News From the Hill

Archive for the ‘Blogging’ Category

I had the most amazing bath this evening, in fact I had the first ever bath in our place!

A friend came to visit to help us build our house and the house building did happen, it’s just that the work we were doing was slow and really only needed two people for most of the work so she was a little bit at a loss as to what to do.

We had finished the foundations so while we were setting out the house frame and playing with string and maths she busied herself with one of the many bath tubs that we have collected.

We have often thought of organising an outside bath and I have just the place in mind – it’s a wee hollow near our stream with a beautiful whitethorn (hawthorn) tree growing at it’s edge. One night that I stayed outside to watch the full moon move across the sky ’til dawn  and I sheltered in the hollow when a north wind blew for a while, it was a beautiful place to shelter and felt really magical.

Nice and all as that spot will be for a winter or spring bath it is too sheltered for a midge season (summer) bath so my friend and I walked around a bit and found a great spot for the bath tub when it is humid, misty and midgy.

I went back to working on the house project and my friend got seriously stuck in to building up two clay banks to hold the bath and supply insulation. She also dug a fire hole under the bath and then dug a channel to drain the  fire hole as it is likely to fill up with rain.

She made use of two lovely little stone walls which were simply sitting in the middle of the field to support the clay banks. The walls also now make a great place to put a mug of tea and a night-light for night-time baths.

The fire was started with local fire-wood gathered in the woods and then we used turf to keep the fire going. It’s a job for patient people, the fire was going for about four hours and the job of walking down to the stream and carrying up water also took some time.

It’s great when friends come to stay and bring great energy and motivation with them!

Eventually the bath was piping hot and as the evening was coming to a close I got the pleasure of being the first into the bath. It was a windy and rainy evening and it did seem a little odd to be going into the garden in a bathrobe and a hat when it was raining!

It was SO worth it! What pleasure it was to be in a hot bath with the rain gently dropping all around – glad I wore a hat to keep my head dry and warm because the wind picked up and I found myself in the bath-tub laughing as the wind blew my hat off, the rain became heavy, the water was piping hot and the turf smoke wafted around!

After some time the rain stopped and the sky became blue with white billowy clouds gently moving across the rainbow above me, as I lazed in a hot bath enjoying the view.

Aw, the simple pleasures in life…

This post was prompted by Suzan over at Scrub Oak, who posted about some books she is reading at the moment. I thought I would post about the book I am currently reading.

The book is called Food Is Better Medicine Than Drugs, by Patrick Holford and Jerome Burne.
I think it would be a very informational read for anyone in healthcare or a caring situation. It may help you understand the drugs being prescribed for yourself or for someone you care about

I am still working through the book and will probably do a book review of sorts when finished. It is fascinating stuff although I have to admit that the beginning of the book, which concentrates in the pharmaceutical industry had me fairly angry, huge parallels to the energy industry and the oil/nuke boys wanting to control the entire market and have us all entirely reliant on them – oops - think that’s another post?

The book goes into quite a bit of detail about “blockbuster” drugs such as statins, high blood pressure pills, pain-killers and anti-inflammatories, anti-depressants etc. I found it fairly shocking really that so many of these drugs do so much harm, for example in Britain more people die from prescription non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) than from some cancers.

I have become aware that I don’t know what sort of drug regularity structures we have in this country, do we rely on US FDA recommendations? I must try to educate myself more. The FDA and the British body MHRA are scarily inept and often the people in charge have links to the Pharmaceutical industry, until recently it was not illegal in Britain for MHRA decision makers to be on the payroll of pharmaceutical companies – hard to believe!

The majority of these “daily” drugs are designed to deal with symptoms, not causes. If we never deal with the cause of the “unwellness” then we will always need these drugs to maintain the status quo.

Not only are some of these drugs designed to be a part of our daily lives, some of them actually produce a need for more drugs! Some NSAIDs (including aspirin) are so hard on the stomach lining that they require the use of another drug to protect the stomach and at worst sometimes cause gastro-intestinal bleeding.

I bought the book to educate myself about arthritis aches and what nutritional advice I could follow to protect myself from these aches without resorting to prescription drugs. Anyway, so far I have discovered that the usual healthy food advice applies in reducing the aches and pains.

Supplements such as chondroitin, glucosomine, msm, omega 3, epa and dha (healthy fats) are all advised for daily consumption to ease inflammation and should be just as useful as taking a daily NSAID.  Naturally daily exercise is also important.
That’s what I gleaned so far, I had skipped ahead and had a quick look at the relevant chapter after I bought the book so that I could do some supplement shopping too before heading home and now I am reading from the beginning.
I am hoping that about six weeks from now I will know if the new regime of supplements and taking nuts, seeds and hemp oil will help ease the aches I have started to feel over the last two months.
I am guessing that doing all those healthy things would help delay the onset of the aches for some people. Obviously these are just my opinions and should not be taken as advice to anyone.

Yeah, we had more of the white stuff today!

Snow Deep

I had a lovely morning, I reckoned that the rain would come at some time today so I was enjoying the snow while I could. I did all the morning jobs listening to that lovely crunch underfoot as I filled water buckets to feed the big pot on the stove for hot water for dish washing, decanted spring water from the large outdoor containers into the container that we use indoors, fed the cats and swept the snow off the PV (photovoltaic) panels.

Sweeping the PV Panels

I did the morning jobs at a nice easy pace, enjoying the work, knowing that I would go for a walk when I had finished, knowing that I would walk uphill a bit today to see the views from up higher before the fog moved in.

The Hill Road

Before I emptied the compost bucket into the compost heap I had to clear the snow off the waiting heap first. I knew that the cut grass pile that we use to cover the compost heap was running low, I had intended to move a few of the smaller grass piles closer to the compost area but the snow made that difficult so I emptied the ashes from the fire over it instead.

Snowy Views

I went in to light the fire and I was watching the morning weather forecast say that it was raining whilst it was still snowing outside. However I suspected that they probably would be right eventually so I grabbed a banana and the camera bag and headed off for a walk in the falling snow.

The Tree Line

The Snow Fence

We had a well deserved day out today. A lovely morning by the fire and then we went to a nearby town for a coffee and a sandwich and a browse through some shops. It was lovely to not be in any sort of mad panic about buying things, I bought some craft supplies for making a few Christmas decorations and looked at possible gifts but mainly we just rambled through town.

Then we went to the cinema and watched The day the Earth Stood Still. Warning - If you have not seen the movie yet then don’t read any further because I will be giving away the ending although you may have seen or read the old science fiction story anyway.  We had fun on the way home discussing what would happen if we lost all technology as the earth did in the film ending, if we had no telephones, no vehicles, no power lines transmitting energy etc.

We have become so accustomed to easily travelling about as and when we want. just think how it could take for a letter to reach friends or family you thought nothing of hopping in the car to go see?  Staying in touch these days is so easy with a text or email no matter how far away we live from each other. Thanks to computers, social networking and blogs, we even stay in touch with people we have never met in person.

How many towns, if any, would have enough food being grown locally to survive? How long would it take for local food industries to get underway?  How would people even get clean drinking water? We have lost so many of our very basic life skills. Obviously we have different set of contemporary life skills now – how to use a computer, how to walk through cities avoiding eye contact etc.

I don’t mean this as a depressing piece, we just started wondering about these things. I think it’s great that so many people are interested in learning the more basic life skills like growing food and making clothes, even if just to keep those skills alive.

Hurray for the basics…

If you are new to reading this blog you may be confused by entries appearing in a very strange calender order – the explanation being that I had lost all my entries due to a large technical hiccup in Canada where my blog was sitting on a server that became non-existent.

I found some of my articles backed up on a usb thingy and put them up on the blog a few evenings ago and then I discovered last evening that most of my blog was still saved for me on my google reader – hurray for google!! I have spend the evening copying and pasting my entries back into the blog so very little has now been lost, isn’t technology wonderful after all?

As I write this i am looking at the rising moon out of the window and I have to admit that it is very difficult to stay focussed on the screen, my eyes are constantly drawn to the wonders of nature outside the window.  There is a storm forecast for tomorrow with 110mph wind so we will have more wonders of nature to observe. We will be visiting friends who have a wind turbine and the wind will certainly test it tomorrow, hopefully everything will stay where it is supposed to.

Sleep well and stay safe…