I am having an expansionist – almost imperialist – moment at the Granary, colonising the ground floor and leading an expeditionary force into the small orchard where the chickens are soon to find themselves relocated to more distant quarters. The ground will be turned over and made into an arrangement of raised vegetable beds and a greenhouse. The digging has started: a novel exercise for my youngest son, removing him from his usual armchair where he is ostensibly reading A History of the Arab Peoples but more generally working on the magnum opus of his playlist.
At present, we occupy the top two storeys of the building, originally a repository for horse harness and grain. The bottom floor once housed ewes and newborn lambs, but more recently has been the farm office and a large room full of random things that haven’t found an obvious home anywhere else. They include: an enormous The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe-style cupboard, two large chest freezers, two bins of chicken feed, a washing machine, all the ponies’ tack, a retired piano and a stuffed and mounted goose. David is pleased about moving the farm office back into the house – he says he felt exiled in the Granary – and new quarters (or the tip) are slowly being found for everything else.
One freezer is now triumphantly installed in the back hall of the house, but not before the usual domino effect: gun cabinet to be moved to make room, cordless drill out of battery, charger nowhere to be found, trip to Hereford to buy new one, hall needed repainting, search for vaguely matching paint, transfer of freezer contents in wheelbarrow involving split bag of damsons which bounced like bullets all over kitchen floor.
When we lived in Australia, visitors roosted with us for weeks (my mother-in-law once stayed for a ground-breaking three months), which stretched the bounds of hospitality. Admittedly, Herefordshire is not quite the same, but still, friends and family must be offered a bed for at least one night and, frankly, there is not room at present to do this in any sort of style. As well as guest accommodation, the renovations will provide space for boots, dogs, laundry, loud music, youthful lounging and – most thrilling – a woodburning range stove for slow cooking, general winter cosiness and a hedge against the fast approaching day when only Russian oligarchs can afford to fill an oil tank.
They will also signal liberation of many household possessions at present stored in the sheep shed at the back of the cattle yards. Packing cases have been a feature of my life for far too long: my former husband and I agreed on many things – God, Thomas Hardy, the horribleness of raw celery – but which side of the world to live on was not among them. And so our furniture spent a great deal of time trundling back and forth in container ships between England and Australia to the places each of us tried to convince the other to call home. Now at last this new extension of my post-marital domestic realm has allowed for the unpacking of several more boxes of books and yielded a dog-eared copy of Elizabeth David’s French Provincial Cooking – just in time for instruction in the proper preparation of rabbit and pheasant.
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And so many surprises yet to emerge. But meanwhile, a note to the many readers who wrote asking for more information about the Showa gardening gloves I mentioned recently. I use the Nitrile 370 (£3.95 from www.gloves.trader.uk.com), but I believe each model is technically as good as another. It just depends what you want them for – pond work, pruning, pricking out... They’re so delicately surgical you could probably handle an emergency tracheotomy in them.