It pretty much goes without saying that these are strange times. Nothing stranger, for me, than the fact that I’m not really looking forward to lockdown ending. Is an image of caterpillar into butterfly too fanciful as a metaphor, as above? Of course there are one or two things I’m missing. Our weekly pub lunch with the dogs and the odd trip to our other properties. Although the last two weeks or so we have been visiting our vineyard and I’m writing about that elsewhere.
But I’m not missing much and I know this will sound bad, but what I’m not missing most of all is people. That’s people in crowds, in queues, in shops, on buses etc. And that sounds alright but, and this doesn’t sound so good, I’m not missing friends, some of them at least.
Let me say straight away there are friends whose company I enjoy. We met a couple of them last weekend after a gap of about 10 weeks. They brought their own bottle of Moet and even their own glasses, we were up at the vineyard, the views and the weather were excellent and plenty of room to maintain a healthy distance. What’s not to like?
This was the first time we’d had the opportunity for a ‘how has it been for you?’ conversation with anybody other than the dogs and Mrs Summerhouse. I felt a bit awkward admitting we’d quite enjoyed it, so some relief when they said they felt pretty much the same.
The male half went so far as to say he’d been hankering after the solitude of the West coast of Scotland. We’d talked about this before after our caravan trip up there a couple of years ago and my blog about Gomera more recently. Selling up and moving lock, stock and internet connection. Local approval permitting of course.
But as I say these are strange times and one bit of strangeness is in the form of Youtube videos of people (mostly American) living off-grid by building log cabins in the wilderness. I have no idea why these clips started appearing on my Youtube site. I have no memory of searching them out. I have not ‘liked’ any of the ones that I have received even though I have enjoyed them. But they’re coming through in bucket or shed or cabin, loads.
They vary, sometimes just one person, other times two people. The cabins vary from literally cutting down surrounding trees then all the hard work by hand and hand tools of stripping the bark, squaring off the logs, carving out the joints, building them up and, even with time lapse this looks incredibly hard work. Too hard for moi.
But there are kit builds, cabins built for no money from pallets and donated, second-hand timber. There are many showing one or more people building using labour-saving tools run off of diesel / electric generators. Chain saws; portable workshops with full-size planers and bench-mounted chop saws; nail guns, battery-powered drills and screwdrivers, and so on. I might not be interested in actually building the cabin but I definitely want to own these bad boys. And in some cases I do and mighty handy they’ve been during my recent DIY fest. Remind me to tell you about my new gate sometime.
So the gate is not a cabin, but I do have plans for yet another shed I have two and a summerhouse up there already) up at the vineyard built out of my favourite material – corrugated iron, the sort with age or patina if you like the word, which I do. But the cabin, even though we do have just the piece of land in Colorado on which to build it, seems less likely. This doesn’t, however, seem to reduce the number of videos showing me how to do it, filling my screen. And along with each one the concept of living in isolation.
I know I’m kidding myself but the attractions of genuine aloneness (including Mrs Summerhouse and the pups, of course) has, as I said at the beginning of this retirement blog (when we can do what we damn well please if we can afford it), seemed almost achievable with the practice run lockdown has offered.
So achievable, yes, desirable? Well we will see. Talk, as we all know, is cheap but on re-reading this retirement blog checking out its credibility, there is one bit of it I stand by – I don’t miss people, well most of them. They probably don’t miss me either.