The Introduction to Permaculture course Darren and I both took part in last weekend was brilliant and for those of you wishing to find a positive path in the heavy chaotic business of worrying about what the future holds for ourselves, our families, our friends and our societies and lifestyles this course delivered by Ruth O’Brien in Bristol comes very highly recommended by both of us..

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I found out today that I’ve been accepted onto the Renewable Energy and the Built Environment MSc course at the Centre for Alternative Technology Starting in Sept. I’m really chuffed as I don’t have a degree so I had to rely on my commercial experience to be accepted onto it and it’ll also allow me to right the wrong of dropping out of my Computer Science BSc course many moons ago.

I’m doing it over 2 years part-time so I can juggle it with community work, family life, some fee earning external work too.

If all goes well then this qualification coupled with what I learn as we try to take Trelay off-grid should give me enough experience to set-up as a renewable energy consultant in the coming years. I suspect it’s the sort of role that will become more and more in demand as time goes on…

I’ve decided to learn to ride a horse as I suspect it will be a good means of transport in the future when petrol is too expensive for Ms Average to afford to run a car.

I thought it would be good to accompany our young daughter but at six, she has decided she is too scared of being on a (tiny) pony and will try again next year. It’s not a nasty skill to learn – as soon as I’d clambered up onto poor 20 year old Verdi’s back we set off on a woodland hack through masses of wild garlic and alongside a pretty little babbling brook. It was a strange sensation having to trust that the animal would not slip into the stream and topple me off but we made it back to the riding school in one piece and then began to learn how to trot. A very way to spend a Saturday lunchtime in the spring sunshine.

Dear old Bealers sourced and bought a beautiful spinning wheel for my christmas present, hid it in his office for weeks and even managed to somehow stop our chatty office cleaner from spilling the beans to me whenever I bumped into her in the village or when she helped us move house. On Christmas day I was presented with an enormous box which contained not only the wheel itself but a huge bag of Jacob sheep fleece and the necessary additional equipment needed to get spinning fleece into yarn (combs, extra bobbins and a ‘niddy noddy’).

For a few months it has been a pretty ornament in the porch until I recently attended a wonderful one-day ‘learn how to spin’ course at the very cool ‘Spinning Weal‘ shop in Clevedon, Somerset (the website has a very good online store for wool, yarns, dyes and quilting things it also has a calendar of forthcoming courses and events).

It was a fascinating day. I discovered that spinning is a rewarding, meditative passtime which seems to bring one back in touch with an activity which must have been essential to  many of our ancestors. For the duration of the course I was learning to spin with some really interesting women and our course tutor Sarah had loads of insight into the history of spinning.

By the end of the day I had been taught not only how to spin yarn but also how to ply it with another yarn and then to make a ball of something which could actually be knitted into fabric. We were also shown how to blend dyed yarns with one another and how to make different textures of yarns.

Since coming back from the course I have been keen to do more spinning but I have not been able to make the time as we don’t sit down to eat until 8.30ish. Perhaps it is the sort of activity I will have more time for when the nights are long and the fire is lit.