I spent the weekend with the twins at Trelay for a ‘new wave’ weekend where all stage 1 members like us got together to discuss many things relating to our possible lives together there.

It was really exciting to see that all of the new members share similar aims in terms of sustainability and resilience and also comforting to find them all to be nice, warm & really interesting and skilled people in their respective fields.We had a judge, some professional gardeners, a woodsman, a nurse and a (sustainable) heating engineer plus of course someone with really useful skills like web development, erm, no…. wait.

5 couples were fully or partially represented (Ackers was in Weymouth doing the unpleasant job of sorting out her recently deceased gran’s house) so should they all move on site full-time as we intend to then Trelay’s population is going to almost double.

We discussed a range of topics on our own and with existing members including conflict resolution, managing community work, where we’d all live and plans for the eco hostel amongst many other things.

We all agreed that it was really luxurious being able to discuss these important but relatively simple topics knowing that the foundations for the community were already in place and working.

I came away exhausted – it was like a 3 day job interview whilst being responsible for two six year olds -  but also positive and hopeful in equal measure that it’ll all work out and we’ll all be moving in this year.