It was dry this morning, by Lake District standards anyway, and the sort of day when outdoor things are almost possible.
We hauled Oliver out of bed and went to the farm.
This meant everybody putting on stout boots and warm jumpers and old clothes, because we were having another go at our long-term clearing out the shed project.
There has been an ancient wooden cart standing in the corner of Mark’s workshop for ever.
This does not sound especially intrusive, but it is not the best thing to have around when you are doing welding and things that make exciting sparks, and anyway it took up roughly as much room as another camper van would.
I suppose it must once have been, if not exactly beautiful, really quite useful, especially if you were fortunate enough to have the horse to go with it: which of course we have not.
In any case it had reached the stage of advanced decay where any attempt at movement would have meant an instant, and very dusty collapse.
Mark’s sister has been on an upmarket hippie course about clean energy flows and liked the idea of not having crumbling woodwormy things in the shed. Mark needed the space to park the camper van, and so it had got to go.
It was half-buried underneath a pile of ancient pitchforks and hooks and other disintegrating farming tools, most of which I couldn’t identify, having very little interest in medieval agricultural activities. We had brought all of our left-over-from-Christmas cardboard boxes, and used them to light a bonfire in the yard: then Mark took his chainsaw to the cart.
Most of it did not need the chainsaw. All the planks were so rotten that they crumbled as we pulled them out. The wheels came apart in my hands, leaving their rusty rims to be chucked into the skip for Mark’s uncle’s scrapyard, and we dragged the once-splendid shafts and axles and stout uprights across the yard and through the stinking mud, to the bonfire pile to be burned.
It felt strange to be seeing the end of something so old and hand-crafted, a thing which had once been of importance to people’s lives: something people had worked on and cared for and oiled and loaded, and it felt sad, although not especially surprising, that nobody had had the time or interest to care for it and maintain it before it was too late.
Of course it is a busy world, and always has been: and the unarguable fact is that creaky old carts are not nearly as useful as tractors. We remembered our French neighbours telling us about the wonder and joy of the day – not really so very many years ago – when they traded their heavy and exhausting oxen-ploughs in for the magnificently shiny new tractors. Wooden carts might be beautiful: but when a man has got a barn full of cattle to be fed and cleaned and cared for I have got no doubt which I would prefer to have.
We cleared all away and threw it on the bonfire, which sent the flames howling twenty feet in the air. Then we pulled out old palettes and sticks of ancient furniture and a pile of elderly pictures of Victorians whom we did not know, rotted and blackened with the damp, possibly the very people who had once harnessed a well-fed horse in polished harness between the shafts of the cart.
We burned them all, the last remaining echoes of those dead farmers becoming bright flames and then ash.
We were filthy when we finished, skin grimy from the dust and horrible mite-infested straw and timber, and hair matted with the dirt. Mark’s sister made coffee and agreed that the energy flow was definitely getting cleaner, and we hauled our mud-caked boots off and warmed our feet in front of her stove.
When we got home we had got to bath the dogs before they were allowed to set a paw on any of the carpets. We carried them straight upstairs and dumped them in the bath, and showered rivers of gritty brown sludge down the plughole. I had to clean the bath again afterwards.
I think I will very probably have to clean it again when we have showered.
But we have got a nice clean energy flow in the shed.
