A day in the life...

5th March 2009

Woke up this morning to three inches of snow. I set off across the fields with some barley and haylage for the sheep. They were pleased to see me. I have been feeling the temporary nature of existence a lot recently. Yesterday the air ambulance landed at a farm over the valley – I still don’t know why. I breathed in the morning air and thought to myself ‘we hang here in life by a thread’.

I haven’t written any of the book for five days now. Sometimes it seems like such a huge task that I just can’t get started. Then at night I lie in bed writing it in my head. Next day I turn the computer on and do anything rather than write. I have my doubts about this book, but I won’t let that stop me from writing it.

About 10.15 I set off across the moor to Haytor where I have been invited to a meeting about ‘sustainable tourism’. I told the guy I thought the title itself was an oxymoron, and he agreed with me. There were about ten of us there and I listened to what everyone had to say. Some pretty idealistic people there, mixed in with a few realists, plus me feeling pretty cynical about the whole thing. There seems to be a whole class of people who basically just live having meetings. Some of them, even most of them, are good people for sure, and some of them know their stuff, but a lot of it is worlds away from trying to make a living out of an honest business. Truth be told, I’m not sure if honest business is the best way to go any more. Most businesses these days seem to make their money from what is politely known as ‘funding’, or what might be more correctly called ‘hand outs’.

I met up with Ed at the meeting, an old acquaintance from when we lived at Haytor. When I said I had no idea why I had been invited to the meeting he shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘Well, it’s free heat isn’t it’. I know it was a farmers joke but to be honest, that’s what it has come down to for a huge wodge of the population these days.

One of my favourite sayings of all time is ‘these days’, as if they are any different to any other days (I learnt that from Tolstoy’s book Anna Karenina – just have to drop in the name of a Russian author there so that you all know I am not totally uncultured). In the break Ed filled me in on the details of a few of the local events. Fortunes gained and fortunes lost, that kind of thing. Then we had to fill a form in that asked us if we had found the meeting helpful. Of course I couldn’t resist a rant – something I am getting more prone to doing as the years go by.

So that was today…..so far!!