country life
Loyal readers may remember that my son and his father share a deep hostility to the countryside. The last time Mr Fixit went to Wales, it took just two hours for him to retreat to bed, declaring he was too ill to eat anything except fruit. When I brought him 
As for Magnus, the last time I proposed scooping him into one of our periodic rural trips, he looked at me with the Alan Rickman sneer he’s been practising for adolescence, and said, ‘When I wake up, I want to see HOUSES!’ He’s also terrified of dogs, which tend, not unreasonably, to see green spaces as their rightful playground and appear in them at random, unconstrained by leash or muzzle.
So his poor sister Dolly, who adores anything furry and even quite likes camping, has had a lifetime of deprivation on this front. And I have been quietly breeding a plan to chop in our modest London home for a rural 
The conjunction of these circumstances made me wonder why it had not occurred to me before to take Dolly on a farm holiday at lambing time. I would get a few days with no housework, and she would be so entirely won over that our return, action plan in place, would be unbeatable.
Meanwhile Magnus and Mr Fixit would do manly urban bonding things, like watching action movies while the EU still allows them a 
It all went brilliantly; the farm was gorgeous, the countryside was gorgeous, the lambs were gorgeous, the breakfast (today’s eggs and last year’s pigs followed by a quick trot to a woodland dell to feed 
With this in mind, I determined next morning to observe more closely the peregrinations of our delightful host and hostess, to see what the job entailed. I began to notice that they seemed very busy. It was really quite hard, from the comfort of the sunny porch, to keep track of where they were , as they drilled carrots, fed baby chicks, rescued orphan lambs or mothers with prolapses, checked heifers’ udders, moved feed, and rounded up 
Still, they were very healthy on it. That sort of gentle but continuous exercise is supposed to be the best, isn’t it? A bit like Tai Qi. That’s why the Okinawans live to be 110 and have great skin. Of course, Mrs Farmer also had the bread to bake and the supplies to get in for the B and B, subsidised by an EU grant as an education centre for local schoolchildren. Except, as she explained, the local school children weren’t too keen on being educated as farmers, possibly because their parents had already told them all about it.
The next day, the weather turned, and it rained continuously for thirty hours. As I sat by the window with my book, keeping warm and dry, I couldn’t help noticing that Mr and Mrs Farmer were still out, doing exactly what they had been doing yesterday, except getting cold and wet. ‘It’s a vocation,’ Mr Farmer explained, shedding more mud than boot on the mat by the kitchen door.
Well, I’ve had plenty of experience of vocations too, if it means living on almost nothing instead of being paid to do a proper job. Then of course, writing and arty stuff don’t entail working on-site twenty hours a day, every day of the year, most of them outside. But then being tied to the place wouldn’t matter, would it, if you couldn’t afford a holiday anyway?
‘That’s all very well, but why do you really do it?’ I asked him, once he’d got indoors, changed his clothes and dried his face, hands and hair. ‘Well, the 
In those two sentences, my entire plan – to live in nature, preserve the value of my tiny assets and ensure the future security of my children – was triumphantly vindicated. But oddly, as we packed up and set off back to 
