Well, the sun has set leaving a mix of light and dark blues clouding the skies and I’m coming to realisation that this time tomorrow I’ll be on the mainland for good. The caravan is clean, most of my stuff is packed and I haven’t got a damn thing to read.
This morning was, well, lets just say if it hadn’t been my second to last day I would have gotten rather annoyed. I woke up and it was pissing it down – really heavy rain the likes of which I haven’t seen for a good few weeks. I figured a nice easy day pottering around the farm and then some time inside doing some DTP for M’s yoga and tai chi classes. But M said coppice, so coppice it was.
The logic was that since the coppice was a wood the trees would stop the rain coming through so it would be relatively dry. Right. All waterproofed up, M dropped me at the coppice just outside Chale and went off to her Friday morning yoga class in Niton. I trudged across the field in the belting rain to the coppice. I could feel the water seeping through my shoes already. I slid down the bank into a muddy puddle and entered the sheltered area. It was soaking. Yes, the trees had stopped the rain from coming through but only for a bit and now all that collected water was pouring down in huge drops. Still, only a couple of hours of this and it’s not all that bad. I’d worked through worse weather weeding the fields and it wasn’t that cold. Just wet. And muddy. Really muddy.
I suppose the advantage to this weather was that I wasn’t really able to stop and sit down. I certainly couldn’t roll a cigarette. Hands are funny things – very hard to dry when you don’t have a towel. I managed to get the components of a fag together three times but was thwarted by blobs of water falling if not from above then from me. It’s quite humbling to realise you have absolutely no shelter at all.
I’d cut down a good amount of coppice, at least equal to that done on Monday, and started bundling it up for Fred to collect later. I didn’t have a clock on me and the sun was well obscured but surely M should be here to collect me by now. All the coppice was ready and still no sign. After sitting in the mud for a bit I figured I might as well get more coppice and as I did so the rain stopped. And then half an hour later the trees stopped dripping. And then at 2.00pm M turned up.
On Monday M was late picking me up because the car was leaking petrol and had to be fixed. This time she’d skidded into a ditch and had to call out a mechanic. I think there’s a pattern developing. By this stage the change in the weather and my adjustment to being damp and dirty meant I wasn’t in a bad mood, and the sight of M slightly frantic about having crashed leaving me stranded in the coppice while wearing plastic bags tied over her shoes brought a mutual smile.
As we drove back to the farm for a big lunch and a quick snooze I reflected on how I probably wouldn’t be roaming around a muddy wood with a heavy duty saw in the rain for quite some time. I wonder if I’ll miss it.