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.

Last night Rhona, one of the three cows in the field, gave birth to a wee calf. Which seems to have disappeared. Admittedly I haven’t been working in their field today but the two times I’ve gone to have a look I’ve seen Rhona and the other cows but not her calf. It’s probably sheltering under a tree or something and I don’t want to investigate in case I worry Rhona, but it’s slightly frustrating. I was looking forward to seeing it stagger around endearingly but all I’ve seen so far is a very small brown shape lying in the grass in the distance first thing this morning.

More babies are on the way. Some of the chickens are broody again and one of them has been given duck eggs (M reckons she can corner the market in selling ducklings as no-one else bothers) while Ayisha, one of the Bengal cats is heavily pregnant and might, just might, give birth before I leave on Saturday.

Over lunch M was looking through the DEFRA guidelines for moving livestock and moaning about the petty regulations. Apparently Fred employs someone just to deal with all the admin stuff. I can’t really give an informed opinion on this but it does seem to come from another planet. I must have a good look through the DEFRA website at a later date.

After building a small perch for the chicken run to give them another dimension I spent most of the day weeding the flower beds which was quite nice as it was a small, contained job. Clearing a field of weeds is on such a massive scale that to just do a bed means you can really get down and eradicate. The end result is satisfyingly fascist compared to the anarchic organic wilderness of the rest of the farm. Though at the end of the day I know what I prefer.

I also spent an hour showing M how to scan stuff into her computer, something I’m more than happy to do (I always enjoyed IT training at work) but it’s quite an effort bridging the unintuitive whims of Windows and a non-computer oriented mind. I know that using a Windows PC is one big bodge requiring more mental sidestepping and abstract mapping than a walk across central London but the “average user” doesn’t expect to need to do this or have the time to develop such maps. So I have to try and explain that it’s not their fault while not getting them disillusions with the whole thing and giving up. I’m a bit out of practice and it was hard work but we got there in the end. Computer training is a bit like teaching adults to walk or eat – it’s easy if you’ve had years of practice but…

Funny, again I haven’t wanted to write this journal for a few days. Is it because I’m leaving soon that my mind is on other things? Or is it that the routine of life here is not stimulating me to write? All I know is that when I looked at the handheld I just didn’t have the urge or will to write in it.

Still, some stuff has happened. The young chickens have again been on the move. You’ll remember on the 11th they were released from their little chicken runs and allowed to roam around the paddock but after spending a good hour at the end of the day trying to get some of them safely shut away from the fox M decided this was not such a good idea. This morning a new plan. My big chicken house is finally going to be used for chickens and we moved in five of them. At first I was using a piece of wood to corner them towards M but her arms weren’t long enough so she asked me to grab them. This was the first time I’d had to physically handle the birds but jumping on sheep hadn’t been so bad so I went for it, grabbing them by the leg so M could pick them up. As with the ducklings before them the chicks stuck together in a block, uncertain about the concept of not existing in a single square metre of space, but eventually they spread out. Tomorrow will be interesting as we mix in more chicks from different mothers. Will they fight? Most certainly, but hopefully with no major casualties.

The main impetus for not mixing the chicks with the older generation of chickens is the ever present threat of the fox. I’ve seen the fox from my caravan window twice now. The first time I thought it was Saffy, the hunter cat, but the colour was slightly too dark. I went out and chased it away, although to be honest this consisted of making my presence known causing the fox to dart away across the field. The nest time I saw it in the freshly cut hay field presumably hunting the wild birds feeding on grass seeds scattered by the harvest. There are a few remains about the place – pairs of wings with the body missing looking like they’ve been left there by very small angels. Both these visits were in the middle of the day and within 20 metres of the farmyard, which is a worry. M says she had 20 chickens a few months back and now there’s just nine, most of them being cockrells, which is annoying as they don’t lay eggs, being male and all. It also means the balance is wrong with too many cocks fighting over an ever decreasing pool of hens. So the new lot will be kept penned up. And now you know why free range eggs are more expensive (and not strictly “free range”).

The hot weather has definitely broken and it’s jumpers before sunset, but only just before. That said, the Island seems to have missed the thunderstorms reportedly covering the south of England and working their way north. My rusty knowledge of meteorology implies this might be the relative lack of ground heat rising from the surrounding sea, assuming that ground heat is an important ingredient of thunder clouds. Also there’s still very little wind so no chance of weather created elsewhere blowing in. But above all is the empirical evidence that weather on the Island never relates to the forecast, so if it’s supposed to be stormy in the south it won’t be here.

There were a couple of showers though – one in the early morning and another in the afternoon – which have cooled things down a bit and a fairly consistent cloud cover kept the sun at bay, but while it hasn’t been sweaty the rain has dried rapidly, so much so I was working in a downpour without really getting wet. If anything the weather today has been perfect, as transitional weather so often seems to be.

Lots of little jobs today as the main job was abandoned on health and safety grounds when I very nearly fell off a ladder twice. Trimming the top of the fir tree hedge is proving to be a harder job than the original cut. The first time round I was able to work in and up the trees but this time I have to attack from above. This means using a very long ladder and laying it at a 45 degree angle to the tree so that when I’m at the top I’m overlooking the trees rather that looking up at them. Already you can see this is not safe as the ladder can slip backwards if no-one’s holding it steady. Then there’s what the ladder is actually resting on. If the trunk is visible then it can rest on that but otherwise it winds up on branches or hooked over branches. Now imagine if the bottom of the ladder slips slightly while the top is hooked over a branch. The whole ladder moves back putting all the weight on the branch rather than the trunk. At the same time the two parts to the ladder are seperated thanks to the top being hooked. And I’m right at the top with my heart popping through my throat and a sudden realisiation that I’m a bit too high to jump safely while the only thing keeping me and the ladder up is a branch about as thick as a stick of rock. Fuck. Slowly I edged down the ladder trying to keep it from flipping over and holding on to branches to minimise the pressure before jumping down. As this was the second time it had gone screwy I decided enough was enough. Especially as this was a pretty much cosmetic operation. Generally I don’t have much fear of clambering over things and taking risks but this was the limit. The job will be done but not without someone standing at the bottom of the ladder.