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It was absolutely freezing in our room when we woke up, so it was even harder to get up for breakfast at 7.30. Heather served us some porridge, which Alice started putting jam onto, until Heather said that the amount on the table was all we had, so we had sugar and dried bananas instead. We then each had a slice of toast each, and then tea and coffee whilst Heather took Hamish to the bus stop for the school bus. Apparently the colder the morning, the hotter it gets throughout the day... gulp!
First task was to clear the horse paddock of poo, which I had assumed we would be doing using a shovel, but we were just given plastic gloves to scoop it up into the sacks. This wasn't as bad as it sounds and throughout the day I was quite good at making our jobs more glamorous than they were, for example I was thinking it's not really that much different to picking up plums, as the poo didn't smell, and it's only really made up of hay. I probably won't be so fond of pig poo though. It also made me appreciate living in Wantage (!!!) as it's big enough so that you don't feel too much of a country bumpkin when you go into a city, but you're not pathetic when it comes to getting in amongst the muck. The only problem I had with it was that it made our backs hurt a bit, but hopefully the longer we do it, the stronger our backs will get.
We filled up all the sacks that were available, but there was still half a paddock to clear, and so we couldn't do anymore until Heather had cleared out the compost, so next task was to get out all the weeds from the heap of stuff next to the next compost (AKA very similar to gold panning). The dust got in my eyes a bit, but I'm looking forward to how brown we'll get, doing all these jobs outside.
Heather had to go and see her daughter as she was getting out of hospital (she has diabetes and depression), so she left us to finish the weed sorting, and then I watered her plants, whilst Alice got our jumpers, which had soon been discarded once we'd got stuck into the horse poo job. Then we picked more plums, and filled the 4 new sacks Heather had found with poo.
After that, we had finished our jobs we could do (which just made it to 4 hours, the amount required to do each day) so headed back up to the house, where we made ourselves lunch of bread rolls, homemade cheese, tomato, cucumber, lettuce and beetroot, and then plums and tea and coffee. I think we'd have both liked to have one of the biscuits in the jar, but we didn't dare push it too much on our first day.
We just chilled out in the outhouse in the afternoon- I finally finished Pride and Prejudice which I thought was a bit tedious but didn't want to leave unread. Heather had to go somewhere else later on, and so had cooked dinner and we just helped ourselves when we wanted it. We had leek sauce (basically leeks in a roux), broccoli, potatoes and lamb (for me) and tofu (for Alice).
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