This old tin miner’s cottage that I’m now living in is normally uninhabited in winter. The remoteness, incessant foul weather, guaranteed frozen pipes and impassable roads make the place unattractive for short-term tenants. ‘See how you get on,’ said the owner dubiously, when I offered to pay up front. ‘It might not be easy. You might hate it.’ I didn’t tell her that a little hardship, a little masochism, some exposure to the elements, is exactly what I am looking for.
There is no running water at present. The pipe taking water from the stream and delivering it to the inside taps is still frozen, so I’m collecting my cooking and washing water in a feed bucket and a white china teapot. The water, when you see it in the teapot, is brown. It is a suspiciously metallic shade of brown, consistent with mineral rather than vegetable-based sediment, and this is probably why I have been doing the military two-step on and off ever since I came here.
The sleeping arrangements are as follows. I share the bedroom with some kind of voracious blood-sucking flying insect that is resting quietly somewhere behind the plaster for the winter, conserving its energies. Roused by the heat and light from my bedside candle, however, and capable of almost supernatural stealth, this chap comes out and feasts on me nightly, leaving raised wealds in unexpected, and, one would have thought, inaccessible places.
I’ve been here a fortnight. It has rained continuously. If the downpour slackens, as it does now and then, it is only gathering its strength for throwing it down with a far greater intensity a minute or two later. Accompanying the rain is either a gale or thick fog. Often you get all three together, which I hadn’t thought possible.
Besides no running water, the cottage has no TV, no radio, no internet, and I can’t get a phone signal. I spend the evenings blowing on the fire and rubbing ointment into my insect bites. On the rare occasion when the fire decides to act like one, I sit staring into space with my mouth open, vaguely conscious of the rain battering on the door.
Once a week I make the journey to the supermarket to restock the fridge. The trip involves a hike up through a wooded valley to the car, then five miles of potholed single-track road across fog-shrouded moorland, the fording of a small river, and a free-wheeling descent of nearly 2,000 feet. Returning from the car to the cottage last week, and laden with shopping, I found I’d forgotten to bring a torch. It can be so dark in the wood some nights that you can’t see your hand in front of your face, and this was one of them.
Able to see nothing, I made progress by feeling experimentally with the soles of my feet for the hardness of the path as opposed to the various unknown softnesses on either side. I’d moved forward perhaps 20 yards down the hill like this when I struck something solid. It gave a deep, bronchial cough. I pulled out my phone and switched on the backlight, illuminating the patient face and tufted head of a big hairy bullock.
A Hereford crossed with something Scottish, I’d guess, well into his second year, with a guilty expression on his face, as though he was well aware that he was on private property. I greeted him warmly and commented unfavourably on the weather. He’d only stopped for a breather, apparently, and now seemed keen to push on so I stood aside to let him pass. After him, a dozen more ungainly black shapes came bowing, nodding, stumbling and coughing their way up the path. And there was, of course, the usual nervous ninny who perceived a man standing still with shopping bags to be a mortal threat, panicked, and mounted the rear of the bullock in front, who stumbled sideways under the extra weight, knocking me off balance.
When they’d passed, I pressed on until I arrived at the slippery little single-plank bridge across the stream from where I take my brown water. Beyond the bridge is an unexpectedly smooth lawn which runs finally up to the granite boulders forming the base of the cottage. Now that I was out from under the trees there was just enough light dimly to discern the devastation. Last year’s windfall crab apples had been their goal. They’d probably had their eye on them for weeks. Some were eaten, most were clumsily trampled into the pitted mud that had once been my lovely garden.
But, having said all that, I don’t hate it here at all. On the contrary, I love it. Right now, and under these circumstances, a place like this suits me down to the ground.
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