Playing catch up after a brief pause

Caravans, Community, & Contemplations

Sunday 2nd June

June arrived with amazing stealth. I know we all say this as we get older, but oh my isn’t time jogging along? Not so long ago I thought summer would never come and here we are, June. Summer, technically.

A lesser spotted warm sunny day

The weather is not so bad, yes it’s been another overcast and windy day and the rain is dribbling down, although the acoustics in Doug mean it sounds like a storm from hell. But it’s balmy, I’m not even wearing a jumper (in Doug), Kiki is passed out on the picnic blanket and Erik is doing something.

We live quite independent lives, coming together in the evening to eat, usually a meal prepared by E. On Monday we had the rare treat of cooking together. It was quite a jocular affair, I somehow got roped into peeling all the potatoes but it does mean we have a stash of mash in the freezer. And if you’ve known me for any length of time you’ll know, that like Badger, mash is one of my all time favourite foods, comfort on another level.

There was no update last week, not because there was nothing to update you on, but time escaped me. I’m a little (a lot) disappointed with myself to be honest. Last year May and June here were glorious. Long days, warmer weather, Doug had just been built and I promised myself that in 2024 I would make sure I worked less. I don’t need August or Christmas off, I want early summer off thanks.

Only it hasn’t quite worked out that way.

A mix of work commitments, rash decisions and overwhelm leading to compete paralysis have meant that I have either been staring blankly at the computer, wondering aimless around with a flutter in my chest or mindlessly scrolling Instagram, Substack and LinkedIn, all the while hoping for some kind of revelation that will snap me out of it and get me going again.

Nothing has been forthcoming, so apparently I have to do the work myself.

A rash decision

Introducing Colin the Caravan, officially best mates with Doug the Crub.

Do you remember me saying a few weeks ago that we’d seen something on Facebook, well it was a 3 bedroom static caravan from down the road, literally. Somehow it felt like all the stars had aligned, which is ridiculous because the stars don’t align do they? The patterns we see from this teeny tiny speck of a planet called Earth is not representative of where the stars are in the great big vast universe.

Gemini Constellation, Allexxandar from Getty Images via Canva

I digress. The point is, it seemed too good to be true. As we walked down the lane to have a look around it, the sun was shining, we had joy and frivolity in our hearts and zero sense in our minds.

Even when, two days later, watching it being towed up the road being walked up by the previous careful owner, the enormity of what we’d taken on still hadn’t sunk in. Everything seemed to be slotting into place. Until the guys that brought it up started talking about wind, anchoring it down, concrete blocks, taking the weight off the wheels, levelling the ground and so on.

We hadn’t thought it through had we? We do have form.

As yet, we still don’t know many people up here, certainly not all the handy people that everyone else seems to know. The advice of ‘I’d speak to P’ or ‘M is your man’ - who are these people & how do I find them?

Naturally this resulted in a sharp dip in both our moods and left us gormlessly looking between Colin and ourselves asking ~ what the fuck have we actually done?

Inevitably I went through the worst case scenario. If nothing else I like to be mentally prepared before the metaphorical shit hits the fan.

“Ok” I said, “the actual worst that can happen is that, it get’s blown through the car and into the cottage.”

“That means we lose £x on the van, £x on the car, the porch would be done for, we may lose a window and the chances are it’ll do some damage to the roof. However, with any luck, the car and porch will prevent it from knocking out the oil tank. Conservative estimate of £30k?”

“Yeah that doesn’t seem to bad…” Gulp.

Needless to say, we haven’t sorted it out yet although ‘M’ has been in touch as he was spraying the field next door and can make us some concrete blocks and ‘P’ may have a couple going spare. Onwards.

Why a caravan?

When we first looked at the ‘property’ online, the field next door to the main garden looked ideal for building a small chalet/granny annex that could serve us in two ways. Initially as a place for us to live while we renovate the cottage, then as a place friends and family can stay and a holiday rental, although I’m thinking a writers retreat would be nicer.

E and I have been struggling to agree on what we should build. The look of it wasn’t a problem, some kind of wooden kit house, but size has been an issue. I have my heart set on a two bed and he reckons a one bed would do.

My argument for a 2-bed is space, we both need somewhere to work:

• His counter argument is that we will need to create a separate office space anyway as the plans for the cottage don’t include a workspace (it’s pretty teeny).

His argument for a 1-bed is cost:

• My counter argument is that much like with Doug, the economy of scale is in our favour and to ‘upgrade’ to a two-bed would be relatively inexpensive.

And so we have been at this impasse for about 6 months, it’s May, or rather it was, and there was absolutely no sign of us getting the the annex, the chalet, the nook, done in 2024.

Enter Colin.

If we pull our fingers out and rally the troops, we could have it anchored, plumbed in and electrics sorted within a couple of months, allowing us to move in before Autumn, meaning we can get started with the reno! Eek. Thankfully Colin is a winter van, fully insulated and double glazed with central heating, we anticipate it being warmer this winter than the previous two. Anything above 15℃ is a win to me!

Oh and Colin isn’t his formal name, it was suggested in the girls WhatsApp group, so if you have any suggestions please hit me up ⬇️

Community minded

It seems everyone here has a sense of community, or at least everyone I’ve met so far. When we first arrived the Scottish Government had announced the Carbon Neutral Island project, with Hoy being one of the 6 islands chosen. Shortly after arriving, I saw a post on FB for people to join the steering group and jumped at the chance.

I joined for two reasons, firstly because it’s an ace project and secondly, I thought it would be a good opportunity to meet people and socialise a little bit. No act is ever truly altruistic right?

Anyway it didn’t work, I met a few people, but the difference between meeting folk and making friends is that you have to put some effort in and this is where I struggle. I don’t know if I’ve talked about this in a previously, but again this is something I can add to my list of things to procrastinate over. The underlying reason why I don’t get in touch with folk or follow up is, I think, because I don’t want to annoy anyone. What if they don’t want to meet for a coffee and do it just because they feel they have to?

It’s a small community and people seem to open and kind, what if they’re just humouring me? What if I seem ok at first, but after 6 months of regular coffees (tea in my case) and random WhatsApp messages they wish they’d never started it and want to escape but they can’t, we’re stuck on an island together.

So I started a bookclub. Because what better way to stare the possibility of rejection square in the face than saying ‘do you want to join my club?’

As it turns out I don’t have a reputation for being hugely annoying just yet because we now have a massive bookclub, fifteen members in total, yep. We had our first meeting on Monday 20th May and folk seemed pretty happy with how it went.

Mind you, I was soooo awkward. SO awkward. To the point of sitting there as we started saying, ‘wow this is awkward’. It turns out that as I move further into my peri-menopausal years my filter is working less efficiently. I suspect it’s also a side effect of being self employed and losing some of those ‘water cooler’ skills that I used to have. All the networking in the world doesn’t make looking round a room full of people any less daunting or any more comfortable.

Still, once I got over myself and said the general blurb, people started chipping in and things got more conversational. Next time will be far easier. We went with my suggestion for the first book, The First Phone Call from Heaven by Mitch Albom, which has been a little disappointing. It’s not nearly as good as The Five People You Meet In Heaven but perhaps I’m misremembering.

I’m going to wait to hear what others say and give it a full appraisal after our next meeting. I’d love to know if you’ve read it and what you thought.

Are you a lists person?

I am, I adore a list. So much so that I will spend more time making lists, refining them and planning out my tasks than doing the actual work. I feel like this level of procrastination is an art form and shouldn’t be dismissed. I am dedicated to creating plans, just not at all dedicated to seeing them through.

I’m a magpie for shiny new things but quickly become disinterested or disengaged and move onto the next thing. I think that’s why I like books so much, even when stories are similar they are nuanced with new characters and environments, a different viewpoint.

Before I started writing this post I exported my Asana task list into a spreadsheet to get my head around all the things I need to get done before next weekend. Not that what I would like to do, this is I/we have to do, including tidying the house before visitors arrive on Sunday and at least cleaning the Colin’s ‘master bedroom’ as one of our guests will be staying there for a few nights. No toilet, no electricity, just a bed. Don’t ever let it be said we don’t know how to treat people.

Now I find myself sitting here, swinging between feeling inspired, or rather, impelled to write and paralysed by what I have to do. Looking at it with my pragmatic, sensible Hannah head on, it’s all so utterly achievable, IF I crack on and do it.

Big IF.

Again, I lay this at the door of the peri-menopause although my counsellor recently asked if I had considered that I might have ADHD. It is something I think on and then immediately dismiss. I’m not sure it fits. Although nothing does, which leaves me curious.

Before I leave you, I wanted to say that some aspects of my origin story part 1 ~ the formative years ~ are factually inaccurate. I’ve started watching the Good Life again and it turns out my memory of it from childhood is not that perfect!

Take care,

Han 🌱

PS. The hardest part of writing is editing and at 9.02am on Monday morning I cannot bring myself to read through this post again.

The fortnight in stats

• Cakes: 2 - Erik’s birthday & book club

• Exercise sessions: ZERO, yes ZERO

• Cold dips: only two, I’m struggling to get the temperature much below 15 but I do miss it. Not sure where that leaves me.

• Wind factor: not enough to tear Colin apart.

• Latest sunset: 10:13pm

• Increase in day length: 49 minutes

The fortnight in Sub-stats:

• Subscribers: 58 (↑ 3) at this rate I’ll have 100 by October.

• Followers: 93 (↑ 14)

• Pledges: 1 (＝)

Last update: 62% open rate; 70 views; 6 likes; 0 comments; 0 new subs; 0 restack.