April 22nd 2020

[H] A month has passed and we are still in lockdown. It is becoming increasingly apparent that this isn’t going to be over any time soon and we are going to have to get used to living differently. Oddly though, we seem to have been very busy!

Malcolm has been “self-isolating in the digger” most days, moving the mountain of crushings around the site to create new levels and a clean, sound base at the entrance of the site for lorries to turn and unload deliveries. I’ve been quite involved locally with volunteering and contacting older folk in the valley to make sure they’re ok. Sadly we’ve had our first Covid-19 death in the village and are desperately hoping there won’t be any more. The weather has been glorious and lambs are starting to appear in the valley, so we try to focus on that, keep occupied and realise how lucky we are to be locked down where we are.

We’ve started working on the top floor of South View, our “other project”. It was already a converted loft and the big job is to strip it back to the bare stone and slate, add insulation and then put all the walls and ceilings back and make it nice again. Just a bit of redecorating really!! The worst part so far has been pulling down the lathe and plaster ceiling because the roof void was full of ancient soot and it all came down with the ceiling in a horrible, choking, black cloud. And some of the walls had been patched in the past with cement render which is not breathable and so had to come off (see the South View section for an explanation of why) - that was a bit messy too. Luckily we already have the gear because trying to get hold of a face mask these days could be difficult.

We also decided that now would be a good time to start growing our own food. We plan a large vegetable plot at Cragside when it’s finished but currently the ground we’ve set aside for that is being used as a holding bed for plants that we rescued from around the garden before it got trashed. So, just to give ourselves a bit more work to do(!), we’ve dug up the garden at South View and turned it into an allotment.