Drury

At Sponish, peninsula n Lochmaddy, a stone hut, turfed over like an ancient burial chamber. A camera obscura, projecting and condensing an image of the complex environment outside onto a personal viewing screen. Making a landscape. A way of being with the outside world. A photograph of a moving image; a film in real time.

Ettie Spencer's Metal House. Sheets of aluminuim cladding a delapidated crofting house. A meditation on 'displacement' (?). Movement of people off the island, leaving behind crofthouses (memories).

Seeing these things on a beautiful, brilliantly light calm day. The striking light of North Uist. Environment again reflected onto house (landscape). Possible to take photographs, suspend reality and confuse surface of house with landscape, sky. House vanishes. People. However, consciousness of bends in metal, rivets, folds into windows and around corners. Debris left in house (abandoned wood and furnishings, litter) and lights on ground like abandoned hair dryers. I think about the effort of getting aluminium on and off island. Evocation of leavings behind, litter. Trails as we go through life. Shit.

Disposal - displacement - recycling - environment - food

Climate change, storms, North Uist. Houses on the edge. Damage. Fragility. Urgency.

Artists. Roles. Working; not only environmental consciousness but own proceedures and acts of living and making in a place.

First electricity moment (although getting it online via internet is the next task...).

Arrival on Friday: I met Alan and Heather and their six year old son Ewan at Mallaig pier. At Eigg we were greeted by people come to help unload supplies (in the winter the ferry comes every other day bringing food, post and other orders for the 80ish people who live here). The ferry's arrival is even more of an event than on North Uist. Alan told me later that you can tell that people aren't coping well with island life when they come down to the pier to meet every ferry.

When Alan showed me into the caravan in which I'd be staying (freezing) and left me there, fully clothed (waterproofs, wooly hat), with a sudden rush of regret and insecurity, I began to know how they felt. I stood there for a long time looking at my face in the mirror, wondering what the hell I'd got myself into. I felt imprisoned by my dependency on the ferry and alone, realising that contact with the outside world would be difficult (no 'phone signal and I had a hunch that internet access was not going to be promising). Oh well, I thought, at least I could watch those DVDs my brother had sent... or not, living in an electricity-free caravan.

This is what I wrote in my diary at that moment:

"I'm in a caravan on Eigg: shit, what have I done... The caravan is rocking, freezing and stinking of gas. It's dark, colourless, brown, a manky orange... 90% incomers: hippies from the north of England with pigtails and waterproof trousers" (I am fairly ashamed by this last bit, but I thought it suitably expressed my mood, condemning and fearful though it is)

Since that first afternoon, I've been feeling a lot better. Working helps. For a start, it's really cold and the only way to keep warm is through a bit of hard graft (more seaweed and manure digging; bit of sowing and so on; feeding hens etc).

The next day, Saturday 10th February I wrote this in my diary:

" - I FEEL MUCH BETTER
- WARMTH IS EVERYTHING
- I HAVE BEEN WEARING THE SAME PANTS FOR THREE DAYS
- THERE'S SOMETHING REALLY MENTAL GOING ON
- SOMETHING HAS SHIFTED NOW I'M WARM
- THE KETTLE WORKS! I JUST MADE MY OWN HOT WATER BOTTLE."

I still find the difficulty of communicating with the "outside world" frustrating, especially when it is actually possible with intermittent broadband, but I've not been off 'working hours' at the same time as both it, and the generator have been on (yes, we have additional electricity issues). There's also a landline in the house, but I can't really express how I feel to anyone within earshot of the people I'm living-ish and working with. Yesterday, Sunday:

"I am feeling extremely ratty about not being able / allowed to go on the internet. And pissed off about my clothes... now I don't know where they are and I have been wearing the same pair of pants for I shudder to think how many days."

So this is it. I can pretend I'm online and that you, whoever you are, can hear my cries for help and attention.

I heard that there was an office down by the pier. I thought "Office... internet?"

I walked across the island. My 'phone started beeping as I came into signal: oh, the joy of connection with the outside world!

I found the office, heavenly with its photocopier and lovely characterless blue chairs. Empty, but someone who works here downstairs in the shop - full of all shiny and colourful things like cereal boxes and reams of food packaging!

So here we are. I've never been so excited to get online and find that Britain hasn't yet been destroyed by bird flu.

There's never enough...

Flick Hawkins (Ullapool) told me about how they used to live self-sufficiently: pigs, vegetables etc; but "in the end," Flick said "we don't regret doing it, but in the end, it was just financially easier for James to go to the studio and paint". I thought, that's saying something, that it's easier for them to sustain themselves by making and selling art.

Farming on a small scale - simply growing your own food - can't be about saving money. I thought about this this afternoon when Neil and Sue asked me to prepare vegetables and cook dinner. This took most of the afternoon, and when I was thinking about it, peeling off the manky outsides of brussel sprouts, thinking about the time it was taking me to prepare them, let alone cook, and thinking about all the time someone else had spent composting, digging, planting, I thought, it would be so much easier just to get a job, work in a shop for an hour and buy the bloody things.

But that's really not the point; and of, course, on a practical level, life on Eigg can never work like that with only 80 or so people here. And yet, I'm still not hitting the nail on the head; there's something else; why is it that I equate convenience with value? Why do I assume that the shortest route possible (my time) is the best process by which to achieve the end result of food? My life is so divorced from the production of the very things (food, energy) which sustain it, that I consider them necessities only, almost irritating consumers of time and energy. And yet the preparation and consumption of food can be a major source of satisfaction, enjoyment and health. Of cultural importance and value. I find myself, doing these things, having a stimulating time, satisfyingly tiring and even meditative, working in the garden and with the animals.

But I don't have much time to make art (except for this). Hmm...

At the end of the day, the six or so cattle (Aberdeen Angus, black or orange and wooly) move towards the gate, making lowing sounds; it's feeding time and my last chore. Like the Cal Mac ferry on Uist, the animals are a time-piece.

On Eigg, the ferry comes every other day. The days it comes are ferry days, and people gather around the pier, chat etc

Wow, Eigg.

Ten eventful days and now a three or four hour journey back to the mainland, via Rum and Muck. I've found a plug in the corner of the top room on the little ferry: woo-hoo! Power is a happy compromise; getting online can wait.

I don't quite know how to give a sensible overview of my time on Eigg. "It's been mental" is the first phrase which comes to mind, allowing me to encompass the surprises and serious excitements as well as the severe lows. Again, as I found on Ullapool, many of the cliches I might have imagined I discovered, from the gossip culture of island life, to the slow pace of living, lack of technology and strong community feeling. The surprises came from myself, as I watched myself adapting to my own astonishment. A particular moment in the first few days, having successfully made myself a hot water bottle on the little gas stove in my caravan, and I realised I was enjoying myself. Accomplishing that small task of independence made me feel that I was coping with the challenges, and that I could cope. This left me freer to enjoy my experiences.

Another (hand-written) diary extract (Thursday 15th February):

"Painted sign white, then dug for about an hour. Sun came out. Made omelette lunch. More painting. Then veg preparation: leeks, brussels, spuds. Made sausages. Did animal feed. Book. Made dinner. Book. That's it really. Beginning to cope with / enjoy life. I like the fact that I can describe it so simply. That is all that happened. I didn't hear anything particularly interesting. I'm not reading anything of particular relevance. There's no point just at this minute worrying about anything particuar. The only thing of minor interest is my discovery of how long it takes to prepare vegetables... The great conundrum: money or time."

Meeting some more people helped too. I discovered on my second weekend that there were more options to living on Eigg than staying in my caravan every evening (yes, even in February). On Friday I had a day off and went down to the pier, taking photographs of the ferry and later of the cows. Ferry time, especially on a Friday, I found to be quite the event. The tea room and shop turned into a hive of activity, of people collecting, dropping off post, exchanging news, gossip, smoking together. I myself recieved a few second glances, a rare February visitor, as well as friendly introductions by people I'd only just met. Then Hannah, who I'd met in the office told me about a meeting / talk later in the afternoon by some architects from Skye about rural housing, and I jumped at the chance of attending (something to do! people to see!). I found myself ridiculously excited at the prospect of being in a room with a handful of other people - excited enough to shower and change my clothes into only slightly muddy jeans. Wow.

As I'd hoped / anticipated, the meeting led to drinks down in the pier bar, which was fun (a word on definitions: "pier bar" and "tea room" are in fact the same place, the former emerging out of the latter at an unspecified moment, perhaps when more people are drinking beer than tea; and "bar" is a few boxes of cans in a store room). People were nice to me: friendly, interested or bored enough to make me feel rapidly welcome. Perhaps people need each other more here; in the dearth of visitors that is midwinter I felt like quite a celebrity. In my diary later, drunk, I wrote:

"Is this why people live here, for these moments, when life is absolutely, unalterably beautiful, positive: for these moments, when you cannot believe that life can be any way otherwise than starlit, with clouds of acne lights... How can I describe it, that wonderful, bumpy journey home across the island, all in a van together like old, old friends? I wanted it to go on for ever..."

As I left, the ferry drawing away from the pier and seperating me from the island, on my way back to the mainland, towards 'home' - something I'd been anticipating since I'd arrived, feeling nervous and lonely - I felt a strong wave of unqualified longing, and I realised that I'd had a good time, and I felt sad to be leaving having only just realised this. I know I can, of course, go back, but I wonder whether it might be better to appreciate the place as one which travels with me; I can never retrieve the Eigg I've experienced.

I wrote this:

"On my own again.

Feeling really sad.

Why do I do this, this travelling?"

I was picked up, just outside Edinburgh, to travel to a large estate on the east coast of Scotland.

On his way back from a conference, about tourism and diversification, the owner of the estate, a baronet and a 'Sir', asked me where I'd come from. I told him about Eigg.

Eigg was bought out from its laird, a wealthy individual landowner, by the island community. As Ewan, Alan's son told me, "everyone who lives on Eigg owns it".

In the station at Fort William, having been dropped off by Hannah on her way to a meeting in Edinburgh (I to Glasgow, to stay with a friend's parents), I wanted to get some money from a cashpoint. Surrounded by bags, the cashpoint outside the station and across the road, I felt stranded. I could no longer leave my belongings, safe amongst strangers. I was alone.

By the time 'Sir' Thomas picked me up, I had for the most part readjusted to life outside Eigg, reacquainting myself with a world of trains, public transport, and capitalism (life on mainland Great Britain), but it was still a shock, travelling to the other side of Scotland with this man, who when asking "So how are they getting on there?" in a curious, aprehensive tone, represented an utterly different way of being - on the land and in Scotland.

In an enormous 19th century house, at the heart of a 1200 acre estate

On the ground floor: on one side bedrooms, bathrooms, washrooms, a laundry room; on the other offices, boot rooms, smarter rooms and a kitchen; between the two a staircase and a grand piano and antique toys and furniture which has printed on it the family name

Why am I here? How is it farming? Maybe it's not. What is the difference between farming and land-use, food production and diversification, managing land and producing businesses from it? When are they the same, when are they not? When do they become each other, stop being something and become something else? How do they change, people? How are people made who they are, from what they do, in connection with the land?

This is why I'm here

Eigg and this estate-family are the same as reinventions of traditional ways of Scottish life: the one, crofting, an island community; the other, estate management, land ownership and a family. Good ideas.

This estate, then: farming, yes, although I'm here to work on the "diversification" side of things, a tourism / horticultural business based around the house and gardens: plant sales and entry to gardens, as well as a mail-order business and B&B. On top of this, presumably the agricultural use of land, and occupation of apartments, cottages, buildings. In and around the house, where I am, it's all mixed up: the family, the home, the house, the land, the branding, the business(es). Lines between things are slight. With us too, eating and living with Thomas and Claire. Working. Life. I like it, but it is also a little confusing.

A piece of news, too, me: I have been awarded a grant from the Arts Council England, to fund the major (England) part of this project, GB Farming. A hooray, official sanction on what I'm doing. A little odd, too. Something has changed, me or it, the project or both, being so interconnected.

Garden Drawing / Burn


Crop / Packaging


Work / Harvest


Word / Sea

For the last two hours, I have been sitting in the corner of a coffee shop in St. Andrews, buying and drinking tea, faffing around on my laptop, avoiding beginning to write.

Now that I am writing, I'll begin with the weather, appropriately English-ly:

not nice, and I'm not faring well, my feet sodden. Others, the rest of the St. Andrews' female population, in Kate Middleton jeans, flower-patterned wellington boots, macs and umbrellas, are better-prepared.

I've been avoiding writing this blog, because I do not know where to begin: so much to say, been so busy, hard to filter what matters, or did, my thoughts from events. So I've been traipsing around charity and second-hand bookshops (got some good-uns!), trying to let everything... fall.

Days have been busy, long, full. Evenings, respites (good conversation, lot to record, if I can) to prepare for next day. In the earliest days of spring, as snowdrops emerge from the ground, it's the busiest time of year for the estate, Thomas and Claire, the business(es) (all of them, all together). We are sending plants out, welcoming and serving visitors, and digging, sorting, packing, replanting, moving (snowdrops). Also pulling ivy, making bonfires, posting mail, collecting groceries (me!). Last weekend (we're recovering), a special activity-packed weekend including a photography workshop, a flower study day, and so on. Yiiiiikes.

So please excuse me, if it's all a little... muddled.

In continuation from yesterday's blog

I daresay I now know more about snowdrops than I ever did about seaweed

Yes, prepare yourself for a selection of the delights of my learning, gleaned from dinner table conversation and eavesdropping, and whilst working outside digging alongside Claire

The snowdrop is of course the first plant that pokes its head through winter, the harbinger of spring. To the uninitiated, this might be all. To the galanthophile however, lover of snowdrops, it is a subject and object for endless discussion, collection, of historical and cultural anecdote and for social occasion, celebration and enjoyment. There are 19 'species' or versions of snowdrop , 22 'taxa' (sorry, can't remember that one, whether a version of species or something else entirely. hmmm...) and over 500 individual types of snowdrop known as 'cultivars'.

There are beautiful allegorical names for the snowdrop - Fair Maids of February, Candlemass Bells, White Ladies - which allude to its cultural and social significance, its appearance and seasonal arrival from the earth (at the time of traditional purification feasts). Galanthus, the 'proper', Latin name for snowdrop, means milk-flower; and 'snowdrop' itself (apart from describing in English the literal visual appearance of a snow-drop), comes from the German schneetropfen, a popular Renaissance-era tear-shaped earring.

In the names of the cultivars, symbolism continues; they are markers of events, people, and the namers' observation(s). Sophie North remembers a daughter killed at Dunblaine; Modern Art is "curious but not beautiful".

I wanted to send Modern Art to the Ruskin, my old art school, but I couldn't get hold of it; cultivars can be rare.

And expensive; so we enter a strange world of value and desire; a tiny plant will sell for £80, and others cannot be bought with money, "only love". It's a little like art.

Apparently, in the Victorian gardening world, it was possible to tell who was friends with who by looking at their ferns - and it's the same in the incestuous cult-clique of snowdrop growing-collecting-selling.

It's not just about the plant; there's a fascinating, and humorous social history behind the collecting of this small flower (indicated in some of the names of snowdrop cultivars), another world of fanatics and eccentrics, including Barlow, the 'King of galanthophiles', the Reverend "Takeaway" (Blakeway) Phillips ("ooh those Reverend gardeners... there's a book in that!") and an elderly gentleman pictured poking with his walking stick ("Just you put your stick away! My eyesight's not that bad!").

A customer here over the weekend, had to go up from the plant area to the gift shop to pay, to use her credit card. She took the plants with her, saying that people who love plants don't steal (that's not what I've heard).

To a snowdrop outsider like myself, there's pleasure watching the seriousness by which a tiny plant is taken. In the squabbling and delicious competitiveness of mostly well-to-do, elderly galanthophiles (but then there are the gay collectors and spouse pairings: husband collectors, women gardeners), and eccentric characters sending other people to buy their plants, allowing no-one to see them, but yet cataloguing them. Finally, that 'snowdropping', a word used to refer to the visiting of snowdrop gardens during 'the season' is also a word for the stealing of underwear from washing lines.

I laugh, and yet, I'm quite captivated (the enthusiasm of a person you live and work closely with, and respect, can be remarkably contagious). I find myself exclaiming at different shapes, names and markings of the 19 species, and making notes before I go to bed. I am, officially, a geek of geekness.

Goodnight.

Dry snowdrop bulbs used to be sold in the autumn. In recent years the practice is to sell them flowering, 'in the green'. I can't tell you Claire's new idea.

Potatoes from the estate are sold here to visitors, packaged in attractive pre-printed brown bags (name of estate + "tatties") and left in piles between the plant shop and the tea room. Sold not just by weight, but by aesthetics and association, visitors buy a piece of the place of the estate.

Pigs here rip up the ivy and provide an attraction for visitors, young and old. Jobs for wwoofers (volunteers) like me, too, running after piglets, trying to catch and sex them. Think meat comes into it too, somewhere. But back to the point: on the path between the walled garden and the area the pigs inhabit, is a large cage. Inside it, potatoes. A sign advertises for people to throw them to the pigs, that it is okay to do so. A note and a small box suggest that visitors might donate some money, to pay the farmer, for the potatoes. Apparently, people give more for potatoes this way, than they do buying to eat them themselves.

I went to the bank in St. Andrews on Friday to do a job for Claire and couldn't take my eyes off the almost-bare legs and classic black heels of the bank assistants, and their clean, close-fitting skirts and carefully made hair-dos, like flight attendants. My hands are already tougher, taughter, than they were six weeks ago, and my fingernails shorter, lined from the front with a thin dark line which is almost impossible to remove (and has seemed increasingly pointless to try, considering its likely reappearance the following day).

I arrived in Edinburgh yesterday, Saturday: on the one hand overawed by the size and the movement of people, by the number of foreign accents and variety of hairstyles, get-ups, costumes; and on the other half-comforted, half-thrown again by the familiarity of the city. As I've said before, to travel is a state of mind (I love the title of a book I found in a 2nd hand bookshop in St. Andrews, 'England, My Adventure', and the quote inside, "No need to go out of England for adventure. Adventure is never anywhere unless we look for it"); reaching a familiar city to stay with friends has knocked some of that out of me. I'm in a state of limbo; 'between farms' I'm still in a sense travelling, but also taking a breather in the rhythm of family life (three children, under teenage) for a few days.

On Thursday, on car-parking duty, meditating in a bright yellow jacket in the sun. Taking entry payment to the estate, I told a RHS member (Royal Horticultural Society), that they get free entry to gardens except in February, July and August. He surprised me: it's March.

On the train on the way to Edinburgh, in the golden sunlight coming through the window, I thought back to my time on North Uist visiting Lucy, and it suddenly felt like an incredible adventure, a very long time ago, that I had reached her house through the mud, surrounded by wild(ish) Highland cattle. It had been sunny then too, but extraordinarily so, like a dream in the middle of winter. On the train now, North Uist and its waterproof clothing, torches and wellies, felt like a very long way away. And it hadn't, on my arrival to St. Andrews. A fundamental change in perspective had taken place between arriving and leaving. More than time and distance I think, although my moving south, onwards towards my fourth farm ("farm") serves to accentuate this change, an emotional shift which takes place in the seasons changing, in that feeling of the worst of winter being over and in the hope of spring.

I've wondered before, whether there might be no such thing as spring; that spring might only ever be the promise of itself, felt in a series of 'firsts': lunch outside, taking a jacket off to dig in the sun, snowdrops. If so, spring has taken place; the sunlight hitting my face through the train window is no longer remarkable; snowdrops are beginning to wither, and fade, replaced by the more colourful daffodils and irises.

Although there is a relief and excitement to it not being Coldest Darkest Winter anymore, as I leave St Andrews and the east coast of Scotland, I also feel the sadness of leaving my wintery adventures, and all the things I haven't done, places I haven't visited. What of the Aberdeenshire fishing villages, the north east side of Scotland, and Sutherland and the north coast? Not to mention the Orkneys and Shetlands... I wanted to experience the extreme edges of things British and rural, but apart from a couple of days on Eigg, it hasn't been that hard; have I done enough? Maybe travelling lightens the experience; you're either arriving or leaving. Maybe I'm tougher than I thought; maybe I've been lucky, missing the heavy rainfall of the autumn and experiencing an incredibly mild January. Or maybe travelling is not farming; farming is living and working in the same place, being prepared to watch the rain fall every day between October and February, sitting out a grey winter and waiting for spring.

I joined the seasonal journey in the approach of spring, January downwards. Working on farms and progressing South has highlighted the movement of the seasons, embodied in the activities of each farm: January a slow month in Ullapool, cleaning, tidying and preparing; February tough on Eigg; then snowdrops on the east coast, further south, slightly warmer. Now what? Lambing will start soon. I visit a family dairy, sheep and poultry farm in March in the Scottish Borders.

A week in Edinburgh, researching and catching up on admin-ish things, staying with friends and chilling in the city.

On Saturday, a mad morning getting those last town things done (running around for a new mac plug, posting things &c &c), before catching a bus to the Border town of Galashiels.

My friend Christopher, is joining me. It's nice. We piled my bags onto the front of the bus and sprawled ourselves out over the back. Somewhere in the outlying expanse of Edinburgh, of leisure centres and anonymous industrial buildings, I fell asleep.

I woke up to gentle rolling hills and a pervading mistiness. At Galashiels, we rang the farm and took it in turns to guard the luggage, go to the toilet and get cash and stash (sweeties, for midnight feasts?) from Somerfield.

Samantha, the daughter of the Wooller family, picked us up; an easy pair to spot camped out amonst rucksacks and wellies.

The Woollers' farm is more like my idea of a farm than any of the other places I've visited so far. Spatially: a central farmhouse, which Chris and I are staying in; outlying buildings used for B&Bs and holiday accommodation; barns, sheds, hen houses, caravans between these and beyond; a good spattering of farm machinery about the place.

On arriving, Chris and I were offered soup and tea hot off the Aga (yum yum), then went exploring :-) We found Malcolm, the father / husband / farmer, feeding calves, and then Doug their son milking the cows. I was mesmerised by the milking machinery. I was (as in my arrival to Ullapool) struck by how alike it was to my image of it in my head, and yet by how utterly different and exciting it was to be there standing in wellies in the pit-like section beneath the cows, being shat on and pissed on as the huge and beautiful beasts munched at their food and were drained of their milk. It all seemed wonderful, and extraordinary: from the softly furred, velveteen udders of the cows, to the way that the mechanical pumps on their teats suddenly popped off and swung away, dripping milky water into the lower area of the dairy.

It's beautiful to me: the writing in chalk on the wall of the dairy, cows numbers (a found poem, a farm poem); in the early evening, light seeping through the corners of the large cowshed illuminating the far end of a pier-like catwalk; the light on the dust from the remains of the hay falling from the claw of a tractor emerging from the shed.

And wierd: a plethora of machinery, farm products and tricks I know nothing about; the iodine-coloured liquid Doug uses on the cows' teats after milking (specially made, produced by people / businesses); a mixture created in the evening from water, eggs and oats (dogs' dinner). It is all new and thrilling, impressive and challenging.

Quilt / Chocolate


Good Morning / Quilt 2


Tyre Mountain / Farm (found) Poetry

Picture this: I'm sitting in a McDonalds near Galashiels, in order to write about Great British Farming (an organic one in particular - CB).

I'm wearing my fleece and tracksuit bottoms (from the farm, unchanged). Opposite me, a woman in a very short denim skirt, high-heeled boots and a serious amount of make-up, is feeding chips to a small child. I am aware of the irony of the situation, but whilst McDonalds' BT internet hotspots enable me to get my laptop (thus website) online, I am glad that the King of fast food chains exists and that there's one near Coldbrook Farm (imagine, I could choose my farms by their proximity to McDonalds'!).

At Coldbrook, my (and Chris') first job of the morning has been to collect hen eggs. It's altogether a different story to going round the croft (Isle of Eigg) with a bucket and bringing a dozen back. Here, there are two hen houses, each with well over a thousand hens. In the mornings, Chris and I go down to the first in the Woollers' landrover and stand in a little room at the back of the shed. It is cold. We wind up the radio, run a conveyor belt, and wait with icy cold wet cloths, dipped in water which we have sometimes had to break. Suddenly, from under a black plastic flap, eggs start appearing. Depending on what mood I'm in when I collect them, it's either quite extraordinary / wonderful, or overwhelming / sickening, to be confronted by these funnily-shaped, jiggling objects, in their hundreds, thousands.

The range of colours, textures, shapes, is startling.

Truffles

We seperate them into three orders: good eggs; seconds; and the rubbish. The good ones are those you'd buy in the supermarket, and can be brown, shiny, speckled or white, but most importantly the shell is intact, strong, and there's nothing 'odd' about the egg. The seconds are those which are okay, but sold to friends, passers-by and used in the house; the might have rough tops, be funny colours (you get stripey eggs), wrinkled or just 'odd' looking. There's something about the rough ones which reminds me of Thornton's chocolates, or truffles (when you look at them for so long, they stop being eggs). The third sort of egg, put aside in blue trays, are cracked or barely recognisable as eggs. You put your fingers down over a warm, squishy, sack-like thing, and if too quickly, the whole thing bursts. Euuughhhh! Anyway, there's still nothing edibly wrong with these eggs (I don't think), but they're not very transportable, and don't look very appealing. But even they have a use; Sam uses some of the yokes in her ice-cream, and they do even get sold, at a very low price, to the egg distributer. Who knows what he does with them? Oh, the mysteries.

There are two tides to the day, determined by the feeding of animals, morning and evening.

The first gets us all up and outside. Literally, I get out of bed, into clothes and outside, bleary-eyed. Perhaps via a cup of tea swiped from the Aga on the way out. I've been getting up between 7:30 and 8; this feels late, the kitchen (and house) already deserted and empty mugs standing by the sink.

During this first wave of activity - feeding, milking, letting out animals, egg-collecting - we all move around each other, co-ordinating activities (feeding calves after cows have been milked). Then suddenly it's all done - eggs packed away, cows reshuffled into the barn - and people disperse into the house or caravans (Doug and Sam live in these, away from the house), towards breakfast and the rest of the day. The farm is quiet again.

I don't really know what happens next: letter-opening and 'phone-call making (and I'm doing this); is it farm work or life, or both, being the same?

In the middle of the day, an uncertain 'no-man's land' of slower time. I find myself something to do: preparing the garden for planting; making an egg sign for the farm. Drink tea throughout the day. Might read, make notes, run into town (can drive their landrover, yipee!), help Sam make ice-cream. Digging is a good afternoon activity: just to dig (lose time, forget everything including my own thoughts) until it's suddenly evening, the pre-spring light casting long shadows.

Then it's feeding time: the second wave to the day.

After this, a sense of things being done, everything put to bed. A glass of wine. Yet Ruth (Malcolm's wife; Sam and Doug's mother) might be making dinner for a B&B guest, Malcolm on the 'phone for something about the farm.

At dinner, conversation flits between farming gossip and Coldbrook plans.

I am tired of getting up in the morning (and ashamed of being tired of it). It's not that it's early, it's that it's every morning, week-day or week-end. You can't have a lie in without letting someone else down. I didn't realise, just how restorative a week-end is. Maybe as much the idea of a lie-in (on a Sunday, with the newspapers) as the actual having of it.

On Saturday, we went out to a ska night in Galashiels (!) - Sam, Doug, his girlfriend Rowena and I - and I wondered if we'd come home early. But no, last out of the building. We're all up again at 7 am, hangovers and all, as the snow began to fall. Rowena even went riding after the morning routine, whereas I slunk back to bed...

I am ashamed and feel weak. In the mornings there is evidence of nocturnal activity: tea on the Aga; a lamb warming in a box before it. Ruth and Malcolm have been taking shifts overnight in the lambing shed. I want to be part of it all, but don't know how. I'm losing energy and feel sad.

It's that depressing time of year when the weather seems to have reverted to winter. After the first promises of spring in Fife (snowdrops, a sunny day sitting outside, taking one's jacket off for the first time) this cold and grey seems worse than ever.

Chris has left and I am lonely. The tasks that were fun and a novelty, which we chatted over and which stimulated discussion, are now monotonous and boring, smelly and cold.

Yesterday, to animate myself, I offered to do a really disgusting job: de-miting the hen house. I had to go in there, amongst all the birds, running the stinking stuff along a ridge. I hate going inside, I hate the chickens. But I felt a little better, having done it.

I wonder whether there is no such thing as spring; that spring never actually arrives but is only ever the promise of itself. Spring is most spring in a moment in which it is possible to remember what summer feels like.

Narnia (Father Christmas and the melting of the snow)

You do not know what to do with yourself when it's neither winter nor summer. You do not want to do anything. You eat a lot of food and then feel full and bored. I remember a year ago, in the Easter holiday of my final year at Oxford, lying in bed in the middle of the day, watching the trees move outside, wishing that spring would arrive. That it would be summer (art school finished, graduation, parties).

Now, there is nothing to do. Except deal with it: get up, go outside, face it: the cold and grey. Go for a walk. Dig. Work. And so the winter passes and you realise that spring has arrived after all.

I had my first milking apprenticeship on Friday :-)

I was hanging around waiting for the colostrum (milk of a cow which has recently calved, rich and creamy and high in all things good, carbohydrates and so on) to take to the calves, when Malcolm handed me a bottle of orange-brown and gloopy liquid (the iodine-like stuff). I'd been standing in the doorway, mesmerised again by the whir of machinery, the chalked notes on the backs of the metal doors and by the sheer size of a cow's head close up.

Malcolm asked me to dip the teats of the milked cows in the (not actually) iodine bottle. Doug told me before that this was to seal them from bugs and so on. I was to put my hand on the side of the cow, so that she would know that I was there, and then put the bottle up to the teat. It was all very exciting: to be so near to, and intimate with such a huge animal. I thought that letting the cow know I was there was rather sweet and courteous (it reminded me of having to knock on the door of the hen-house before entering; similarly mildly amusing), especially as it was matted with mud and likely to spew out some form of bodily fluid onto me.

There is a striking incongruity to farming, in the inexplicable mixture of intimacy and distance, life and death. At milking, the farmer's love and respect for his cows is obvious. Malcolm knows each one individually: its history, character, ailments. He talks about them fondly: "she's a sweet old soul". Yet, simultaneously, there's a roughness as he shouts her out the door, gives her a whack on the rump. And he won't hesitate to send her away when her time comes. She's an economic thing; the farm is a business.

What is going on here? Is it, at the end of the day, really, fundamentally, (just?) about the money?

The energy put into looking after the sheep during lambing time is as if Malcolm and Ruth are raising their own children again; Ruth is often up helping and safe-guarding ewes until beyond 2 am (last night it was 4 am before she went to bed, despite having to get up the next morning to make breakfast for her B&B guests); Malcolm shares the burden with an early 5 am start for milking. My God it's a tough life.

Why do they do it? What is going on?

There's a lot of love involved. But also a matter-of-factness. It's so strange! I don't understand. Endangered lambs are brought into the farmhouse to warm up infront of the Aga and we coo over them, "poor wee soul". And then it dies and we don't really care. Another is brought in as we're eating our cooked breakfast (including a tasty slice of haggis, made from odd bits of lamb and oatmeal etc). We look up, for a moment, then carry on eating.

I've left Scotland and British summer time has begun.

Crossing into England was a shock. I took a two hour bus journey from Galashiels to Carlisle, through pretty border towns with individual shops and services along a main high street. After we passed a 'Welcome to England' sign I immediately felt a change. The people on the bus seemed a little harder somehow, a little closer to me. The landscape seemed flatter and slightly less colourful, the bus window no longer filled with huge patches of evergreen stretching upwards.

The clocks going forward marks the change from Scotland to England, and makes the time I've spent in S very definitely in the past.

Things in my head (memories of Coldbrook):

Fleece on in bed, straw in sleeves. Smelling of milk / Wrists itching.

A family meeting with farm consultant: people constantly in and out of room; and tea

Rowena on our night out, jumping around like a Coldbrook calf

How whole calves are when they come out

Whether I've under-estimated differences between us: art & farming; me & them

Incubator lambs under a light in a yellow tub in the calf shed

Milk which for three years after conversion to organic farming was thrown in with non-organic

The consequences (tragedy) of my mistakes: feeding calves too much milk and them being ill, potentially terminally. What that means (econom & welf). Also accidently cutting down raspberry plants in garden which were due to flower that year (shit)

Q of quality of life: Sam and Doug working here, long hours, living in caravans and earning a fraction of many of my friends / contemporaries in London as bankers etc; and yet, the air! the space! the home, not travelling. What things are worth and what I want. The fucking hardness of life, whatever.

Arrived at Alnmouth last night, picked up by next host Harry Williams found through FACE (Farming & Countryside Education). Feel project has changed in many ways including by season, country and purpose (now under Arts Council funding).

Also into something less easy to classify; just been to 'farm cultural diversification and entrepreneurship conference'. Now I know it's not just me, randomly. There's a purpose and potential meaning and value behind it all. I'm not sure what, but I know that I'm part of something.

Good time with Harry today; joined him in tractor. He talked whilst doing something (seeds, into land; drilling corn?). We rode across, on top of the soil. I remembered being a child when my Dad took me on a work open day, and I got to ride in the top of a big company lorry, and felt like a King. Harry tells me about the land: why one bit was sunken; how another bit always floods; something to do with smugglers. It is transformed from an abstract space to a known place. And as we ride over it, drilling corn, we become a part of it too.

Then a mad cow hunt. Got to be in tractor on road (hip hip hooray!) rather than car following. Mad cow hunt = two escaped wild cows and us trying to get them back. Long story, not quite sure I fully understand. Following process instead: we are using 'nice' cows to get 'nasty' cows back. Took silage down to nearby field of escaped beasts for enticing. All very convoluted, involving changes of trailors and tractors, cages. Most of afternoon just to do one job. Harry aptly described the process as being akin to that of the song, There's a hole in my bucket...

Loving it:


Carpet / Fashion


Red / Blow


Shiny / Piles

Continually amazed by the beauty on the farm. A couple of images:

in one of the cowsheds this morning, about 8:30, the steam rising, white against the thick brown, dark wet shit-carpet: from fresh manure, fermenting silage, the cows' breath and our own

silage bales, wrapped up like blown-up sweets, the evening light playing colourful havoc on the surface of the black plastic: soft purple-grey stain of dried mud at the base; stretches of glistening, fecund aubergine purple skin; light blue streaks; at the centre a golden spot, a pool of yellow, caught light; and the glitter of expensive orange

I get carried away

The evenings are infinitely longer than they were a week ago; no doubt one of the reasons for my excitement. I was outside drawing well after 7 pm. But, oh, how brilliant! I haven't enjoyed drawing so much since my first year at the Ruskin, the art school I went to. Strange, really. I grew up drawing (holidays, school, boredom) and then going to art school sort of killed it for me. I slowed down in my second year and gave up almost entirely in my third. It became too hard. But here, one evening, I found myself sitting on a pile of bales, alone and happy, and felt able. Nervous, but I was alone and it didn't matter. To no-one except myself. I began, and enjoyed it. I'm so happy.

Harry took me to see a sheep farm as they were lambing. He talked about the farm in almost hushed tones, and I thought if the way they parked their cars and tractors was anything to go by (neatly, orderly, side-by-side), they knew what they were doing. The barn inside was yellow and golden, cathedral-like, the space organised into pens containing the sheep. People around, were calm and in control.

The photographs above show a system of visual signs telling the farmer, for example, that a ewe needed special attention (pink rag); a tin can highlights a ewe due to have triplets. Paint identifies how many lambs were due. Out of 800, 3 incorrect was deemed inaccurate (an outside job).

While I was there, someone noticed something, and a sheep was swiftly swiped and a lamb procured. It came out, like a sausage.

Amazing really, in the middle of that golden space. That mess, event.

Afterwards, we went back to cups of tea.

Getting the website online has been like getting the mad cows back (mending a hole in a bucket). It would be boring to explain how / why. And I would apologise, but it seems fairly pointless, seeing as you seeing this means that it's up.

One of the reasons I started this project, was that I saw a connection between art and farming.

They seem different: farming stereotyped as very 'hands-on', physical and matter-of-fact; artists thought of as contemplative and sensitive, their work abstracted from the fundamental necessities of life such as food production. This is true, and the outcomes, uses of their time and energy are vastly different. But it is certainly no longer fair to think of artists as fussy and etheral (welding farm machinery yesterday smacked of 'macho' American sculptor David Smith), nor of farmers as exclusively physical. Much of what they do is both scientific , and I believe, creative. There's a lot of problem-solving, and entrepreneurship, not unlike the work of an artist. In addition, farming and art are alike in the way that they both demand independence, strong self-motivation and bloody-mindedness. Farmers and artists know what it's like to be alone.

I love it. I love the feeling of satisfaction after a long day's work. It doesn't matter what time it is when I finally get in, or if I've been on my feet since the early hours. I love not having to get in a car to go to work. I love 'hours' not being relevant; that time isn't a measure of success. I love having first-hand experience of the seasons changing. I love that my life is in one place, that I do what I do where I am. It's straight-forward.

I think that above all, farming and art are alike in the way that they are all-encompassing activities, in that the line between work and life is a very thin one: artists can't switch off; farmers are on call 24/7. They don't make a lot of economic sense; a farmer works the hours of a city banker for a fraction of the pay; almost all artists depend on other invome to make possible their practice. They are both activities, farming and art, which although consuming and exhausting, are justified by the sense of satisfaction they bring after a good day's work. There's a profound connection with the environment (in the widest sense of the word), and you'd be hard pressed to find a farmer or artist who didn't think that what they were doing was a good thing. They believe in what they do.

I'm aware that it's easy for me to eulogise about farming, as a fleeting visitor in the excitement of spring's arrival (two days ago, our first calf; yesterday we were in t-shirts; today I cycled into Alnwick in a vest-top). I know that it's probably the day-in, day-out nature of farming that makes it tough and exhausting. Nevertheless, as a way of thinking about your role in the world, as I've said, I love it.

a poem including the line "...Is your life more real because you dig and sow?"

Virgil

The Land by Vita Sackville West

Seamus Heaney

R.S.Thomas

etc

The Farm, Richard Benson

Rural Rides, William Cobbett

The Worm Forgives the Plough, John Stewart Collis

At Home in the Hills (sense of place in the scottish borders), John N. Gray

The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Walter Evans (photographs) and James Agee

The Claude Glass, Tom Bullough


also contemporary nature (and sometimes travel) writing:

Nature Cure by Richard Mabey

Kathleen Jamie, Robert MacFarlane, Roger Deakin

Constable

Goldsworthy ?

Wim Delvoye's Art Farm

Stubbs (Victorian hay-making scenes)

Damien Hirst's pickled cows / bulls ?

Pre-Raphaelite pastorals

William Holman Hunt

Henry Moore's Sheep Piece

Walter Evans

Dark Days, John Darwell

the website of Helen Thompstone

19th century livestock paintings

A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, Daniel Defoe

Journey to the Western Islands and A Tour to the Hebrides, Johnson & Boswell

Through England on a Side-saddle (English journeys), Celia Fiennes

Journey Through Britain, John Hillaby

Great British Bus Journeys (travels through unfamous places), David McKie

In Search of England (and Scotland and Wales) H.V.Morton

Wild Wales, George Borrow

The Journey Through Wales, Gerald of Wales

The Z-Z of Great Britain, Dixe Wills


and other travel books:

London Orbital and The Edge of the Orison (in the traces of John Clare's "Journey out of Essex"), Iain Sinclair

The Snow Geese, William Fiennes

About driving around with his father when he was younger, pointing things out about crap farmers; now there being no crap farmers left

about size, things getting bigger and bigger, fewer people managing ever-bigger farms

about cows getting "wilder" as they are handled less and less used to people

about foot and mouth, the loneliness

In the field of the 'mad' cows, creeping over the rough ground, looking for them through the foliage. Being quiet. careful, hushed by Harry. Not knowing if he's pulling my leg, being over-protective or whether there really is something wild and dangerous hidden from sight.

Lowering a metal pen on the back of a tractor down over a newly-born calf, to catch it, safely, away from a potentially nervous, aggressive mother

Moving machines, swopping over trailors and pens. Time. Safety making things complicated. Level of risk.

A joke with a man come to help: Harry's 'wild' cattle. Is this a criticism or a complement? Somehow a comment about H, his cows an extension of his person. How you make choices; your skill as a farmer; husbandry. Reputation.

About 8 years ago I had one of my seminal farming moments.

My uncle had recently begun to farm. One of his first projects was to rear two Highland cattle. I was captivated; they were positively gorgeous: orange and hairy, quite small and friendly. I loved the farm and the animals. As they increased in numbers I loved being roped into activities by my uncle.

The cows even had names, Hengis and Cowsa. My uncle's a funny man. After they were killed, Mum and Dad bought some of the meat, and we had it, one Sunday lunch. I knew what was going on, pre-teenage, an age not to be lied to.

It was served to me, and I sat there looking at it, for what seemed like a lifetime. I didn't know what to do, but I knew that it mattered. Not the eating or not eating, but the process by which I decided. How I felt.

I was curious, and put some on my fork. I thought about them, on the farm, and the fun we'd had (all of us). Then I ate it and it tasted amazing and I had no regrets.

Eating is a celebration of life and work and a reflection of who we are

36 of Harry's cattle are leaving the farm this week, on their way to the abattoir. As he explained how they are killed, and how the cattle become meat, I was reminded of the fascinating albeit challenging experiences I'd had drawing in the dissection rooms of the medicine department at Oxford. It had been illuminating and rewarding on many levels, and a profound privilege.

Now, I want to see, understand and deal with the killing part of the (commercial) farming process in the abattoir, that missing link between the farm and the supermarket. Harry's a perceptive and a generous man, and to cut a long story short, he has arranged for me to go with them...

Two calves born overnight. Discovered them just dropped into the straw; how do they come out so whole, with so much fur? Amazing. Quickly and painlessly castrated (elastic band) and tagged. Taken to the field. Sight after a long winter inside: both a beginning and an end.

The abattoir rang up yesterday to say that they were having an audit so I can't go. Not happy or sure I believe what they said. Pissed off. I'd already agreed not to take photographs / draw, I just wanted to see. What are they so scared of? Ridiculous. Paranoia, closed-ness; why? I understand, but considering the ignorance of the general public and the delight of the media in sensationalism, wouldn't they want a sensitive, thoughtful artist like me to come along and see. Maybe they didn't like this, my blog. But I wouldn't rip them off. I'd try not to. I think I've been sensitive to Harry and all the other people I've met and written about. I do my best to be honest and open and considerate. Relationships are most important. At what point do you break them, write something someone doesn't want written? In the face of something like this. I don't like being shut out. Especially as I feel I represent anyone who is interested or cares about the subject. It's selfish, ignorant and rude and that makes me cross. People want to know about these things, and deserve to know in ways that aren't the media or the farming industry ranting at them. Not everyone wants to criticise, judge, condemn; but if you act like you've got something to hide then people will.

My only agenda is interest and concern, and care. All I want is to be a bridge, create general love and interest all around between artist, farming industry and public. This would make me and everyone else less cross, and much more happy. Am I being naive?

Damn it's been a shit, a really shit week. Things I can't tell you. Maybe it's a good thing I'm not going.

Damn it.

We went to look at a bull today. Several in fact, although they all looked pretty similar to me. Eight or so South Devon bulls. Big necks, orange (ish), long bodies, strong hindquarters. Short tawny, carpety coats; they look like lions. They are, in fact, 'the largest mammal native to the British Isles'. Not an uninteresting fact.

These bulls were two years old and ready for action. South Devon bulls retail in from about two thousand pounds upwards. I think that for some (pedigree breeders), it's a bit like the snowdrop thing all over again (a collecting obsession), although you get a bit more for your money. Rob, the breeder, mentioned wanting to get one from a certain herd, to add to his collection. His father had given him half a dozen pedigree South Devon cows for his 21st. It's like boys, collecting stickers of football plays; Charles Saatchi, collecting young British artists; me, as a child, birthday by birthday, building up a playmobil empire.

I liked looking at them, for sure - they're incredible things - but what was even more interesting was watching Harry and his father look at them. They were seeing things I couldn't, differentiating between them: this one would be better than that one; another looked great walking, but wasn't so great standing still. Harry spent a long time walking around them, sizing them up, making notes, positively drooling over a couple of them. As we were walking out, Jesse, Harry's father, asked me which one liked. "That one!" I blurted out, "It's coat has a nice texture!" Honestly! Couldn't I have said it looked like a good bull?! Turns out I'd picked a good one though; Harry later made an offer for it which was accepted. I've never seen a person look so pleased about buying an animal; he was positively radiant. Admittedly, I've never seen anyone buy a bull before. He said it was retail therapy; a woman buys a dress, a farmer (or he might have said man) buys a bull. I nearly hit him.

Going to see bulls with Harry, and other trips we've made, has taken me to whole other parts of the country. I've been to Northumberland several times before, on holidays and for an art journey once, but I've not been inland. One of the great things about being involved in farming, especially on a temporary, travelling remit such as this (and wwoofing), is that you get to see places and parts of the country(side), that you wouldn't usually as a tourist. Understand and know it, don't just have to follow land marks, visit particular famous sites, castles and beaches and so on. Working in it, having a purpose, gives you a different perspective. It's a different way of occupying space. It feels different.

I went with Harry on a visit to a sheep farm inland, up towards Scotland: the Cheviot hills. His farm was at the end of a long and beautiful, almost desolate valley. He'd been encouraged to host visits on his farm because of rare wildlife in a hay meadow, but basically had no idea of how much else there was on his farm that would be interesting to others, children particularly. I felt such a mixture of emotion towards him: admiration and pity; sorrow and respect. About the place and his connection to it, the difficulty and the pleasure. About how far removed it was 'from the rest of the world' and about whether that mattered or not.



I went on a bit of an 'art pilgrimage' with Harry's son Peter and his friend Emily. We drove west for an hour, across the Northumberland moors and Cheviot hills, to Kielder, just south of the Scottish border. An expanse of forest and parkland surrounds a huge reservoir, and an art and architecture programme commissions permanent works. With its endless coniferous trees, Kielder has an other-worldly feel - almost Canadian - and feels like another country. I couldn't believe that I'd had no awareness of this kind of landscape in England. How could I not know...? How could I not imagine...?



We saw the James Turrell piece, Skyspace, a chamber built at the top of a hill with a circular viewing space in the roof. The light is projected onto the wall, and the circular hole 'frames' the sky, as a painting, or a screen. It's very, very simple, but quite beautiful, and exquisitely thought out, in location and design: just too high to climb up and vandalize; big enough to have an almost-sacred feel to it; small enough to be intimate and to comprehend, physically, in its entirety. What really struck me, was the way that its utterly simple shape echoes land monuments: burial chambers, but particularly the stone sheep rings which can be found on the Northumbrian moors. They are so beautiful: so simple but evocative of magic, monuments to farming activity, and reminders of the harsh weather (they are built to shelter the hill sheep in storms).



Driving back from that remote Cheviot hill farm (did you know that the word 'bereaved' comes from the 'reiving' of English and Scottish raiders, stealing sheep from across the border), we stopped to look at the landscape. I pointed to the extraordinary difference in colour between the different fields, areas: purple heather in the wild uplands; rougher yellow grassy areas; bright green lowland fields. "None of what you see is natural" said Harry, "It looks the way it does because of hundreds of years of work and investment in the land". Moving stones. Managing heather. The years.

Calving began a few days after I arrived, and now they're coming out thick and fast, pretty literally. Harry farms with as much of a 'hands-off' approach as possible, but still, it's remarkable to return to one of the cow sheds, and find a calf deposited there, warm, like an egg just laid in the middle of the straw. It feels as though you only need to turn your back for a minute for one to appear. The whole thing is bizarrely, comically, matter of fact: I see this sizeable, miraculous living thing on the floor and look at the cow with excitement and respect; she looks straight back at me nonchalently, as if to say, "Yeah, and...?"

I watched one being born from start to finish for the first time this morning. There was something white and slimy beginning to appear from the back of the cow, about the size of a tennis ball. At the time, Harry was still trying to draw out another cow and its calf, but this one was broody, making a claim for the first calf which wasn't hers (hormones, Harry said). But didn't she know that there was something coming out her backside, that she's giving birth herself?! Harry managed to take the first calf away, its mother following, and left this cow to it, me watching from the other side of the shed.

The calf is clearly on its way out, but she's still getting up and moving around, and then lying down again, postphoning the process as I watch. She does lie down eventually, and it comes out in a mere half a dozen heaves, spasms - of pain? - passing over her face during the contractions. There's no way it hurst as much as it does women, with her relative quietness. As she heaves, this thick black sausage-like thing is squeezed out, covered in a wet film of white. It's not cute; it's a wierd, alien thing from the darkness of the inside of a cow! Yeeeeeugh!

It's nearly all out, when she gets up again...! Over three quarters of the calf is hanging out of her backside, feet first, paused in a dive towards the ground. Does it have any bones?! It's so floppy and flexible. Is it still alive?! Then after what seems like a lifetime, it falls. Splat! Water bursts around it, and she immediately starts licking, pulling away, and sucking - eating! - the flaccid wet coat. And then, eventually, what I suppose is its body, rises, ever so slightly, in its first breath of air. Welcome to the world!

Relief.

The rising increases. The body begins making noises. She is making louder ones. She licks it, transforming it from this alien object into a fluffy, cutesy calf. I can't see its head at all, and long to see it stand up for the first time, but I am getting eaten alive by the one year old curious calves on the other side of the fence. They are becoming increasingly brave and paying increasingly less attention to the stick I periodically wave in their faces. And she, the cow, is looking increasingly unhappy about my presence, increasingly like she's going to charge at me. I wouldn't put it past her to come over the barrier. So I leave everyone to it.

An hour or so later, I am walking down the lane when Harry calls to me and points at a cow and her calf walking away from a gate into the middle of a fresh green field: "That cow there - its calf - you just watched it being born". The wet sausage-like alien lump splattered on the straw an hour ago is haphazardly following its mother into a lush green expanse, discovering its legs for the first time; and her, back outside after x months in.

Ahhhhhhhh

With sweets and scale, material and metaphor:

I've left Brownfield and arrived at Highthwaite Farm.

Felt sick leaving Brownfield, having had a really great time and a lot of companionship. I'd sat up talking to two of his children the night before, and it was sad to be leaving still in the process of getting to know them, making friends. I guess it's better that way than having overstayed my welcome, but it doesn't make moving on any easier.


Fig Roll

Shortly before leaving, I found myself sitting on the quad bike waiting for Harry. Earlier that morning I'd helped as usual, feeding the cattle. As I spliced open the black-wrapped silage bales with a pen knife, I knew just how the black plastic would spring away, revealing glistening yellow silage. Sitting there, on the bike, the heels of my boots resting on the platform, the elbows of my arms on my jeans, my feet apart, and my chin cupped in my hands, I realised how comfortable I was. Like I knew how to be there, in that place. I was happy, relaxed.

Highthwaite is in the thick of the Lake District, only a valley away from Coniston. It's odd; I've been to Coniston before on holiday (same story as Northumberland, the castles and beaches); but the landscape has a different feel to it now that I'm walking cattle up the fell. It's like I'm somewhere else entirely.

This part of the Lake District, extreme and mountainous, is beautiful and extraordinary, but I also find it frightening and violent. As we go up into the the hills I look down and notice the green fields in the valley. Flattened like billiard tables. The stone walls run across the rough terrain like seams of a jumper turned inside out, or a child's drawing. I find these things reassuring: signs of human activity and survival.


Seams



I drove away from Brownfield down the A1 towards Newcastle, the coast not far across somewhere on my left. I visualise all of England and the summer stretched out before me. I turn off right towards Penrith, crossing the top of the country, its back coarse and bumpy like a lamb's. From Penrith I took the 'scenic route' reassuring my ten-year old Renault Clio (newly acquired companion) up and down the massive hills in 2nd gear. Bless it. When I reached Grassmore, thinking I'd already been driving along a minor, hairy road, warning signs alerted me that I was in for a ride along the Wrynose Pass. It felt like it went on for ever. I couldn't believe that it actually led somewhere and was surprised, at each stage, by the signposts appearing where they were supposed to. Eventually, I arrived at Highthwaite, at the end of its very own road.

Arriving is hard work. It's especially galling when there's no mobile phone signal (Eigg again, aghhh!). I'm not a complete townie (?) but I do like to feel connected to the outside (whose outside?!) world. The little bothy I'm staying in is cute, but I'm nervous about not being able to get a daily news fix with no nearby shop, TV or broadband. Having my car now though is reassuring :-) And last night I discovered a pay 'phone on the road across the river. I enjoyed hearing my coins rattle down, a retro sound ;-)

Yes, that first evening of arrival is hard, and it doesn't seem to get any easier, but I'm also beginning to enjoy it, in a way. The challenge; as I find myself confronted with my own self. I'm utterly alone; can I cope? It's exciting. And the first simple steps - using an outdoor toilet, taking a cold shower, sharing a first laugh with a stranger - when you realise that you can, are glorious.

... is a National Trust hill farm in the thick of the Lake District. It's an SSI (Site of Scientific Interest) and conservation issues are key: traditional building materials are used to convert an old farm building into a camping barn, and it's a labourious and expensive process, the chipping away of the old cement to be replaced with lime.

Differences in farming are enormous and represent more than changes in landscape (soil, climate), but of ideas, and attitudes (although these to some degree find themselves in matching landscapes). Highthwaite is a world away from Brownfield; not only is it the other side of the country and predominantly about rearing sheep rather than cattle, but the decision-making process is governed by a differing set of principles; aesthetics and social and historical values are accommodated alongside the commercial output of farming, and the farm is a reflection of these concerns.

Rain. All bloody day.

But it's a relief.

I can count the number of days it's rained since January. There haven't been many: perhaps two at Ullapool, one on Eigg, two when I was in Fife, a spattering of snow at Coldbrook and none in my three weeks at Brownfield. It hasn't rained for 30 days.

So it's with mixed feelings that I've been working outside in the rain today. The land desperately needed it, but it got me wet too. F'ing soaked actually.

Bleugh!

More rain. After a month of none, it's been almost continuous. Not so bad today; yesterday was wet, wet, wet. Today's light mist and drizzle like sunshine in contrast.

How am I doing?

Well, first of all, what:

I've been working with Sam and the (I'm guessing) 75+ yr old Frank (neither of whom seem to bat an eyelid at the rain). I've been helping to feed animals, patch up a bit of stone wall, clean the sheep pen and run 111 gimmer hogs (one yr old females) through the pen to trim their feet (cut nails) and shear around their arses (poooooo-ey).

That was Sunday. I coped alright to start off with and then, as I became increasingly more sodden and less enthusiastic about learning / helping and frustrated about what I could do, I came to feel depressed and tired. Standing around in the rain watching other people do things is not good for you. Especially when your waterproof is not... waterproof. So at about 3 / 4 o'clock I left them to it, the sheep's bums, and went inside to get dry and clean (and failed to get rid of the smell of sheep). I admit it: I thought I was tough (I do try), but there's no denying it, I'm not a farmer.

I've learnt a few things though, in the rain; and it's been fun at times. I particularly like brushing down the pen (a job for every kind of weather), sweeping along the ridges of the cement, using the rain and the slight gradient down towards the field at the pen's edge to clear out the muck, the hair and the shit. Satisfying and wierdly addictive, getting out the hose to peel away the mud at the bases of wooden posts. Using my arms, feeling the connection between my body and the work.

Another point of interest is the way that everything reminds me of sheep: from the smell on my hands to my woolen cardigan; I think about them when clipping my nails; even my own breasts and vagina... (I am horrified)

Dosing for worms; sorting between "in lamb" and "geld" ewes; weeding out boy "wethers" and sheep from other farms

Marking it all; painting

Everything has a sign and a meaning, each farm a different mark to identify its sheep

I ask Sam what was the meaning of half the hogs (one year olds) having yellow forehead spots, and half green. Sam and Tony, another help, laughed. "It means we ran out of yellow" said Tony.

Iodine on my hands (disinfecting lambs' navels), a farmer's equivalent to paint, I drive to Grizedale to check out Lawson Park Farm near Coniston.

Lawson Park Farm: owned and run by Grizedale Arts; buildings and land undergoing renovation to be experimentally farmed by artists. Behind Brantwood, John Ruskin's Lake District home (writer hunters' tourist stop...), it used to be owned and played with by the artist and social reformer.

An odd experience; I holidayed nearby with my parents the year before I started at the Ruskin (School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford). We visited Brantwood, I proud and excited to be heading off to the art school still using his name. Now it's the year after I've left, and I'm back on his trail again. Strangely, I know little more about the man than I did after that first visit; but I've been thinking about him recently in his ideas about drawing, discovery and understanding, and the 'real world'.

Lots of questions about LPF: what is the produce for; how can GA relate its activities with those of the surrounding Lake District farming community, and justify the ACE money which is being spent on it (Japenese farmers currently over in an exchange project with Grizedale-resident artists)? It doesn't seem fair

A comment from Becky, project manager, that LPF and GA's work there may be more of a continuation of Ruskin's ideas, than many heritage schemes about his life and home.

To bed. Just had supper after a night-time whip round: three ewes recently lambed, and a fox barking nearby in the wood. Scooted round in the quad bike, picking them up to bring them in. Sheep look unearthly under headlights and head torches, eyes glinting back in the dark. New-found respect for the animals as we leave them to deal with the night.

A long day. All of it. Up at 5, just about light enough to see everything; bed now, after supper, after dark, after last possible sheep inspection.

Lambed first ewe today. Pulled it out, slime and all. All that - blood and bums - becoming routine. Becoming comfortable wandering around the fields with a shepherd's staff.

Sneaky break this afternoon to visit GA project in Coniston - Japenese farmers cooking Lake District produce (braken, dandelion in tempura anyone?) with Grizedale artists. Another world. Mine? Not sure.

Getting sheep off Highthwaite Crag. The last upland area to be scoured for its ewes: pulling them off the high rocky land from the furthest corner; bringing them down to the flat green fields around the farmhouse where we can watch them and help them lamb.

Sam and the dogs; Frank, Tony and I. Tactics beforehand: Sam, Tony and the dogs to go one way; Frank and I the other, "to shout like hell" as we go through the wood. All together, to push the ewes up over the crag and catch them "in a pincer movement" on the other side.

We run over the rough ground, stones; scramble; shouting 'oi! oi! oi!' and 'ho! ho! ho!'; bang sticks against the trees.

Hot in the sun. Teamwork; listening for the others, thinking of where they might be. I'm "in the saddle" waiting, watching for the sheep to come over the crag. They don't come. I lie down, the sky is blue. Maybe I'll get a tan.

Flailing arms and shouting like a mad thing

Sam yelling at the dogs; the dogs flying past the sheep, swerving amazing tight corners

Exuberance at getting the sheep to run through the right gate; despair as they jump over a wall

Knackering. Fun. Do they have sheep-gathering competitions as well as stone-walling, sheep-shearing and sheep dog trials? Joy: finding I can do it, run a sheep a certain way, outwit it, pre-empt (sometimes). Liking sheep; respecting them. Nutty things, stupid sometimes, but pretty bloody brilliant too, living out there, jumping up a wall three times (and more) their own height.

Walkers. Climbers as we come down. Completely different ways of occupying space, acting in a place, being a person and a body.

In the pen dealing with the sheep, getting on with it. Being watched. Highthw like Piccadilly Circus, a hot bank holiday week-end after a lot of rain. I'm happy, familiar with the sheep. I like catching them; I'm comfortable holding them. Used to the smell, enjoy being comfortable with it, and the blood and the muck. But being watched. We're not a bloody tourist attraction (harsh! I'm so proud to be on this side of the wall, not a voyeur).

Now:

Tired. Sunburned. Happy. Bed.

To Sheffield for Hillbury City Farm. Odd to be writing to the sound of traffic, to have made sure that my car is locked and unloaded of valuables.

Staying with friends near the city centre. Commuting to the farm tomorrow.


Sheffield

Getting here, I felt suddenly that there are a lot of people in the world, the bit I'm in. All those northern towns: Leeds; Huddersfield; Pontefract; Bradford; Sheffield. All those roads. All those cars. Strange and frightening. I think of Tony, who thinks that Highthwaite is a busy place, and whose ideal is a farm in Scotland, off a track, a long way away from a conventional road. I wonder how he gets on when he travels between farms and to a mother in the south. How does he feel about the road?

Houses! surround the farm; and a view of the city

People! working here, so many; school-teachers and office-people and finally "Todd the farmer" and "Sally his assistant".

Is it a farm? Is it a game?

Set up by a Sheffield entrepreneur Harold George, who in the Second World War had been a city evacuee to a farm. Must have had a good time, George; Hillbury is a giving-back to the children of the city, enabling those who wouldn't normally "have the opportunity" to experience farming first-hand. School and community groups are taught educational lessons on the farm, and encouraged to participate where possible in farm-work, for example mucking out and feeding animals. So the point is that yes, Hillbury is a "real" working farm.

And yet. It shouldn't be where it is, surely? We feel as though we're in the middle of a city (I do). It barely covers its costs. Hillbury staff point this out in educational sessions, as though it makes the farm less real.

I travel to work. The day is a different shape and size. Evenings. Home and work. And travel, that gap inbetween H&W which also occupies time and space.

A thought: just as organic farming can in some ways be thought of as a kind of modern retake upon traditional farming processes, Hillbury, with its very up-to-date teaching methods (in its unique way, a kind of very contemporary diversification?) has a wierdly retro feel. There's a mixture of livestock and cropping, all in close proximity. We could be on an English Mixed Farm, Ladybird-style.

Crisp shirts, after work drinks, gay men, I hide underneath cap: I've washed the smell of pigshit off everything but my hair. Sitting nearby, working businessman, nonetheless the occassional rogue whif.

I finally made it - to an abattoir, a slaughterhouse in Nottinghamshire.

I am going to write about it.

So. We met at Hillbury to collect 2 pigs and 3 lambs, a year old, at 5:30 am. It seemed like a very small amount to drive quite a long way. And back, eventually, via a butcher's somewhere else. They were destined for the farm shop at Hillbury, so Sally was taking them to an abattoir "she trusts" to give her back the "right" animals. Irony, the food miles on the heads of the animals reared and sold on the farm (the farm-abattoir-butchers-farm distance). But I'm not getting into food politics. Only to say (you just can't not), all the small abattoirs have closed down. And that "local" meat seems in the light of this a bit of a fantasy. There's no turning back (...?).

When Sally started, she used to dread Fridays. Abattoir day, she dreaded reversing the trailor in front of all the men. Now she's a 'regular', seeing the same people each week (and one who has taught her how to reverse), I think she almost enjoys it. Today there are two of us, young females (she says she's never seen another).

Arriving I found pretty wierd (it's your imagination which freaks you out the most). The town we visited, of abattoir fame, is quite high on the "crap towns" list. Gun crime of Nott without the culture, if I'm being snotty (I am). On the roads between Hillbury and the ab, cars everywhere (even at 6:30 in the morning). Still recovering from the Lake District, it felt like practically London. Then, as we began obviously turning off, onto more minor roads, past a disused colliery, a dusty road and a boarded-up shop-front, towards what could only be the abattoir, I began to feel sick. "Oh God, what am I doing?!" and "What if I can't cope with this?!" came to mind.

I pulled myself together. We drove in. You can't see very much from the outside, but it's kind of this - the not knowing - that freaked me out. Skips and machinery I didn't know the use of were terrifying. And the men. All these men, wandering around at 7 am in the morning, spotlessly clean (it was 7 am, but still, why are they so clean?), wearing wierd clothes (plastic deep red aprons; white cotton jump-suit overalls over bare arms; orange ear muffs; clean yellow wellies) which make you ask what noises and sights and materials are they protecting themselves from. You wonder what they do and how.

We dropped the animals off, handed over the paperwork. They walked in. A man ticked 'no' in the 'Were the animals showing any sign of distress?' box. "Bye!" That was odd. Did I feel guilty? No, I don't think so. Or maybe just a tiny bit. But then again, they weren't my pigs.

Looking back, it is difficult to distinguish between the things that were, and how it was painted by my nervous, feverish imagination. Was it very quiet and eerie (I think it was) or were people actually quite cheerful (Sally said to a punter, "You seem happy today"), and if so, did that make the whole thing even more eerie (yes!)? When we were hosing the trailer down (compliance with movement regulations), beside us a more "farmer-like" farmer, was doing the same. No communication. Is this normal? because it is 7 am in the morning? Or - am I imagining? - we are under a guilty depression, having taken the animals we have reared to their deaths? Another, younger man pulled up and said hello cheerily. I wondered, 'Is this normal? because it is 7 am in the morning? Or - am I imagining? - to compensate for the heaviness of the task in hand.

For some reason, the inquisitive part of me found a way to watch the killing. This is not a gratuitous blog or an apologetic one so all I need say is that it was surprisingly quick, efficient and silent. Also mesmerising, I couldn't take my eyes off. So much to deal with, the visual and the transformation alive to dead. Amazing, extraordinary, beyond what I feel.

I came away with a rush of adrenaline: I'd seen it and coped (perhaps)! It was fascinating. It was okay, I thought. I was both shocked and reassured. Impressed too, by both the simplicity, and the meticulous design and organisation of the operation. Felt privileged, too. And incredulous; how could I have been a meat-eater all my life, but never before seen or had much idea?

I'm glad to have pieced together another part of this chain of events.

Hillbury. City Farm. Todd away. Sunday afternoon. Farming as entertainment methinks is not a good thing. Except, for the first time, I'm of some use. I caught her, eventually, in a spectacular dive (method: grab wool, hold on, even when on ground) that made me wonder why I gave up team sport.

Weighing up stones; fitting them together; using logic; understanding a shape: sculpture. A farmer has a lot of skills; if he's a good dry stone-waller, aesthetic sensibility is one.

Deeply stressful and also quite depressing. On the website beforehand: "if possible, please try to avoid visiting during the May bank holidays." I organised myself to arrive as it opened at 10 am.

I enjoyed the early works, the solo forages, experiments on Morecombe Bay of G's student years. I imagine early morning rises, wonderfully lonely expeditions with nothing to prove, only a massive sky and expanse of sand and sea to face. I liked the Bruce Nauman / Bas Jan Ader (60's American performance artists) futile gestures: spitting; catching rainbows and actions on camera. And the titles, simple and poetic: "Working with stones. At a place struck by waves"; "How to make a black hole".

Goldsworthy as a teenager spent time living / working on a farm near Leeds.

I disliked the work in the Longside Gallery, the sheep ring pieces: a white circle in the place of a sheep lick laid over the canvas, the sheep's feet having muddied the canvas around it (now that I'm editing this blog this dislike seems pure jealousy). Does G know there's another pattern sheep leave on the ground, around a mineral lick: not only the yellowed hole where it used to sit, but a subtle stain, bleached circle in the grass about a metre outside the inner ring; sheep piss.

Clipboards; education-giving tour-guide priests; signposts; information; worshippers at the Holy Grail of Goldsworthy, the central altar of the leaf stalk room. "May I take a photograph?" Automated reply of the intercessor: "Thank you for asking but there is no photography allowed. You may sketch."

Do not touch the clay, the wall of YSP earth. I wanted.



A group sprawled over a large Henry Moore bronze in the park outside, taking photographs of themselves. I am amazed (bodily familiarity, confidence, cheek) and am going to be snotty until I remember doing exactly the same thing four or five years ago with school friends on an A Level Art trip; and consider how sculptural and natural a form of engagement with a work of art it is.

Another James Turrell Skyspace, in an old deer shelter. I sit in contemplation and peace until a family come in, sit down, look around, huff, chatter away. I wonder what they are doing and want them to piss off. I am in a really bad mood; what is wrong with me? (looking back, I think, loneliness).

Thinking of Harry from Brownfield in Northumberland, who supplies W with AA. Wondering...

Walking around in a daze, picking up the food and looking at it, obsessively reading the labels, thinking about where it had come from.

Spending quite a lot of money, and not minding. Later, enjoying eating, imagining.

I feel like the actor, who once they've secured the job, must look for the next. I am excited, but also tired. Things have been pretty manic, finishing stuff off at Hillbury and starting at Caleford in Shropshire. Also thinking about exhibitions in the autumn, and money. It's hard, tiring and lonely. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the connections taking place in my brain as it deals with the future. It's frightening at times; being and working on my own so much, there's always the danger of turning inwards until it becomes too hard to talk to other people, that you give up trying or even thinking about them. And then, hiding from loneliness, I become obsessed with myself and my work. Anxiety keeps me company.

I'm planning an exhibition in Wales in September, the culmination of this journey. To co-incide with my aunt and uncle's Apple Day, Powys Arts Month, and the beginning of the DEFRA 'Year of Food and Farming'. Please come.

Pig in the City (1, 2 and 3)

Full of **** (Shaun the Sheep)

Rodney

I left Sheffield on Saturday, having ticked off the following objectives:

- visiting a cattle market (at Bakewell, Derbyshire: another world)



- giving a solo farm tour / talk to three disabled children and their carers (eye-opening)



- finishing a pig-board display I'd been making (satisfying)

- making the series of photographs above, Animal Farm (satisfying)

- appearing in the local press (embarrassing and rather thrilling)

amongst other things (seeing film This is England and continuing to help on the farm)

That Saturday evening, I arrived at a university friend's house in Huddersfield, for a birthday party, the first social reunion I'd been to since leaving. They were college (Oxford) people rather than art school, and it was a little overwhelming, to say the least. So much to talk about, me; and oh, the luxury of time, attitude and lifestyle! Amongst conversations of skiing holidays and world-wide travel ("doing" or "saving" Australia, Asia, America) I kept thinking of Tony, who has never been abroad, left the island. As we stayed up to the early hours, talking, drinking, sitting (doing what?) I felt strange pangs of homesickness for the countryside, despite the fact that I was in it. I fall asleep early. In the morning, I took myself off for a long walk whilst everyone else lay slumbering amongst left-over food, empty bottles and bags and clothes. I felt free, I felt alive, in the cold air and emerging sun. Grass was thick and green (when did that happen?), populated with dandelions and cowparsley. Cows chewing the cud, contented with being. People in houses stirring, I imagine. Making pots of tea and taking newspapers back to bed. Returning to the party, to bleary-eyed risers, I remembered Tony one morning in the Lake District, about 8 am as I emerged from my bothy, saying to me, without a hint of sarcasm or mockery, "It was a nice morning."

I enjoyed seeing my friends, but it was a relief to get back in my car and continue my journey.

I arrive in Shropshire to stay with some family friends a short (driving) distance from Caleford Farm. The commute is annoying and will change things, but it is lovely to be with people I know and who know me and who kiss me and give me a hug goodnight.

Caleford, part of an agricultural college. I am invited by Holly, an educational officer: sweet, Wrexham accent, working joviality with canteen staff. Simon, farm manager, is much more to the point: "So what do you want from this?"; "Have you got any clothes to wear?"; "Do you know anything about farming?" I feel as though I am being grilled by the headmaster, but I like him still. Pat, the farm secretary, constantly burrows about in the office: a field mouse shuffling forms between me, herself, Simon, and anyone else who dares enter. The only time she stops is when I bring up Foot and Mouth, which hit the college in 2001. She stops and sits, and talks seriously to me for a few moments, before continuing with her activities, putting a folder or two of information and press clippings in front of my nose.

Foot and Mouth was detected at Caleford on Good Friday. All the animals were slaughtered by Saturday, but the bodies lay there for three days, without resurrection. Phil, the herdsman, describes the events, in a press clipping which shows him meeting Prince Charles a year later, as "one of the worst experiences of my life". Random anecdotes give away its pain, significance and trauma: Phil going to Tesco's at midnight to get groceries (F&M the time when Tesco's home deliveries took off, apparently); Pat not going to the toilet all day because the people brought in to do the work ("off the dole from Telford") were so messy.

I spent yesterday morning in the farm office "because, as I'm sure you know, that side of farming, is increasingly time consuming". Then (as a reward?) Simon took me on a tour of the farm, showing me, amongst other things, their incredible anaerobic digester, which distills the manure produced by the cows in the dairy, producing methane for electricity, liquid slurry as farm fertilizer and remaining solids as garden fertilizer. Cool! In the afternoon I hung around with Phil. Another remarkable man; like Pat and to some extent Simon, he buzzes around with apparent ceaseless energy. He must be well into his 60s (working during the '66 F&M outbreak, remembers a farmer making a Ministry vet strip to his underwear before allowing him on the farm), but like Frank at Highthwaite he is incredibly agile and fit, moving the whole time whilst talking to me. We climbed up to the top of the anaerobic digester, installed in 1994 "ten years ahead of its time" and look into the massive container, a "glamourised apple press". Then we fetch the 200-odd cows in for milking. When Simon comes in, mid-milk, me getting involved and learning, he asks me if I've done it before and I am satisfied, to have proved myself ever-so slightly able.

The Shropshire countryside is again different, a difference which has a significant debt to the progression of time as well as distance: in the thick long green grass reading to be cut for silage; in the calves discovering how to run, turned out into the fields for the first time. I visit Shropshire in May.

It feels like "proper farming" countryside. On my drive to Caleford, I pass numerous sizeable farms which as far as appearance goes, might be doing okay. The Farmer's Guardian is well-stocked in the newsagents; there's an NFU Mutal office in a village I drive through; everyone I meet seems to have good general farming chat.

Simon, I would say, is a farmer, straight up, straight down. Apart from the fact that the farm is part of an agricultural college, I wouldn't imagine that diversification crosses his mind a great deal. I'm not sure he knows quite what to do with me, and certainly doesn't see me as being helpful in any way, a girl, and an "artist".

At the Ruskin, we girls worked hard. A couple of my friends, girls, became expert at stereotypically ' male' skills such as welding. They proved themselves and were often better than the men. So now, something in me rises when I'm disqualified or undermined from success or participation as a consequence of my gender. I've seen it on farms, a couple of them with keen girls (daughters) wanting to help more, learn to drive and use the tractors &c. By default they find themselves feeding calves, doing the admin and working on diversification enterprises. Apparently there's "no time" to teach them, but I can't help feeling that there's a little more to it than that; there was evidently time to teach the sons.

I have been knee-deep, up to my elbows, treading water in, up to my chin, struggling to breathe, drowning, in letter-writing and funding-finding activities for a lot of this week. Yee-uch. Give me cowpoo any day.

Speaking of which, the one good, fun, interesting, educational, productive (see, I am a worthy cause) thing I did do this week (actually, there was more than one, don't worry, all ye potential funders) did involve cowpoo. It's a very interesting thing, and not to be maligned.

Possibly the most interesting thing about Caleford is their 'anaerobic digester' which takes the methane from the cowpoo and turns it into electricity, yee-ha! Now we all know that cows are responsible for global warming. All that methane! Did you know that if a cow gets stuck on her back she very quickly blows up with gas and dies. In a matter of hours, potentially, so I've heard. Well, at Walford, they use the gas as well as the solid and the liquid. It's rather a nice conceit: the waste is neatly divided into gas, solid and liquid and all of it is used. Not waste; product; both Output and Imput. The soilds (smelling a lot less than you'd thing) get sold to garden centres by the truckload (they're queuing up, apparently), and the liquid (al that liquid, ooh) is sprayed onto the fields as fertiliser.

One of the things I like about farms is the scale of pure matter, and the way in which it is (re)cycled (a)round. Grass becomes milk (cash) and flesh (cash) and poo. Poo becomes grass, kind of. Material changes. Lots of it; grass is piled up, piled up, and a year later it is a useful thing: silage. It was the ground; now it is a thing. There is lots and lots of stuff on a farm. Truckloads of this green stuff, which close-up, in an artist's hands, was grass, is now something else. It is dumped in heaps in a massive concrete space. A digger, with a little man in it, rides over it, pushes it across, and down. It is no longer grass.

When I was at Hillbury we played a little game with some of the kids. They had a card with adhesive on it, and had to find as many 'colours' as possible from the farm, and stick them on it.

At the small-holders' agricultural show in Wales at the weekend, in the farmers' market there was some farm ice-cream, marketed as COW POTS

The artist Piero Manzoni tinned his own excrement and titled, and sold it, as MERDA D'ARTISTE

Household paints are often named after natural materials. Are the following words colours, names, or things? PEACH, OLIVE, SUNFLOWER, BUTTERCUP, HONEY, SAND, FEATHER...?





This week, I went around Caleford collecting in empty tester paint pots, colours, or materials, or names...

Oh, and to come back, in a cycle, one of the things I collected was cowpoo. It's a great colour. It has a great texture too (or is ?) Not thinking of it as excrement, but as colour, I found myself picking it up - with my fingers - slopping it into the pot. It had the same kind of illicit feeling as putting your hands in a pot of paint (unsurprising parrallel?), only with the added bonus of "Am I really doing this?" and "Yes, I am" and "Am I completely mental?" and "Perhaps" running through my head.

PS on the gas: I think the anaerobic digester must be pretty efficient; I had my cowpoo all bottled up and when I returned to photograph it 36 hours later, it had exploded everywhere.

Fresh Cowshit


Fresh Milk to Fresh Cowshit

This past weekend I went to Penlanole, an organic small-holding in the heart of Wales, where I'll be having my exhibition in September. Penlanole is home to an outdoor 'Living Willow Theatre' and theatre company Shakespeare Link. I was serving tea and flipping Pen burgers before and during the interval of a community production of 'The Merchant of Venice', Shakespeare play. It struck me as a rather inverted form of diversification, theatre (Art), as it used farm resources for a non-commercial activity. However I think there are other currencies, at play, in the way that it serves as a hub for a deeply rural area with great population dispersal. And everything else, all the other things which good art does for audiences, participants...

Is it a co-incidence that Shakespeare Link and the farm are located in the same place, or are they inseperable? The farm has been in Sue's family since her parents bought it forty years ago; Sue and Phil met through their work, in careers in theatre and didn't move to Penlanole until Sue's mother became frail in the 90's, when Phil took the land in hand again (it was being farmed by neighbours) and learned to farm, himself, pretty much from scratch. In a report I read recently, 'New Rural Arts Strategy' Tim Land said the arts and agriculture below together.

It was at Penlanole that the idea for this journey / project originated, where I first began to think about farming creatively, and where it is a symbol for me of creative life, in a place. As the above report pointed out, "agriculture is also a unique form of human cultural and artistic practice and knowledge, with its own aesthetic, cultural diversity, and creative programmes" and "managing sustainable agriculture and rural change is also fundamentally a cultural task and responsibility". Some points for discussion, elsewhere.

The Shakespeare Link production of M of V was I felt community art at its best, involving a cross-section of Powys society (ages est 11 - 65) and including actors with a range of experience, from nothing to those who had had professional experience. I like, best of all, great art and it doesn't matter who produces it, but it is warming to see art which is good as well as good. It was good: well-done, edited and pitched; both light-hearted and at times topical and provocative. And it was also good, moving in the way in which it involved so many (not just the actors), and additionally brought together an audience which might not otherwise participate in the arts in Powys. On the BBQ I overheard two other volunteers, relatives of actors, say how much they were enjoying it (from the sidelines). Here's the thing: they didn't get on with Shakespeare at school, could never go to a "big theatre in Stratford" but this was okay, they "could do this". So yes, good and good (why should they be exclusive; perhaps great art is both... DISCUSS). Furthermore, by being on a farm (Saturday's performance outdoors in the willow round; Sunday's in the 'wet cover' of the hay barn), did it not add something? When Lorenzo points out the bright moon to Jessica, we agree in the beauty of a Penlanole star-spangled night, that it is a magical moment.

Back home in Leics. Next week I visit Frisby Hall, where they make Stilton and rear Longhorn beef cattle. Longhorn is a traditional local breed, and the Stilton production is additionally interesting as a form of diversification in that it is the only British "protected name" cheese. By law "Stilton" can only be made in Leics, Notts and Derbysh. There are just six licenced dairies, and to be Stilton, the cheese must also be made using local milk (amongst other requirements). Locality, localness.

It's odd to be home. I'm usually conscious of the route, the zigzag I'm drawing. I've been aware of driving south, or east, or west, across to one side of the island or to the other, outwards towards the sea. Now I'm back in the middle of it, home, I know where I am, but not in relation to anywhere else; I'm nowhere; I'm home. What is Leicestershire, I've never felt part of it.

Was this journey a way of escaping that feeling, the banality of middle England and my disconnection to the land?

I live in a village which used to be highly agricultural (didn't they all - ?). Zoom out: an agricultural area, still; fields although fewer farms. Zoom out: in the middle of three major cities, Leicester, Nottingham and Derby; commuter heaven. Zoom out: London, not so far, at the end of a 1hr 40min train journey (regular); makes us almost metropolitan, we have access to these things. Zoom out further: the edges of Britain; you see we're at the centre; as far away from the sea

I'm from middle-class, middle-England.

I am who I am.

Back, I do recognise the landscape as agricultural. The spaces between villages and towns are not a filling in. I know a little, and have a stronger sense, of their use; just that they are used and don't simply exist. I'm conscious of change and what it means, scalped stubble as the result of long days, hard work. Fatter lambs the product of time passing, and all the work that goes into that.

Obvious, obviously. And yet...

1.
Food a story about movement:
journey from animal to human, field to fork, milk to cheese;
movement between farms, shops, dairies, processors, butchers, abattoirs;
veins of mould travelling outwards from the centre of Stilton cheese like roads on a map from a town into the countryside;
Stilton a place where the cheese was sold, the first stop north on the journey out of London



2.
Frisby the origin of Stilton (arguably),
Leicestershire in the middle of the midlands, as far away...

3.
Looking at cylinders, wedges, pie slices, circles, centres

4.
Metal surfaces: clean, clean, clean. Floors: wet, wet, wet. Water. No natural light. Inside or outside or underground or somewhere else? Madness.

5.
Primary colours, playmobil buckets: blue bucket, blue brush, blue hook (food surfaces); yellow bucket, yellow brush, yellow hook (ceilings and walls); green gloves and green apron

6.
Rethinking Leicestershire as farming countryside

7.
A local accent which is mine

8.
Stilton two names: Stilton and Stilton; village and cheese

9.
Project changes with place or time or progression? No longer Scottish adventure - can drive anywhere I need and see friends. In longer journey, trying to remember the travel, be a tourist to home county. Work?

1.
Driving through Melton Mowbray with Rachel on a delivery run; traffic because it's "market day" meaning livestock, still. Places, farms, transport as we drive, defined by food production. Dairy farms on the way to Long Clawson have Long Clawson Cheese logo underneath their own.

2.
Leicestershire like I've never seen it, farming countryside: good land and the thin roads; silage-making; 'Fight the Ban' posters; no stone walls, all hedges

3.
Understanding more about a place: why it is where it is; how it is; how it came to be. The structure, the history, the sense of it

4.
Melton is understood in terms of Stilton (Tuxford) and Pork Pies (Tebutt). The discarded whey from the Stilton production at Frisby goes to nearby pig farm; also ends up in M as pork pie. Food about place, too (after a party I had at my house last autumn, some London friends went on a road trip for MM pp's)

5.
Cleaning, cleaning, cleaning.
Water everywhere. Sweat. Big vats. Swimming pool/s.

6.
Frisby, Robert Bakewell, Loughborough, Fat Duck chef Heston Blumenthal, Longhorn cattle

1.
Beautiful shining stainless steel buckets filled with clean white granules of salt topped with bright plastic cup. Everything is so clean, frighteningly spotless and I must remember it (foreign pencils, pens, pads, cameras not allowed).



2.
George a pure business-man
Farming as pure capitalism

3.
Longhorn cattle in park as
ANIMAL
MEAT
CASH
TRADITION
IMAGE
LOCAL STORY
COLOUR
SMELL
SOUND



4.
Digging Jack Thistles? No, slaying them (Bastard Thistles).

5.
Relentless task, clearing these knee-high bastards. But it's not a bad way to spend a day justifying one's existence, is it, alone in lonely Leicestershire countryside, green as far as I can see?

6.
Calves named Hilda, Helena, Henry: The Year of H

7.
Leicestershire, Frisby, farming:
a lesson in history and place

8.
Robert Bakewell's LONGHORN cattle and LONGWOOL sheep

9.
Leics
Bakewell
Stilton
Quenby
Me
Farming
AT THE CENTRE

10.
Names and places: Bakewell (Robert, from Derbyshire), Stilton (Cheese, sold in the village of), Gray (family, lending name to Loughborough school)

11.
Loughborough: where I grew up; home to Bakewell, agricultural pioneer, founder of modern-day farming practices; much of surrounding land historically and presently owned by Gray family. CIRCLES. Stilton in a circle, rolling, rolling, in Stilton Rolling in Stilton Village. Moving, moving, in distribution out of centre of England, midlands. Outwards, like blue mould, veins, roads, capillaries, energy routes

12.
Paintings of Bakewell's livestock e.g. J Digby Curtis' ROBERT BAKEWELL'S TWO POUNDER': no longer beasts but valuable objects, sources of pride, to paint, hang up. For breeding: sold for breeding; for breeding, breeding. 'Old Comely' cow calved in 1765, in 1790 described as "like a venerable ruin on props of magnificent architecture, bulging fine limbs, enfeebled with old age... She now lives in an asylum, a meadow full of keep, set apart to soothe her passage to the earth, for in the slaughter-house she is not to make her exit..."

1.
Lying on my back underneath a large aluminium vat (large sauna / small swimming pool) on a plastic sheet, scrubbing its underside as water and dirt drips onto my face

2.
Standing in rolled-up dirty jeans huddled inside warm hoody drying off after cleaning saga; watching the others seperated by barrier, still scrubbing, cleaning in white overalls transparent through wet, with hair sweat-stuck around edge of face under cap, and arms strained through effort; thinking Wow, You're amazing.

3.
In a chain throwing 7 kilo ruined stiltons from broken cooler out into a skip. Hot, arms hurting from lobbing cheese weights. Laughing with the girls, an alternative to crying as we throw away thousands of pounds and hundreds of hours' work worth of Stilton, matured too far (but not taste-ruined) after broken cooler

4.
A mountain of Stilton: rustic objects stinking; wheels; footstools; greaseproof-wrapped stones of perfectly good (but not Frisby) Stilton. What are they? How can, should I respond? I want to photograph, but respect (a dying person).
Hundreds of plastic-covered wedges, greening.
Sitting on top of it all in the skip tearing off Waitrose bar-coded packaging. The glee of destruction in the short-term, after despair; depression and fatigue in the long.

These women are incredible. How well they know, to work.

I am happy to be here working. It is good to be here working. An experience which could not be understood any other way. How else to understand what an activity means or how a person works, is

It is my priviledge to know these people. What is my work?

Up at four to set up a Stilton Art Piece and photograph in first light on main driveway

Between 4:30 and 6:30 five cars drive down the road: Rachel, the herdsman (woman?); David, George's business partner; a livery owner; a delivery van; someone else who was 'curious' about what I was up to.

Drove home through morning rush-hour traffic and felt part of the company of night-workers, lorry drivers who know this country in its liminal hours.

Half-way back I have a new idea and after having spent two hours faffing around, and more preparing, Stiltons and books and cables and maps and clumsy metaphors and apertures and lenses, I get this, in a snapshot, in a second:



This is my work.

Usual semi-panic like Christmas Eve, burning CDs, writing thank-yous, not knowing if I'm really going to go, not knowing if I am going until I'm in the car, driving away.

Difference between leaving home last time, early January, packing fleeces and woolies and waterproofs into a couple of bags, feeling sick; now piling bags, putting swimming costumes, shorts and even tennis racket into the back of the car. On the one hand I'm getting good at this, leaving; on the other, it never gets any easier.

Driving away in my car, all alone again: the joy and the loneliness and the sadness. Leaving the friends I've made, worrying about the kind of person I am, that I hate this and do it anyway, and love it.

There's something wierd and wonderful about this 'in between' time; I've said goodbye to one place, and the next doesn't expect me yet. I could be anywhere; I could not exist; I'm utterly alone. I feel as though I've slipped through a certain order of living, like I don't exist or like I do more.

Rain chucking down on my little tin car on the motorway, packed up with all my life in it, for the next two months. Me, dry, inside.

Fields heavy with crops and ready to be cut (how did it happen?); many more boxes to fill in in my understanding of the land I'm driving past, through, on, over.

To Oxford in-between farms for Ruskin degree show, catch up with old friends, peers and tutors. To say 'hi, I'm here, I'm still alive, I've been busy!' and be said hello to back. Brought two whole too-mature Frisby Stiltons, salvaged from the skip (beautiful, beautiful white crusty pitted and pierced cylinder things). They are perfect and bizarrely trendy, effortless (after 12 weeks' humanness, work, into their making) sitting on window sills amongst heaving masses of people (hacked into with last-minute plastic fork purchases), glasses of wine, bottles of beer. Again I am overwhelmed by the crowds (so much to say! too many people!) and the luxury of it all; felt like more people in the building than I'd seen in total since the beginning of the year. Suddenly looked forward to being back on a farm, to visiting the fens, the East of England.

I left the Ruskin early. Spent the rest of the evening happily watching Hollyoaks with a 13 year-old friend at home just outside Oxford.

Between Oxford and Cambridge, driving up the wrong motorway. Detour through Bedford. 'Me' time, as alone as I'll ever be, do I enjoy getting lost? Is this project a long-winded way of detours through the Brit countryside? I think I'd better enjoy it.

Is all that is not town, farming? What is the countryside, in an economic sense?

I can confirm that Cambridgeshire is flat.


Fields are full like a shaved head grown much too long. Roads are elegant. Lorries, food-based; all ASDA, TESCO's and WAITROSE. Fullness of food in all spaces. Driving away from main road, pulling the car over and standing outside in the rain looking at the fens, I think of my mother who would on holiday-making journeys orchestrate long detours from the motorway in search of the right spot for field-side picnics.

I think it could be amazing

I said to someone last night, the people I'm staying with (Polish law students) that I think I like leaving, but arriving's pretty good too

I'm living in a proper house, with a lovely double bed in my own clean room. A kitchen and a bathroom with people's things in it; a TV and a table to eat food from. These things surprise and please me.

I'm visiting Pinks, a company producing salad and vegetables, family-owned and run, an umbrella for farms across Cambridgeshire and East Anglia, a massive multi-million pound business. Supply pretty much all the major UK supermarkets. This evening, told there are 1300 people working here in the summer. A lot of lettuce.

I'm here through FACE; Sarah Kent, the PA to one of the Directors, likes Art, heard about my project and invited me...

Something possessed me to drive up to the Wash. Sunday, not being inducted until Monday morning. Looking at a map of East Anglia, wondering what the edges looked like, felt like. A bug caught for driving through the flat landscape, on and on infinitely through fields heaving with salad.

A good 40 minutes into my drive towards King's Lynn, a sign advertising a Pinks farm.

Still don't know what the Wash looks like; got lost in small capillary roads; felt depressed; gave up and headed instead inside, along the north west side of Norfolk. Stopped at Hunstanton, another past-its-time (made by 19th C. coming-of-the-railway) seaside holiday resort: promenade along the seafront; shack after shack of fish and chips; bedragled ponies on the beach; 'family amusements'; skating show accompanied by amped-up tin rock music. Sat on a cement wall eating f&c feeling very very lonely and wondering why, in such a mood, I find myself at these sad depressing places.

Drove back via Ely. Lit a candle in the cathedral (so tall). Made notes in the bookshop (William Black's The Land that Thyme forgot a journey through culinary Britain; Iqbal Ahmed's Empire of the Mind an immigrant's journey through literary and intellectual GB; Kathleen Jamie's Findings "as close as writing gets to a conversation with the natural world" and WG Sebald's The Rings of Saturn a fictional walking tour through EA). Settled in the end for Paul Farley's selection of John Clare's poems. Clare, the "Northamptonshire peasant poet" I've spoken of before, a hero of other heroes (Mabey & co). A friend.

Morning of information about the company and health and safety videos. A lot. Tomorrow to be an 'iceberg' day. Thinking about, including:

flatness and the fens
scale and machinery
eastern european workforce in east anglian landscape
marketing (converted ice-cream van giving out celery dips; lovebeetroot and lovecelery websites)
different soil types
water and irrigation

I've asked if I can work a couple of shifts...

More H&S followed by a visit to "the field" wearing flourescant jacket and cap to watch iceberg cutting and packing.



Huge machinery, rolling over black and green ground: in front of it rows of perfectly aligned bright green lettuces like massive brussel sprouts; behind it, an expanse of leaves which will rot back into and fertilise the earth; inside the "rig" lettuce from the ground are transformed into objects, for the consumer.



Large field, no hedges, split by planting into areas of wheat and lettuce. Black peaty soil, like putty: squishy. The field a raised platform of this earth, cut at its edges by a channel of water to control moisture levels. Areas rise and fall by the activity of the vehicles. Sets of rigs move slowly, like snails down the field. Also ex-mail vans for workers' breaks, portakabin toilets and stations for washing hands. The scale is something I've not seen before, and the efficiency seems strange, making the field so much a working place, a factory. Why not, though? ??

Driving back to Pinks HQ, windows open, car radios broadcast Polish language between vans, throughout EA landscape. Strikes me as surreal, and then I remember EA's history and geographic position (Vikings, anyone?!). Foreign language, cultural imput is not so strange.

Being at Pinks makes me think about the relationship between farming and the environment; and about public opinion, law & the government, responsibility and power. Who has it, and who does not.

After the production drive of post-WW2 agriculture, and in the criticism of modern nature writers (Richard Mabey & co), farming has been seen as in conflict with the environment, a negative act on the natural landscape.

The current NFU 'Why Farming Matters' campaign tells us that "nationally British farmers and growers carry out more than £400 million worth of unpaid work in managing and maintaining the landscape".

At Pinks in spite of the scale and the power and the machinery, you can feel the weight of environmental law e.g. on margins and use of chemicals. These are the new edges, not the size of the fields and roads in relation to machines.

In public opinion, farmers seem to have become the new guardians of the British countryside. It reminds me of attitudes in the first and second world wars, farmers staying behind to work, protect, keep 'in perpetuity' the land for which other men fought abroad. And now, farmers are in the front line of another war: against climate change and general environmental doom. Is this right, and is it fair?

It's all so complicated.

Whose responsibility is ethics? Is Pinks farming just the inevitable product of political and economic forces, driven by a balance between consumer demand and public interest, mediated by the government? How much choice is involved?

My head spins.

Kindly taken on an awesome farm tour by Mark Halford, Pinks' farm H&S guru



Drove around most of the morning, through impressive landscape of Pinks' crops. Vegetables stretching towards infinity: hundreds and hundreds of perfectly aligned green rows, accentuated by lack of hedges and the flat ground. Unnaturalness of landscape is clearer than ever. Criticism? I'm not sure. In pre-Roman times the area of East Anglia was largely a marshy swamp, reclaimed by the sea in winter. Its geographical history is of farmers, people, fighting against the water with evolving systems of drainage and pumping and a bit of prayer, to hold onto the rich golden soil. It's of the best in the UK, now saving EA from being more full of more commuter towns and housing conglomerates within striking distance of London. One could say that if it wasn't for farming, the area, unnatural though it is, wouldn't exist at all.

To whom does unnaturalness matter, anyway? Who benefits and who loses? Who has a claim to how this land, and its architecture, is treated? What does it mean?

Let us continue our tour, a 'circle of life' seeing journey of plants from tiny seeds to vegetables packed and on their way to supermarket, ready to eat:

Pinks' warehouse an enormous, beautiful palace of plastic and light, standing bizarrely empty and naked, with sky above, around and inside; only when looking at the ground to you discover the reason for its existence, the floor covered with thousands of tiny lettuce seedlings like tiles.



A raddish-processing factory, one of the brightest agricultural working places I've ever seen. Everywhere, wet, shining scarlet objects: jumping along steel conveyor rollers; waiting in a trailor fresh off the field; leaving in crates or via a waste shute. Returned to the field, a visual wonder, flash of pink against black peat; a Félix González-Torres artwork, pile of sweets left to decompose.

I've talked before of similarities between artists and farmers. Most farmers have looked at me as though I'm crazy when I've been on this topic. I'm not retracting my position, but okay, I concede a few differences, particularly as it is generous for farmers to take and show me around.

Time, capitalism, productivity, speed and efficiency (farming, here), focus

Open-mindedness, flexibility, interest, public funding (me), wide-ranging outlook, conversation, general

A good day today, shadowing Ian Stewart, Celery manager (I love this, the 'Celery' and 'Raddish' and 'Iceberg' departments, like houses at school). The smell of celery being harvested is something else. A sea of celery.

A moment today when Ian was cutting celery and examining (ready?) and I was taking photographs of celery and examining it (colour, beauty). When we got out of the truck in each field, he takes his (special) celery knife, and I my camera.

I asked if I could work at Pinks. Thus did I find myself on Friday morning, standing in a line picking up celery sticks from a crate in front of me, and placing them on a conveyor belt to be trimmed. I enjoyed it, the satisfaction of doing some 'real work', experiencing what it feels like and being alongside some of the people I've been curious to understand. I enjoyed snatching a conversation with a young Polish girl, proud to be "the youngest in the hostel", saving up to study medicine back home. I was also fully aware of my privileged outsider position... To come in for a morning is nothing like working six days a week, looking at celery, doing the same job, all summer. Still, I am who I am.

Extraordinary to see and know real people responsible for the food which ends up in the Tesco's packet. The labour and organisation; the Polish girl next to me said that the preparation and standard expected (and delivered) in Britain is much greater than in other countries, at home. Later that morning I found myself packing baby carrots into plastic containers, to become a 'salad and dip' for another supermarket. I made a realisation about their cost, and that circumventing the preparation as a consumer doesn't mean that nobody else is doing it. Real people in a real factory putting in real labour.

Obvious, much? Maybe. And yet...

To London:

meeting about potential a&f exhibition
researching idea about British holiday postcards (farm as exotic?)
catching up with sis and friends :-)
seeing exhibitions
feeling the contrast, the first time I'd been to the city since leaving on a megabus, bound for Inverness, at midnight on that cold January evening

Felt very un-trendy, shabby, heading towards my meeting near Bond Street. I put my bag down at a table in a coffee shop and went to the counter to order tea, and then realised with sadness and sudden insecurity, that I couldn't do that, leave my things. I am amongst foreigners, more alone than on Eigg. All this, added to my shock (and horror?), in my coffee-meeting to hear about the 'trendyness' of my project, in the wave of interest and cool people 'doing farming' (Alex from Blur, Jimmy Doherty). I am confused.

On Saturday I walked through Hyde Park with a friend. The trees and the grass and the lake in the middle of the city seemed more bizarre and unnatural than ever. We made dinner that evening. Buying food was odd, so convenient in an environment in which there was no ('real') farming.

Monday: the happy monotony of trimming leeks and packing broccoli

Tuesday: collecting soil, the origin of food and our connection to Place

Horrible weather. Raining and Humid. Can't sleep; can't think.

Joined Little Gem Rig this am. What role can I play? Wanting to work, join the workers. Easier to pack, unpack, sort salad. Easier than to be different. Artist has to find role, make role, know what she wants, communicate that clearly. Sometimes I envy the holiday-job, strenuous I know and respect that it is, of the harvesters. Being told what to do; having hours to complete; switching off at the end of the day. But I am here because I am doing this.

Went back to the house in the afternoon for 40 minute sleep. Turned into a few hours. Woke up feeling terrible. Then photographing soils (food as cultural object, liked to Place through specifics of soil and env. conditions) on the table, on household plates. Moving furniture. Pissed off housemates.

Went swimming in Ely - everyone on site aware of work even if not actually working - only by leaving can configure alternative (creative) space for brain. Process of farming never stops, light of tractors through window at night. Only later, looking out of window, evening rain glistening on the trees, drizzle illuminated by early eve light, housemates watching Shrek (English, Polish subtitles) downstairs, I think it'll all be alright.

AM: with Elizabeth Wilson who has perhaps one of the most difficult jobs at Pinks. Ed Yorke, the Organics manager who took me round this afternoon, assured me that it is impossible for farmers at Pinks to ignore the importance of sustainability in farming. But it doesn't make Elizabeth's not a tough job, negotiating an appropriate (and sustainable) balance between commercial and environmental pressures and responsibilities.

Visiting Pinks has given me an amazing insight into 21st British commercial farming, at its most successful. It felt good to round it off spending time with Elizabeth and Ed, whose positions indicate the dramatic changes in agriculture over the last decade or so; they're here, and their work increasing, because consumer demand, via the supermarket, and public opinion, via the government, is for greater environmental care. How, why so? I like to think this is where I come in; writers, journalists, artists, people who communicate with the general public (without interest other than interest's sake, the better) mediate massive shifts in attitudes and ideas about the world (and how it should be farmed).

The organic debate (I have consciously avoided, so far), is not simple (there are dangers even in coupling 'conservation' or 'local' with 'organic'). However, the speed at which the market has grown is extraordinary & fascinating. And the 'creative' reinventions spawned: Pinks provides a box scheme for one of the leading supermarkets and is marketing its East Anglian produce in EA as local. This taking up of methods and strategies of brave (or desperate) entrepreneurial smaller farms who first championed ethical or environmental concerns in food production, seems strange. It is hard not to feel sorry for Mr Small, as his excellently-communicated and timed ideas are incorporated into the marketing methods and even business ideology of 'conventional' and industrial farming. It is as though they have run away with themselves, causing bottoms-up change - you would think it would be the other way around, in a treadmill industry such as agriculture. What does that say about society? And what about Mr Small, who has to continue to fight in the marketplace, his ideas reframed by competition?

I think there are no answers, but that it matters to pay attention.

Some people have been unhappy with the idea that food in supermarkets can be either organic or (more recently) local. I wonder if this is an opposition to other ideas and feelings about farming and its relationship to society (scale, capitalism, power). Having seen Pinks, and made the connection between this kind of farming, and my own life (eating patterns as well as to my ability to get out and about, do certain things e.g. work, and function in the world I live), I reckon I can’t with integrity make much criticism of contemporary intensive commercial farming. I’m just not up for the radical overhaul of my own life that this would require, and think that there are greater issues to occupy myself with. Namely, the simple but pressing need for a wider, much better informed, and more intelligent discussion about the issues in and around farming today.

In the meantime, let's wait until after this project is over and I've seen the whole story (more eco, please!) until I make any hasty resolutions. Instead, I leave Pinks with an impression of Awe, slight confusion of the brain, and in relation to bottoms-up change, an element of Relief. The manoeuver of Mr Big into a position of greater environmental responsibility is surely a good thing (also to his relief, I think).

The power of opinion, public or peer, is an amazing thing. After the Second World War, to see wide margins around crops in fields was shameful (waste). Now it is shocking to see farmers utilising every inch of available land (environment, wildlife).

Give Mr Big an ideological break, I think. Take responsibility for your own opinion and how you fit into the world, via food (farming).

PS just so you know, the degree of accountability (not just environmental: also H&S and treatment of employees) within large commercial farm operations such as Pinks is eye-watering. As Ed said, and I do believe, they would never be able to get away with cutting any corners. Faith is another matter.

Fresh produce farming like gambling; risks of weather and high financial gains or losses

Farmers not attuned to artists? Surely farming like creative process? Creative, but not artistic, Ed conceeded

I drove back to Leicestershire last night with 7 large bags of East Anglian soil from different Pinks' farms on the floor of the passenger's side of my car. Today I photographed a sample of each on my parents' best dinner plates: beautiful little piles of dark truffle or chocolate crunch against the white china, on the polished dining room table. Later, dealing with the left-over soil I was again mesmerised by how sensual it all is: soil that's basically compost; soil you could throw a pot with; soil like manure. The names of the farms where the soil comes from inform what you see: that from 'Engine Farm' is particularly gravelly, sooty; 'Black Horse Farm' soil is distinctly manure-like. Filling old take-away boxes scrupulously recycled by my mother was also interesting; the boxes contained both 'Chicken Korma (Medium)' and 'East Coast (Iceberg)'.

Whilst being completely absorbed by the task, as I make art, I have moments, drawing back when I see myself through the eyes of 'non-artists' (e.g. farmers), and wonder if I'm mad: most of the time not very seriously; some of the time more seriously. I had a particular case of this (the not too serious kind) when I found myself wondering what I should do with the now-redundant soil (take or post back to Pinks?? the tip??? dump in some random's field?). Eventually I remembered that it is soil, and highly fertile at that. Relieved, I put it into Dad's compost.

Black Horse / Engine


East Coast / off Great Fen Rd


Stretham / Barway

To south Wales through Herefordshire, underneath the Brecon Beacons along the A40 through Abergavenny, Merthyr Tydfil, back onto the M4 at Swansea and onwards into Carmarthenshire. Coming across country rather than down place-less motorway. Hoping for a feel for being in Wales, and, for some reason to see Merthyr, I've always wanted: exotic, industrial south Wales? Been reading Glyn Jones' The Island of Apples set in Merthyr and Carm. Plus, Herefordshire has happy memories through a story told by my mother, who overheard at Hereford train station: "I'll take the direct route today, have a terrible cold". NB 1. the luxury or priority of usually taking the in-direct route (scenic) 2. rare appreciation of travel itself (and mine and my mother's difference) 3. telling the vendor (relationship). So yes, I took the route which as my father warns me before setting out "will take you all day" ("but Dad" I reply, "what else have I got to do today, apart from appreciate the journey?").

Wales like Cumbria and Cornwall: the West Country not the East of Ang(Eng)lia(land). And with its wall of evergreen trees (?) against the A-road, almost seasonless.

Asleep last night to the smell of goats milk and the sound of water. The small-holding is set around a disused, empty reservoir. The power of the water here used to supply a forge. Tinplating was made further down the river; rural Carmarthen not very seperate from industrial Carmarthen (also refer The Island of Apples; also what is rural / industrial?). A nice aside: the Celts, essentially farmers (of the West) also brought industry to the Brit Isles: smelting and forging; industry not seperate to farming nor rural life (why would it be? Pinks... agriculture as an industry).

The small-holding centres around this disused reservoir which is a kind of walled garden: somewhere between a crazy and a beautiful enterprise. Almost tip-like, and yet rather wonderful and very finely done: deep-beds made out of tyres in neat diagonal shapes. A 'post-industrial Victorian walled garden'??! Small-holding, here, about utilizing resources, problem-solving: an outside toilet become a smoke-house; another curious building a goat-milking parlour, kitted out with bench and wall-chart. Very like art.

Today's activities consisted of looking to the animals (chickens, goats, ducks), stacking firewood (v sculptural, like stone-walling but easier), mucking out the goats, going for a walk (old tin-plating site) and hanging out washing.

A note on stacking firewood and stone-walling and cheese-making: think it's interesting that these skills are being seen as that, even as crafts. Once just things which needed doing, now (me) the feeling of them being sculptural, and recognition of the know-how involved, building up layers &c, makes them something else. Think also about the impact of choice on how and why we do things and percieve them - there being other ways. Role of aesthetics, ethics. Under ideology. Jane sitting spinning wool in front of the television every night. Making cheese from her own goats milk, preserving and bottling spearmint, because she wants to, enjoys it. Is this how skill, after necessity, becomes craft??

Old Tinplating Place down the road (river)

A small-holding in rural Carmarthenshire. Self sufficiency: a 'walled garden' out of an old reservoir; a few goats (milk, and meat); chickens; and a recently-killed pig (damn, I missed it). In the kitchen, images of ?rural life: a string of dried chillies (rich reds, purples, oranes); a line of flies stuck to a reel of tape hanging from the ceiling; Jane spinning wool in the sitting room. After Pinks, it's like an image of farming which doesn't exist, which actually does exist. Economic reality? Sense? And yet, these people doing it, choosing, living here, like this, whatever it is.

What does this place have in common with the last? Anything to do with each other, except from being joined up by my travelling between them? Displaying completely different concepts of farming and the word 'organic'. The 'wwoofing' network by which I've ended up here ('Willing Workers On Organic Farms) having been outgrown (?) by the term organic, its original driving-force. Wwoofing really about small-holding life-style farming (?). Having seen Pinks, its organic farms, the word organic no longer seems to fit a place like this. The empasis not on regulation of process but ideology (about farming), in general. Craft, and the sharing of expertise and skills (what, whose?), in the "free exchange of energy".

Someone once described 'organic farming' to be as a going back to pre-Second World War farming techniques. Everything I read about modern agriculture talks about the impact WW2 had on food production in Britain. The need to keep Britain self-sufficient (or fear of not being) after a war in which fighting on the land (LAND ARMY) was as important, possibly, as overseas, in surviving blockades, not starving into surrender, literally. Led to intensive farming, valuing production above everything else. The organic farming movement the result of a recognition, a realisation of damage caused, that this valuation is not quite right to where and who we are now and the world / country / area / communities we wish to live in. A lessened concern with national self-sufficiency, in the most part. Irony in the wwoofing movement, in the light of climate change / peak oil twists, that local self-sufficiency has become a player.

Confusing.

How do you 're-track'? Can farming go backwards? And in relation to modern society (which, who?), who is making the choices, driving change or non-change? Farmers or consumers? Government? Artists?

When I was looking in the Wwoofing brochure for somewhere to visit in south Wales, there were many small-holdings of a similar ilk to the one I've ended up with, but hardly any in East Anglia on the other side of the country. This 'type' of org. farming can only exist here, and other geographically-alike locations (west, poorish soils and hilly, away from large cities &c); neither can the Pinks style exist outside of EA. Both, the inevitable outcomes of Place.

Cutting garlic stalks and their mudded hairy ends into a bucket in front of a DVD in the kitchen: the rhythm of domestic culinary activity; the meditation of it, cutting again and again; the light in the kitchen and the feeling of comradeship with June; the activity of the hands combined with the occupation of the mind (DVD; The Archers; thinking about relationships; thinking about Art).

A pile of onions, green and brown wet stalks hanging off the ends, on a shelf in a makeshift smoke-room. The smell of them, the texture and the material. Mud and leaves on food: the connection to the ground, to culture and human activity. I remember two things: a farmer proud of his clean, supermarket-packaged vegetables saying "I don't see why people would prefer to get up at 6 am to go to a farmer's market to buy vegetables covered in mud..." and a story about a 14-ish-year old in a supermarket asking, "Mum, why do the potatoes have soil on them?" Food connects us to the place we live in; soil as evidence.

Gradually it gets harder to write: as the rain falls; as I become accustomed to the slowness of life, and things become less strange

Material:

Milk
Feathers (goose, duck, chicken)
Cheese
Eggs
Scrap metal
Tyres
Vegetable matter
Water

Drinking home-brewed beer reading Dylan Thomas sitting outside on the edge of the reservoir / walled garden with a cat by my knee

Taking a shower and 'getting dressed up' for a once-weekly trip into (market) town

'Market' town having no irony about it. Stalls of ?home-grown, ?home-reared, ?home-made food with minimal post-?global (Starbucks) awareness (£2.50 for a cake, a whole one, not a slice). Tobacconists which sell tobacco by weight. A multiplicity of charity shops, although Oxfam does have printed franchise signage.

Walking into nearest town/village to catch a request-stop train to Swansea

Hitchhiking being a real/good option

Yesterday (Sunday), at long last, the sun came out, and I felt like I was enjoying something for which I'd been waiting all year. We went into the garden first thing, after milking, in order to make the most of a morning of no rain. Digging, with the sun on the bare skin of my shoulders, I enjoyed the pace of June and Kenneth's "The Good Life", of work interrupted by a drink of home-brewed beer and the cliches of e.g. watching goat kids playing. It is satisfying.

I am getting better and better at milking the goats. I respect the appearance of my hands: browner, tighter, dirtier; evidence of work of which I am proud.

I've been reading a classic John Seymour self-sufficiency book, as well as The Worm Forgives the Plough by John Stewart Collis. Collis' story is of his experience as an agricultural labourer during WW2. An interesting, pivotal time, when horses were still being used to work the land, and meanwhile. 'artificial manure' (not yet 'fertiliser) and increasingly specialised American machinery, were being introduced. I feel some afinity with Collis, not a farmer but "an intellectual". He writes descriptively of his pleasure in the work, as well as his position (preface: "'What made you go and work on the land?'" answered "'because I very much wanted to'... I had hitherto regarded the world too much from the outside, and I wished to become more involved in it... I gained the opportunity of becoming thoroughly implicated in the fields instead of being merely a spectator of them"). I particularly enjoyed his meditation 'A View of Literary Production' and his wondering what his farm manager would have thought of an Oscar Wilde story, in which the writer answers a question about what he had been doing on a certain day, "'I spent the morning putting in a comma, and the afternoon in taking it out again'."

The theories behind self-sufficiency in John Seymour's book are an interesting contrast (1970). Where Collis is describing a period in which agriculture was beginning to become more and more specialised, Seymour stresses the importance of variety, the fundamental symbiotic relationship between arable and livestock farming, and the idea that nothing should be wasted ('The Law of Return' that everything taken from the earth should go back into it, soil for growing, whether wasted vegetable matter or excrement, animal and human). Seymour's book feels dated, but provides an interesting background for the current organic mode.

Tuesday

After morning milking had time off: drove to St. David's, west, west Wales. Stopped the car where the road finished and walked to St. David's Head, Wales' most westerly point. Climbed down the rocks towards the sea as far as safely possible. Looked West over the sea. I stood at another edge of the island, knowing where I am in it and its connection to other places. Wales like Cumbria as well as Cornwall (driving down a thin road surrounded by overgrown hedges), even a less extreme version of some parts of western Scotland. Indeed, Cumbria one of the few English words which retain something of the ancient British language (of the Welsh and Cornish too): connected to the Welsh word for themselves, Cymry, meaning 'compatriot'.

St. David's: Britain's smallest city, a Celtic cathedral village, site of pilgrimage: an end of journeying


Wednesday


The Force That Through the Green Fuse

Made sculpture: 'borrowed' jug of goats' milk to surround with waste vegetable matter (pre-compost) and muck (pre-compost, pre-veg matter). Photographed it on edge of res / walled garden (power, change, re-invention, growth). Then job over, art made, place encapsulated; all done, time to leave. I am getting good at this, too good I fear: let's pack up and go, no ties; what am I doing?

Out of Wales along the M4 listening to Dylan Thomas reading Under Milk Wood

Watching the Welsh names pass, trying to pronounce them think about the politics of language - 'Welsh' a Germanic, Anglo-Saxon word meaning 'foreigner'

After Cardiff, the Under Milk Wood voices become more obscure. I switch them off and 'reconnect' myself - national radio

At Monmouth I detour through the town, stop, have a drink and walk about. A pleasant alternative to motorway services. I wonder about all these attractive towns at the centre of rural areas, and hope they will find their way through. I wonder about Post Office closures, and the rural-urban divide.

I return to the motorway, refreshed and happy. Then I nearly cause a pile-up on the M5. I turn off, worrying about myself. Make my way along A roads before going the wrong way around Birmingham.

New place. South Britain. At least I arrive. Via M1 (so easy, straight down) and M25 (so busy, so circular). I remember a girl in the Scottish Borders, "it's so full of people down there". The world gravitating towards London. When I read Iain Sinclair's brilliant London Orbital I'd never been on the M25. Now I have I understand even more the wonder of it.

I stopped and had lunch at a service station. The sun came out and I stayed there for ages, an hour or two perhaps. It was as though I was in a cafe on a French pavement: nowhere to go, all day to go there. The joy of service stations - forget what I said before. The joy of being one of randoms, part of a reasonably representative splice of society; the only thing in common that we're going along the same road. Nobody's chosen to come here for lunch; no-one's particularly interested in anything or anyone else, as though we've been picked out of a hat, to be together for our own moment.

Crazy weather, driving under a black cloud, 8 lines of traffic filled with cars, with lights on at 3pm on a mid-summer Sunday afternoon. Then my sunny holiday stop at the service station. Later, driving down the A21, sliding down it towards the south coast, sunroof open, driver window open, sunlight falling on arm. Later, more flashes of lightening and downpour.

Fields full: hay for grass; wheat (ruined? what is this weather doing?); fit looking animals. It feels as though we're nearer London, everything that bit richer and fat.

Tractors working in fields; I'm glad to know a little bit about them and what they're doing. How bizarre it is, the M25, this major, major metropolitan thing, piece of architecture, bisecting such rural landscape. We think about each other (do we?), drivers and farmers. I shudder: do we think we know the countryside from what we see driving through? Gordon Brown and his house-building schemes. The impossibility of understanding rural life without living ? and working in it.

Tippery. Caravan. Electricity. All I need, for now. Up earlier tomorrow. Working days. Bed, now. Sleep.

Did not sleep last night. Thought it might have something to do with the caravan, but no-one did. Weather. Humid, and rain (surely it can't keep on coming?). I awake till early hours, mind a fairground ride of thoughts, relentless. Got up and walked outside; felt comforted by sight of my car, a friend; almost slept in it.

Up to start working at 7:30. Pruning and easing vines through wire fence structures. All day until 4:30. Okay when the sun came out, enjoyed the monotony - for a while. Afternoon longer, I was glad to finish, back aching.

What you might imagine from 'Wwoofing', maybe. Nice people. England's first organic wine business. Still fairly small scale & relaxed. William, an employee lives in a van on site with wife and son; Adrien and Magya, French and Hungarian volunteers. All to Sainsbury's at the end of the day. Now for a drink in William's van; I'm off.

The feeling of having arrived - to Hastings this afternoon after work - is glorious. Most of the farms I've visited have been pretty near the sea, in my zig-zagging from side to side (Frisby, Leicestershire, the Mid-lands being the obvious exception), so to finally reach "the bottom" is satisfying, to say the least. Added to that, being let off an hour early, and the sun being out. Oh, what a long time ago it was that I was in Ullapool. And then again, not at all. And then again (again), I remember the very many layers of clothes I was wearing back then, even indoors. Now, working outside in a vest top, towards the time when the grapes will be ripe to pick, I know that time has passed.

As I said last night, this place is very much as I imagined 'wwoofing' to be. There's a few of us, working steadily but without the urgency of somewhere like Pinks. I enjoy it, but look forward to lunchtime and evening, try not to look at my watch too much. It's both boring and enjoyable, but varied if we get too bored with one job: maintaining posts and wires for vines to grow through; tidying and pruning them. Okay, it's all pretty monotonous, variety created by the sun coming out and going back in.

I slept much better last night, which is good.

Working outside on the vines. Up and down most of the day. I know now how long it takes me to do a row, how many rows to an hour, how many before morning tea break, how many before lunch. Walking slowly, working methodically, trying to forget the time so that it's lunchtime and I'm surprised. It gets harder each day.



It's not as bad as it sounds; I do enjoy it and as a volunteer I am given a variety of tasks; this afternoon I walked around the visitors' trail (T V the first of the Soil Association's network of farms open to visitors) to check signposts and the route; later on, in the shade of the cellar (yes, glorious summer in the south is finally overwhelming) I helped clean, label and pack bottles of apple juice. A pleasure to see the arbitrary, murky bottles transformed into seductively presented bottles of 'Organic Apple Juice' stamped with Soil Ass and 'Bronze Great Taste Awards 2005' logos. I sit typing drinking from a bottle with a label which got squished on wrongly; I am invited to help myself from the box of seconds.

Marketing is everything

Ethan Waters' and his vineyard were early (modern) adherents to organic farming and business, in which the produce is grown, turned into a consumable thing, marketed and sold, all by the same people (and a small number of them). His that which has thrived from the growth of farmers' markets, especially in this wealthy, semi-rural, countryside-conscious, close-to-London area. And the warming weather: his the first commercial vineyard in England, established in 1979; now there are a multitude over the south of England (three signposted in a ten minute drive down the A21).


Spaceship (Wine Vat)

I can't help wondering sometimes whether the organic movement has been too successful for its own good (talked about this a little before), outstripped the people who originally drove it. When my uncle went organic nearly ten years ago, he was mocked by the traditional, conventional farmers around him. It must be strange for those people now, who did what they did because they believed in it, to see them taken up as 'principles', adopted into marketing strategies, and flogged to the finish line, by more commercially-driven food businesses. Perhaps it's a little more complicated than that, but I am intrigued by the current trend for supermarkets to print photographs of "the farmer" on product packaging. Is this not a response (reaction?) to (against?) the success of face-to-face sales and communication via e.g. farmers' markets of Mr Small?

An article by Robert Crampton in the Times a year or two ago: it turns out the hippies were right (but we'll screw them anyway).

How nice to successfully reach the end of the week, to lie in bed this morning, get up and have breakfast in pie-jams, and write. Caravan, basic and old as it is, provides a life of seclusion apt for writer's retreat. Ideal to be occupied in the day (week), then get on with writing, drawing, reading in the evening. Feel that practical life works well against creative. Whilst occupied with menial, mind free to wander, plan projects, dream.

Or organic art and farming?

This is the only farm I've been to where I've worked Monday to Friday and had the weekend off. It's been lovely, I've milled about for two days and am ready to work again tomorrow.

I've been reading an interesting collection of writing about organic farming, The Organic Tradition, ed. Philip Conford. I had thought of organic farming as a very recent phenomenon, so it surprised me that the Soil Association, the main lobby group and certifier of organic farming, was founded as far back as 1946. But as this book (pub. 1988) proposes, organic farming is in fact, nothing new but a continuation of long-established farming practices; a movement only out of opposition to the new, aggressive style of modern farming, which we call 'conventional'.

One of the most interesting things in The Organic Tradition, is the idea that art is especially connected to organic farming. Practical methods are governed by ethics, or more specifically, spirituality (mythologies and religions). Organic farming is an art, concerning the environment and man's relationship to it.

I have to think a little more about this. And a few other things:

1) The soil as cultural metaphor; Edward Hyams, in Soil and Civilization (1952), draws a parrallel between erosion and loss of fertility in the soil, and the decline of Rome as a great civilization:

"The foundation of the Roman character was the Roman Soil Community. Hannibal destroyed it, and with it Rome's power to act with generosity and charity... She could only make a spiritually barren, aesthetically contemptible, socially decadent monstrosity" (my italics)

2) Sense of Place. Relationships between people and their environment, through farming (organically?).

3) Religion. Lady Eve Balfour, founder of the Soil Association, strongly religious (spoke of "valuing and conserving soil" as "a living faith in the Christian ideals"). Similarly, H.J. Massingham, whose "rejection of the assumptions on which industrial society is based led him to join the Roman Catholic Church". Ideas about 'wholeness', 'stewardship' and 'husbandry'.

4) The soil as God. The Biblical story (2 Kings), pointed to by Edward Hyams, in which a prophet, Namaan, when cleased of his leprosy, takes Palestinian soil back to Syria to worship Jehovah, the god who cleansed him in Palestine. Also pagan and American Indian imaginings, worship of the soil. The soil is something beyond what it is.

The Soil Association have an 'art and organic farming' page on their website. I'd not been comfortable with it, not sure what it meant, and I haven't wanted in this project to align myself, as an artist, with either 'organic' or 'conventional' farming, but it reminds me of something deeper, more complex and profound in the relationship between a & f.

I am tired.

Monday it rains. I sit in the evening in William's van with a glass of Tippery wine looking at the rain until it gets dark enough that it's not going to stop raining before it gets too dark for me to find my way back to my caravan.

Tuesday the sun burns down and it's like heaven. William and I roam the vines overlooking Bodour, a National Trust moated castle. It's 8am in the morning and there's no noise yet before the tourists arrive. It's 10am and we're lying out underneath the sun, sweating.

It's Wednesday today. I finished yesterday; I left this morning. I'm not due at my next place til tomorrow but I was ready to leave, so I did. I lost my watch, an 18th birthday present. Damnit.

Found myself earlier today, sitting in my car with the rest of my belongings behind me, in a carpark of a leisure centre in a random coastal town, watching the rain, feeling pretty shit. With nowhere planned to stay this evening, and nowhere to go, I wondered, once again, what the hell it was that I was doing and what I was trying to prove.

Now I am in a very basic guesthouse on Weymouth seafront. I got here, hung my soaking Converse trainers out of the window to dry, clothes in the wardrobe and washed my face. Climbed into the sheets and fell sleep to the sound of a fairground ride. Woke up, watched the news and Hollyoaks, went out to get some food, and now find myself back here, writing, feeling a bit better: alone and drowsy, but oddly contented. I needed this gap, this day which doesn't exist. I'm a fugitive on the run, hanging up my soiled clothes, washing and removing the evidence, resting, waiting for time to pass until it's safe to move on.



This has got to stop, soon.

I don't know how to begin to describe this extraordinary place: words one might use (community, eco-hamlet, alternative) make boxes I'm not happy about; and a description of the activities which make it fervently green (going to the toilet in a hole in the ground; sharing food and resources; careful use of electricity generated by renewable sources) do not relay what it has felt like and meant to be here. I've not kept up this blog (lack of electricity and the internet, being major factors, and tiredness becoming one too). Instead, as a way forward, let's go back to notes and sketches scribbled in snatched moments and at night, and photographs taken on scarce battery:

hansel & g wooden houses on the top of a hill - narnia scene - like a film set but these houses r real + people live in them

lives I had no idea existed or could exist

astonishing understanding of material
3 horseshoes forged together upon iron legs making a stool for pans over a fire and forming a clover shape
the threeness, the circularity and the Celtic weaving
I could learn more than at art school

crates holding empty plastic bottles upside-down, purposefully; to what end I have no idea
a man cycling off as I arrive with veg boxes in a cart behind the bike: sad, pitiful, positive, brave and courageous (I think)
a barn made of straw and matresses
solar panels on a timber frame: glittering, chintzy shapes like mystic signs
a solar-powered laptop
bio-diesel-fuelled cars

how aesthetic it all is: hundreds of chopped orange-brown carrots in a large soot-black pan; the smoke from the fire; even the hatch over the toilet, a handle from a branch

the satisfaction of running a bath from a fire you made: the joy of hot water finally coming out of the tap

potato digging like digging for gold - there a flash of yellow - or like overturning a nest of baby mice

images of myself: sweating from the strain of carrying bags of potatoes on my back to the top of the hill; sweating in the sun scything in shorts and a bikini top with bandana around my head; sleeping in the shade from the afternoon sun underneath an apple tree (I am concious of the cliche), with a battered straw hat over my face

phone off and no means to recharge it - giving up time (no watch)



ferral children
mugs on pegs
cutlery and pans living outside in the rain
being taught how to make fire by a five year-old
living outside with mud
is dirt dirty?

(at dinner time) so much to ask: "are you happy" and "why do you do this" but people just want to eat

media attention - they said no to wife swap, and "one of the Spice girls wanted to come, I can't remember which" but Blue Peter were allowed to film in the garden

Mark on protesting and campaigning, and living here: "It's the easiest job in the world to point the finger, but what do you do when they stop and ask, 'well, what should we do?'"

on the village: "I hate it when rich people move in and despise us"

connections: George Monbiot a shareholder; books by Alastair McIntosh (founder of the Isle of Eigg trust) in the roundhouse; in the guest book, the name and address of recently-deceased writer and filmmaker Roger Deakin (Waterlog and the post-humously published Wildwood)

"all we want is the privilege of remaining poor and being crofters" (Canon Angus John MacQueen of the Isle of Barra, from McIntosh's book, Soil and Soul: People versus Corporate Power)

the question about quality of life

here, experiencing this during the flood crisis in England, people in towns collecting water
that girl on Eigg telling me about her winter, days revolving around checking the pipes which supplied water to her caravan, following them up the mountain
the effort of living, what you need

remarkable differences of motivations, principles and opinions even within the people who live here: people who sound bonkers (fetishes about cutlery, nakedness, veganism) but given time, interest, seen living and understood, make sense and become impressive

the pleasure of better weather: enjoyment of group activity, and plans, plans; let's make hay, make hay!



getting up at 5 to start cutting
once out of bed, simply the morning rather than a godawful hour
the beauty of the field with the dew on it, and the sun rising, what it feels like to work on it and see the sun move over it, going down on the other side at the end of the day



politics of scything - territorialism over your "own scythe" and fear of cutting and ruining someone else's neat rows - the precarious challenge of living with other people

the wisdom and the stupidity: over several days a dozen people scything and turning hay whilst in the field on the other side of the road a farmer in a tractor completes the same work in hours

other worlds of people who go to green festivals and know about scything, how they're made, and who makes them

I'm in Bath.

Left Harley's Puddle last night and headed up to my cousin's in Bath to recollect myself: clean myself up; get on the internet and upload this; prepare to head south for my last stop at Forgarth Organics, near Truro in Cornwall.

The convenience of life! Getting into the shower, switching it on and hot water coming out automatically; flicking light bulbs on without cause to think about whether there is enough electricity; throwing clothes into a washing machine; making 'phonecalls; using the internet. Memory fades; or rather, experience washed away from my body, becomes memory as remainder?

Driving through the outskirts of Bath today, recognising what is taking place in the fields, the stubble demonstrating a wave of sunny weather in which tractors and people have worked to cut grass and make hay, at a certain pace.

Sun is different to experience in the garden of my cousin's house. Instead of meaning we can work outside, it means we can sit outside, perhaps on a rug on the lawn, and have a leisurely barbeque. The difference is enormous.

Friday night come back from the pub to switch on television: foot and mouth disease returns to Britain. Sickening in the stomach as I can imagine just a little bit of what that means to many of the farmers I've met from Scotland through to Cornwall: fear, isolation, lonleiness. It's hard to describe or fully understand just how terrible the 2001 epidemic was to farmers and the countryside. It also, in many ways, epitomises the rural-urban divide: "Why does it matter so much?" my cousin Hannah asks. I try and explain the isolation caused by the restrictions, and that the loss of a herd of sheep or cattle is more than their immediate financial value. And the emotional ties, broken. The meaning of it all. I explain that the characteristics of a herd - temperaments, relationship to the farm and farmer, medical history and breeding - embody years of work and experience, often inherited, and are impossible to compensate for. Particularly strongly in the uplands e.g. the Lake District, where sheep know to return or 'heft' ('leer' in the south) to the same part of the hills. This knowledge they pass on to each generation, as the farmers' do their knowledge. A new flock wouldn't have this wiring, built up for perhaps as much as hundreds of years.

"So... losing your flock might be like me losing my degree, like us losing our knowledge, which we need to be able to work and live?" Yes, I think that's a pretty good analogy.

Went to an excellent maze created out of a field of maize (doubts on pun quality, but hey it's the weekend). Thought, someone at some point has had a very good idea, understanding what a field is and could be. During the window of time of the few summer months between when the maize is high enough to surround a person, and when it is cropped in September, the space and scale (albeit with a bit of cutting, justified commercially by enterprise's additional income) is utlized to become a tourist attraction, the maze.

This one is a copy of others, created and run by two brothers who looked to me, student-age. Entrepreneurial, employing their young attractive friends running around in t-shirts. They rent the field off the farmer for the summer: when the crop is young, spray-paint the shape of the maize on the ground and then go pulling it out by hand. By summertime, the crop has grown up into a fantastic, enormous maze. I love it, a form of diversification which barely (correct me if I'm wrong) impinges on farming. Fun, too, on a sunny day, perfect.

Just about to leave for my last stop, wahey!

Turned into a bit of a muddle over Forgarth, some confusion about whether they had space for me (and something about me being Celtic or not - wierd), so at the last minute (calls through Wwoofing book), I'm to another small-holding in mid-Cornwall. 5 days-ish, I'm too tired for much more. In fact, part of me would really like to go home, but I'm not leaving until I've finished: one more stop, and the end of the country, the toe of Cornwall / GB.

The volunteer booklet in its description of Cally Woods mentions something about 'permaculture'. As far as I can gather it's a highly theoretical version of organic farming, but we'll see...

Cornwall at long last, the long-anticipated destination and end point of my journey. I drive down from Bath along the massive thoroughfare to the end of the world. The sun has finally, properly arrived; this final leg of the journey is made along the A30 in sunglasses and a bikini top.

Over the Tamar: Welcome to Cornwall. Another country? A black and white flag is painted onto the front of Jo's car, who comes to work here at Cally Woods with Zach. I wonder about the Celtic West and its languages, and the history of its languages. Is an allegience to Cornwall or Wales automatically anti-Englishness? Zach's friend Ivor (long extended lunch break, cider on the verranda of the caravan in the sun; Jo begins to play the guitar, I am in heaven, Cornwall, I doze off relaxed) tells us that when he went into the Cornish shop in Liskeard the shopkeeper had been bemused, but not critical, of his ordering a Scottish, rather than a Cornish kilt ('as long as it's not English'). I remember H.V.Morton's story of a Cornish man who tells the writer that he his going up to Plymouth next week, then corrects himself: 'England'.

I think about what it means to live down here, and the choices people make, today. It is often a choice, I feel, to remain. In a conversation about climate change and leaving, Jo tells me that she wants to be here "when the shit hits the fan".

Love

Cally Woods: in a quiet valley inland; away from the tourist-teeming north and south coasts. Zach and Leah live and work, and are bringing up and educating their children from their home: a static, solar-powered caravan with a built-on varanda (made by Zach) surrounded by a small plot of land (vegetables, sheep, trees), and a 'community woodland', beyond that. They're planning a wooden roundhouse, like that of their friend Ben Law of Grand Designs fame.


I'm still trying to work out what permaculture is, a way of thinking about living as much as growing or producing things I think, but the outdoor compost toilet with chintzy walls, is pretty cool.

And them, too; I rang up on Saturday night and was here on Sunday. Similar things had happened to them as young wwoofers, a time back, before they had decided to give up their day jobs and try a different way of living.

Zach is now a 'green woodworker' and has a workshop here, utilising the obvious resources; Jo was here helping him make a wedding bough; I really like his pencils although he says they take more time than they're worth. Leah home-schools the children and teaches environmental classes in the woodland, which they manage for the community by whom it is owned, bought as it was with public money; an interesting story. I help Zach and Leah with general tasks, from pole-stripping in the wood workshop, to gardening and child entertainment. General life. I'm learning too; it's a proper wwoofing exchange. I like making yoghurt and the kids are good too, I've been enjoying drawing with them, yellow hair and brown faces, smiley.

5 days, it's been my shortest visit; tired and lonely I found myself going to bed in my own little caravan at 8 or 9 in the evening, with no energy left to go out and meet people. Or make, much.

Whilst I've been here, two sets of friends have come down to Cornwall on holiday. I've been envying them the luxury of a temporary, rootless and carefree existance in a place. Two evenings ago, I swam in the Fowey estuary on the south coast with my friend Holly and her husband, who I visited at Polruan. I only thought briefly of Zach and the children, the irony of them swimming in the pool of the Liskeard leisure centre. I lay back instead, into the water and felt the sun on my face, water on my skin. Felt relaxed, happy. Dived off a pontoon thing with Holly. Acted like girls, giggling. Didn't want to go back to the farm.

Holly and her family are leaving a day early at the end of the week, and have offered me their rented apartment for the last day, tomorrow. It'll be a much-needed holiday of my own :-) and a little pause for thought before I return back up into 'England'. Before taking it, however, I'm going to see a farmer near St. Austell, Eric Ward, who has been involved with farming awareness and arts projects since the BSE crisis.

Almost the end now

I left Cally feeling sad but underwhelmed by my departure, an anti-climax. At Eric's however, things seemed to fall into place. I sat outside with him in his garden and we talked for a long time. I listened to his story, and learned some more about agriculture's rollercoaster period of the last ten years, particularly in relation to the public perception of farming. He told me about the influence of the BSE crisis as well as Foot & Mouth; about change within his local community and the distance between people. We talked of the faltering morale of British farmers, of falling prices and the pressure to produce quantity rather than quality. The wrath of environmental groups and his wondering whether anybody cares about him and what he does. Then he told me about how he built a straw bale man at the end of this drive with a sign 'support British farmers' (to do with a daughter, upset about the possible cull of her "pet" cows) and how that had spiralled into communication-education projects about farming, and being rung up by the RSC. We talked about art, and why it matters. Of artists, art schools and students. Society, bridges, relationships and understanding.

Leaving Eric's farm I felt happy and that I'd reached the end of my journey. Then turning towards the coast, I saw a golden field of straw bales in front of a brilliant blue sea, and felt euphoric. I realised how much I'd achieved, although I couldn't put it into words or pinpoint what exactly that is.




After arriving in Polruan, via the Fowey estuary car ferry :-) I padded around Holly's apartment, enjoying the cool quiet luxury, the balcony looking over the sea. I took my time over having a bath and getting dressed, epilating my legs in front of a Sex & the City DVD and then went out to see some other friends staying in a camping site nearby. We had champagne in the pub, and then I returned to the apartment. Alone, I went outside onto the balcony, and looked out towards where I knew the sea was. Back inside, I wrote this in my diary:

"I feel happy. Knackered, but pretty happy. Able, like I know what I'm doing.

Wierd though, it's all over, so suddenly. I don't have to visit any more bloody farms! Ha ha.

I'm surprised by how much older I feel. My body has changed too; I'm brown (a worker's tan - arms, shoulders, lower legs only); stronger, the veins across the backs of my hands and lower arms more pronounced. But there's also something else; I feel more comfortable, more connected to and in my own body. And the world. On the top of Bodmin Moor last week, I lay on my back, feeling the earth beneath me, feeling this."

Now, back at the centre of England in Leicestershire, I am grateful (to myself, God, ACE, FACE, all the people who have hosted me and helped me), to have felt and known so many different people, places and experiences across GB & agriculture over the past 8 months. I feel empowered, in possessing a sense of the physical landscape stretching out beyond me in every direction and in a knowledge of its meaning as embodied and mediated by farming.

I'm less sure about myself, where I'm going, not knowing what the future holds or how to make it work; I've been happy, during this project, but what do I do now; is GB Farming anything more than a glamourised gap year? How can I can fit, and sustain myself as a whole human being in the world, my world, this world?

It's over two years since I started the GB Farming journey.

That seems like a lifetime. But I've been busy, jumping between locations and ideas; growing up; managing this strange addiction, art; meeting, establishing, destroying and rebuilding relationships with other farm artists, art farmers, farming and art people; keeping up with and running away from Oxford / Ruskin / London / family / friends. Succeeding. Failing. All this.

I think I've probably a lot of people to thank, particularly François Matarasso, and my parents; but this isn't the Oscars, so I'll move on:

In the period in between finishing the physical journey, I've become more and more interested in the interface between farming and the public and my role as an artist.








Living in London last year, homesick for farming, I even found signs:

Now it is 2009. I live in Shropshire, near Harper Adams (UK leading agricultural college), where I was Artist in Residence officially, for a term last year. I have a lot of doubts and fears, particularly in relation to being and / or working as an artist, paying the rent and wholeness. But I remain, in the quietest, happiest periods, obsessed with farming and acting as an artist, mesmerised by the profundity of these two occupations. I yearn to understand more and more, and to somehow act in that space to develop the idea and relationship farming has to the world. Discussion of agriculture in art remains thin on the ground, although the recent Our Daily Bread film was awesome (holy, beyond words) and I've a reactionary fondness for Wim Delvoye's Art Farm. There's even something interesting to me about Damien Hirst's Golden Calf, reproduced and discussed in Farmers' Weekly but let's not go there today.



The media, advertising and marketing roll on, and our UK celebrity farmers, chefs and farming chefs do a stirling trade in fickle relationships to the idea of f. A conversation about British butter deserves a whole other art project. In wider contemporary society the issues have developed as ever, last year talk of 'credit crunch' replacing that of 'climate change'. But me, despite terrible, terrible fear, as an artist, I've a growing sense that this is how I fit.

To question and have doubts is not a sign of unbelief but in fact, faith.