Weekend Away, Visitors- Familiar & Unknown, Wood-Piles

While the farm work carries on as usual & I continue to produce meals at regular intervals we have had a number of visitors over the past couple of weeks, including various family members making their annual summer pilgrimage ot the farm which is lovely. It is always good to see them,  but we also have had total strangers turning up having found their way here for an assortment of reasons, some of which have proved to be very interesting.
 For example last week a couple arived from London coming to look for a house that they last visited in 1969 (!) that happens to be the old 'big house' here on the farm. They certainly saw some changes but were able to tell us a large part of the history that we had not been able to discover for ourselves, which was fascinating.
The following day another couple turned up hoping we could tell them the whereabouts of a neighbour who had left the area about 25 years ago who had owned a Bristol motor-car that now belonged to friends of theirs in England who wanted to track its history. We weren't able to help them but they came in for a cup of tea and it turned out that they had been involved with the Soil Association  in the 1970's & had been small-scale cheese-makers which led to very interesting conversation for a couple of hours.

We still have our French student A., who seems to have settled in to our mode of living quite well. I don't think he has ever worked so hard in his life before but he no longer gets up at the crack of dawn to help with the morning milking! He eats everything that is put in front of him & is very polite & well-mannered. We converse reasonably well with him now and I hope he does feel that his English is improving, though we get some hilarious moments where his politeness overides comprehension!

We have another delightful family from Germany in the cottage this week and who seem very pleased with place and their two small children have been adopted by the Labradors as happens so often.

The Farmer & I went away for 24 hours this weekend having been invited to a party up in mid-Wales ( a sleep-over!) near Carno at a sweet cottage tucked away in a fold of the hills. It was accessible either over a railway line where one has to use yellow telephone to ensure that there are no trains rushing towards you or down a rough track with two gates to be opened and a very, very narrow railway bridge to drive under. We had borrowed Younger Son's Ford Focus which was just as well as I don't think our 4x4 would have squeezed through... as it was the wing mirrors were scraped on the stonework!
We had an excellent weekend of really great conversation, wonderful food & very interesting people many of whom had travelled up from London & Bristol and so lived very different lives to those of us in Welsh hills, and we have returned home exhausted.

The Farmer, Elder Son & A. are doing a splendid job of processing the very large logs piles that have sitting seasoning for a year or more and filling the fire-woods sheds with very satisfying mountains of logs which should keep us going for good long time.

This afternoon I think we shall be picking plums. There is a good crop this year and we must get them before the wasps!