Well, there has been the same news here as everywhere else in the country. But 2022 has got to be better. Surely…
We did, however, welcome lots and lots of guests to the Lodge during 2021, and mighty glad we were to have new people to chat to. Some guests were returning couples, which is lovely. They feel like family now.
Our house is now in the final stages of renovation. The builders arrived to put the new window in during October, and then again in December (gulp) to take up the stone flag floor (nothing special!) and replace with easy to clean (and flat!) tiles. The underfloor heating works a treat now and there’s no longer an excuse to leave the floor un-mopped.
The new back door is also in. Watching a Master Mason at work selecting stones individually is mesmerising. The deciding what paint colour to use on the new wall is just tedious.
The bathrooms are half way done, so there is STILL a pile of building stuff (and a skip) in the drive, but I believe the builders when they say that we’ll be all tidied up by the spring.
An absolutely unstoppable tree surgeon arrived in October to trim the fruit trees, and then turned up for odd days to take all the hedges back to bare bones and three trees down completely. It looks so different. The issue we have now is where to store all the wood…
We only had one little flood at the end of December – very odd. In 2020 we seemed to be getting ready for the river to break its banks every 5 minutes. All we got last week was a little water overtopping onto the flood meadow – nothing in our paddock at all. Very disappointing for the grandchildren who wanted to test the new wellies.
As the chickens die of old age we aren’t replacing them – with bird flu meaning that hens should be kept confined if not locked in it just seems not fair. The whole point of keeping the chickens was to know they had a completely free range life. Sad…
But the sheep are thriving, if noisy and spoiled.