Justin Tyers's Blog

The old mast had a dark area just below the spreaders.

I wondered why our Mast was bending. I’d tuned the rigging until you could play it like a harp – but still couldn’t get rid of the ‘kink’.

Then last winter – when everything that isn’t varnished turns black – I noticed a ‘shadow’ halfway up the mast. I knew what it was even before I pulled myself up to it in the bosun’s chair. (I don’t know if the mast is getting longer, or I’m getting weaker). And there it was – a soft spot. Well – call a spade a spade – it was rot.

You can get your mast craned out for about a hundred quid. But the way I look at it, a hundred quid is a hundred quid …why have it lowered gently to the deck when you’re only going to take a chainsaw to it later? Save a few bob – why not let the rigging off, string by string, until there can only be one possible outcome?

A falling mast can do a lot of damage. It could tear the pin rail out of the deck. It could crash through the scuppers, taking the cap rail with it …along with some of the frame heads. Or it can fall on your head.

Unusually for me, none of these things happened. Foreseeing the danger, I unbolted the pin rail. But here – if you don’t mind me saying – was my master stroke: In order to avoid the mast foot sliding across the deck as it fell, destroying everything in its path, I tied alongside an old quay and waited for low water. With the Quay ten feet (3m) above deck, when the fifty-foot (15m) mast fell into it, the foot was lifted smartly off the deck – and clear of all obstructions. On the quay, the mast broke into six pieces. None of the breaks, I noticed, was on a glue-line.

When I announced my intention to build another one, myself, the more generous of my correspondents said something like – well, you’re a better man than I am. I feel uncomfortable when people talk like that; I wonder if they’re aware of a pitfall I haven’t seen yet. Then I reassure myself …not ‘better’, but ‘poorer’. It’s my poverty which drives me to undertake projects, myself. It can be quite interesting.

In February I felled a couple of Sitka Spruce. From those I cut three lengths of twenty-odd feet (6m) which seemed to be about the right diameter. Then they were sawn length-wise, like a Banana Split. Then they were hollowed. They dried for three months, both indoors and outdoors, according to the weather.

Split lengthways…

Then they had a birds-mouth cut in their ends. Back in the days of wooden boatbuilding the rule of thumb for joining straight pieces of timber together was to scarf them at 12:1. For every inch of thickness, the joint must be a foot long.

Top/truck varnished in the workshop, middle outside, foot in the distance.

I drove the three pieces 120 miles to Cornwall on my pick up, with the intention of gluing them on a pontoon. But the moorings officer said he wasn’t keen. Walkers on the quay, on the other hand, welcomed the sight of someone building a timber mast. Some of them even seemed to think I was a proper boat builder.

Only the top section left to glue.

When the mast was in three pieces, I could only lift two of them off the ground …and then needed to lie down. So there was a nagging worry about how I would lift the mast aboard when it was all in one piece.

John Leather says it alright to have a bit of aft rake. Fortunately.

In order to pull the joints together, whilst the glue cured, I installed the mast winch (which is normally located a couple of feet above the deck), tied a halyard to a mast band on the next section, and winched it tight. Because the upper section sleeves into the birds mouth, not much can go wrong, really …and winding the halyard up hard is all that is required. You can see the birds-mouth glue lines on the stick in the picture below.

Birds-mouth glue lines

In order to lift the mast on-board, waiting a few days for a spring tide …when the deck and the quay would be at the same height, really paid off. First I tied the stern close up to the quay – allowing the bow to drift out toward mid-stream. Then I straddled a baulk of timber between the deck and the shore, and lifted the mast foot across to the boat a foot at a time. I tied that in place, then let off the stern, and swung the Bow hard alongside. Hey presto.

Bow hard in.

Next week I’m going to get the mast stepped. I’ll probably pay someone to do that. It’ll be interesting to see if the joints hold. Would you like to hear how it goes?

If you’d like to read more tales of adventure which should have gone wrong, but didn’t (well…) consider investing in a copy of Phoenix from the Ashes; or Canvas Flying…

Thanks for reading this blog…

Justin Tyers

When people ask us if the house is finished yet …and I say ‘Yes‘; but even as the word comes out, I hear Linda saying ‘No‘.

‘…well, sort-of finished‘; we agree.

Thing is, when a job like self-building a house is 97% complete there’s so little fight left in you that you call it ‘finished’ or ‘as-good-as’ and put your tools away before the pipes have been boxed-in, the window boards have been cut to fit around the quirky shape of the straw bale walls, and before a wall has been built around the loo. Don’t ask.People ask a lot of questions about living in a straw bale house. Mainly they’re to do with the perceived risks of fire, vermin, and rot. ‘How long will your house last?’ They ask …as though we’ve built a summer camp …but the winter will destroy it.

Don’t laugh, but when push comes to shove, what lies behind their fears-on-our-behalf is the story about the three little pigs. Being told, at such a young age, that danger lurks if you build a house of straw, seeps into our formative minds and unconsciously throbs out its warning for the rest of our lives. We’re all quite damaged in that way.

Having survived the danger of being attacked by wolves, fire, rot, and vermin for twelve months – so far …and with every prospect of being able to survive another twelve – I can tell you that when you live in a straw bale house you are unaware of the fact that the walls are built from straw. …Except that it is incredibly warm; there’s pleasing undulation to the lime-plastered walls; there’s no condensation or humidity in airless corners of the bathroom; and there’s a subtle wholesome smell in the atmosphere.

Being off-grid, do you have to run your generator all the time? Apart from using straw bales as the material of choice for our walls, something else we’ll all be doing in future is to generate electricity for our own consumption. For the last forty years the price of solar panels (PV) has been falling. In 1977 a panel used to cos £56 for every watt it produced – today it’s 23p. There was a great surge of interest in installing panels ten or fifteen years ago on the basis that you could sell electricity to the back to the grid to earn a handsome second-income. Conjoining the idea that you installed solar panels only to earn money has backfired now that the price you will be paid for each unit of electricity has fallen to a fraction of the original offer. Another result of conjoining the idea is that few people consider installing solar in order to cut their tie with the electricity grid. Why should they?

PV panels have a design life of 25 years. Lead/acid batteries will need to be replaced every 5 or 10 years (…but they’ll only last that long if you look after them.) Installing your own off-gridPV electrical system will cost £10k – £15k. And you’ll get the VAT back on that if it’s a new build. Two or three more lots of batteries, over the years, might be another £12k, say.

The average annual electricity bill in the UK today is £600. The average annual price hike is 8%. In twenty-five years we’ll be paying £4,100 a year for our electricity. The average household will have paid £65,000 for grid electricity during the 25 year life of a Solar Panels.

I know I won’t be believed when I say this – but it makes no sense to connect your new-build house to the grid. And in answer to the original question …about whether we ‘have to run our generator all the time’ – last year we ran it for 20 hours.

We used to live on board a boat. On board we learnt to manage our resources …and that lesson helps us keep our generator run-time to a miserly minimum. We don’t use high demand devices on a cloudy day. We look at the weather forecast and if it’s going to be sunnier tomorrow – that’s when we do the washing; make beer; run our light/industrial workshop tools.

By the way, our boat’s got a new home, too. Nice innit? Lucky boat.

Justin Tyers

Major Tim Peake and I touched down at exactly the same moment. What happened was  that Tim’s bolts blew allowing his module to separate whilst I was up a ladder trying to attach a purlin to the roof. When I heard those bolts go, the ladder slipped from under me. We both saw the ground rushing toward us, and we both overtook my ladder. Tim landed in Kurdistan, I hit the ground in Somerset with a welt. Tim gave the thumbs up ….I lay groaning, winded. Tim planned ahead and had a comfy seat for his crash, I didn’t even have a parachute. My injuries would have been more severe but by a stroke of luck Linda happened to be under my ladder and broke my fall.

This blog is about building ‘affordable’ housing ….we’re setting out to prove that affordable needn’t mean ‘stingy’.

Like many would-be house owners we haven’t got a great deal of money but don’t want to live in a poorly designed box.

If you’d like to do a similar thing, but wonder if you’re capable – you are. Get in touch …we’ll give you all the help we can.

We began by thinking of all the things we want from a house – designed those in, and left out the things we thought would sound impressive, but which weren’t important to us …like having four bedrooms when we only need two.

There’s a verandah running the length of the house where we’ll be able to store firewood conveniently near the front door; leave wet coats and muddy boots, …and sit outside when it’s pissing down.

We went on to make scale plans for the planning application …then went into much more detail for building control. It was hard work that we were tempted to farm out to an architect, but it forced us to work out how we would actually build the house, and from what materials. I nearly gave up several times because it was so tedious, but doing our own drawings saved £10k. At least.

Now we’re building we have to be our own quantity surveyors …to work out how many of everything we need – so that we don’t get left with loads of wasted materials. That’s not very much fun, either, but in the words of Benjamin Franklin ‘Few people realise what income there is in economy.’

We decided to build a garage/workshop first of all – on our empty site – which would give us somewhere to work, and to store tools. If the house isn’t wind and watertight by this winter we’ll move out of our titchy caravan, clear the workshop, and live in that. The workshop only took five weeks – but I’d already built that on paper, too, so it helped speed things up.

The timber frame for our house is a vanity project. Straw bales don’t need a frame, but I’ve always loved heavy frames.

Framing team: Martin (hoist) Kes (framer), Linda (foreman), me (camera operator), Chris (boss).

We found some brilliant timber-framers who agreed to take on the heavy parts of the frame (which was most of it) and leave the rest (only slightly lighter) timbers to me. I was planning to do all that myself, but I hadn’t noticed how old I’m getting. I’m 56, you know? You can always tell when you’re past it – you fall into the habit of telling complete strangers how old you are, and then following the information with the words ‘you know?’.

We hadn’t budgeted for the £8,000  labour costs of having the frame built by others, but it was worth it so that we could avoid lengthy stays in hospital. I expect I’ll have to make all the windows to get us back on budget, but at least windows are made from lighter bits of wood, which can be lifted by one person, working alone.

(By the way …stop worrying about Linda – I was only joking about that bit.)

I’ve covered the roof with sarking board – they’re a bit like floor boards for your roof, and they remain ‘on view’. Then I taped on a vapour membrane, then 6×2 rafters, then 120mm foam insulation …and right now I’m putting on the felt-and-batten, ready for slating. It’s amazing how quickly you get used to working at heights.

After that we’ll build a foundation for the straw bales, and then have a fun couple of days stacking them. We’d love you to join us for that – many hands make light work. We’ll do the food. If you can’t make it for that day, but would love to try your hand working with lime render – come then. And if you’d like to have advance notice of the dates that we’ll be doing our community straw baling and lime rendering – drop me an email saying ‘dates please’ to justin@justintyers.plus.com

Other stuff we’ve achieved to date (we started on March 1st 2016):

We’ve installed a ‘Package Treatment Plant’ to deal with our domestic waste water.  That’ll save us money eventually, on ‘sewage’ bills.

We’re capturing spring water on site. It’s piped into an under-ground tank, then pumped and filtered for our domestic supply. It tastes like bottled water (we’ve had it analysed) and it doesn’t have fluoride or chlorine added. Best of all it costs nothing per litre.

We’ve bought enough solar panels to provide 4kw of electricity. (No, that doesn’t mean anything to me either.) We didn’t have ‘mains’ electricity when we lived on our boat and always swore that mains electricity was the one thing we were really looking forward to when we lived in a house again. But because connection costs to the mains grid were so high, when we realised we could go ‘off-grid’ for the same money we set ourselves up with solar panels in the hope that we won’t have to worry about electricity. We’re quite frugal – we don’t use much …you don’t when you’ve lived on a boat. And we’ve bought a generator for the winter days when we’ve all forgotten what the sun looks like. We haven’t bought the other bits yet (batteries, inverter, charge controller).

Here is our old house… we didn’t have mains electricity because we couldn’t find a cable long enough.

If you’d like to read about our travels on board, by the way, meet the people we met along the way, and dream about the lifestyle – you can find the books I wrote here and here.

We brought seven tons of timber down from Scotland when we ‘moved south’ – mostly it is in long wide planks, and because I paid for it six years ago, it feels like it’s free and saving us a fortune. They will be used for the floorboards eventually, but are proving to be useful all over the place. I hope there will be enough left.

We’ve bought an Esse wood-fired range recently which we’re very excited about for £5k as an ex-display model …it will be the heart of the home and we can’t wait to fire it up.

I think that sums up our progress to date. We’ve got about £24k left to buy the slate, glazing, straw, lime, bathroom, kitchen, the rest of the off grid electricity equipment (among many other incidental items). If you’ve done this kind of thing before you will realise that the budget is really tight …though we’ll be helped by getting a bit of VAT back on our purchases.

If you’d like more information on any aspect of our build – let me know. I’m being brief with the description here in the hope that I won’t bore those of you who aren’t looking for a manual.

Another similarity between me and Major Tim Peake is that he spent six months in a confined space in the company of people with whom he didn’t share a common language.  Me and Linda have been in our two berth caravan for almost six weeks …and she’s from Glasgow.

This is where we are ‘at’ today:

roofing can be fun – if you’re young and like that kind of thing… I’m 56 you know?

One of the striking differences between buying a ready-made house and building one – setting aside for a moment the thousands of hours of work you’ll have to put in if you decide to build one – is that if you’re considering buying a house off-the-shelf for, say, £300,000 you know that it’s going to cost you around £300,000 …whereas when you build a house you have absolutely no idea how much it will cost. That simple fact will haunt you until the job is finally completed …over-budget.

Just as a man in possession of a million pounds is unable to afford an item whose price tag is two millions, a man in possession of a pound is unable to afford an item whose price is two pounds. Our budget, then, for this build is £65,000. Not a penny more.

Houses have been built for less, much less, but we want to live in a stylish house built from quality materials, and one which modest though our needs are – includes everything we’d like it have.

Medieval Frame – now that’s what I call ‘quite good’.

We like Medieval pegged joint frames. You can save a fortune by learning to design them from a book – armed with a passing interest in that sort of thing. When we lived in Scotland we had one designed for us – it was lovely, but somehow the design ran away from us and we ended up with a big house we couldn’t afford to build. This time we did it ourselves and t’s just right.

Two of the timbers in this photo – which was taken today, by the way …just so you know you’re right up-to-date – weigh just under ¼ ton each. When I saw them I realised that I was too old to build the house by myself and got some splendid framers to do all you can see here, for me.

When we were quoted £2,700 for connecting to a mains water tank situated 30 feet away from us, we baulked and got a dowser on to our plot to see if we had water on-site …below ground. He found three sources of water. His costs for drilling a bore hole were going to be similar – but e’d get free water. Whilst waiting six weeks for the drilling team to arrive, we had leisure to wonder if a spring which weeped reliably from some rocks on site would provide us with sufficient and potable water. We had it tested and found it was similar in quality to bottled water, so now we’ve made a connection to that, instead – and together with the pump and UV treatment have excellent free water for an investment of just under £2,000.

Electricity was similarly expensive: Early investigations showed it would cost £7,500 to connect, plus a pepper-corn rent to the owner of a field the cable would have to come through. It didn’t take long to decide, bravely we thought, to install equipment for all-off-grid electricity. We haven’t got that far yet, so I can’t tell you how it is all going …but it will be the subject of a future blog.

I’ll try to get a bit more organised in my next blog and give you a sense of the running order of our build …what has been done, and what has yet to be done. I’m rushing this a bit, I know …but we have only recently got broadband on site, and because we don’t yet have photo-voltaic electricity, I have to start the generator every time we want to turn on the router and go online. And because both the generator and my computer are in my workshop, I have about 20 minutes before I have to turn everything off and go outside to recover from carbon monoxide poisoning.

This is the workshop, it’s 40m2 and cost a whisker under £3,000 to build.

Workshop

I’ll be back with more news soon – but in the meantime, thanks for following me, and here’s a piece of wood I’m working on …I don’t know how I’m going to lift this one in place either – so if you happen to be passing…

A few years back – probably 20 – I noticed people were beginning to preface everything they said with the word ‘So’. For example:

What would you like for breakfast?

So …what are my choices?

…and I thought to myself you know Justin, you’re not doing too bad if you’ve still got all your own teeth and hair, and you don’t plonk the word So in front of everything you say. Since then I’ve noticed that my hair is getting a bit thin, and I’ve got a dentist’s appointment coming up at the end of the month. Having already met the new dentist for a check-up I couldn’t help thinking how keen he was.

Why have I been so tardy in posting a new blog?

So …the reason is that I know you enjoy a bit of a break from me. A little time to heal. Not only that – we haven’t had broadband laid on to our small craftsman-built caravan until just now.

No holiday

This week, in an unthinking moment, we invited a ‘digger’ and his ‘digging machine’ onto our building plot. He turned out to be an absolute bastard for digging holes – we only had time to boil the kettle, sit down for a cup of tea and next time we looked out of the window the caravan was marooned. Now we can’t even go on holiday.  He was like a bloody mole.

Kit House

Linda and I are building a straw-bale house – did I mention that? We went to the sawmill a few weeks ago to pick up our kit-house. We’re having a frame inside our straw bales. Bloody clever, really – all you have to do is design a house to your own specification; work out how many bits of wood you’ll need …and what size they should be; and then when you get them home, lay-out where all the mortise and tenon joints should go; cut them; raise the frame – and then you’re ready to begin the painstaking work of building yourself a house. In the photograph above Linda is sitting on a piece of wood at the sawmill. Like all the bits of wood around her, the one she’s sitting on now belongs to us. When I first caught sight of our stack of timber I had a short period of hospitalisation.

Why the f–k we thought that building a timber frame would be a good way to go about getting ourselves a house to live in …and why we thought we’d be the ideal people to take the task on, will be the subject of my future blogs.

The diligent reader will spot that this blog no longer claims to be about ‘living in the Hebrides’ but claims instead to be ‘An idiots guide to building a Straw Bale house’.

Don’t miss an instalment (which will be more frequent now than of late) and as an observant practitioner you’ll avoid the pitfalls of this new and exciting method of building by watching me fall into them first.

We’re not laying-on real electricity, but using ‘solar’. We’re not having real chlorinated, flourinated water either, hoping instead to divert water from a spring. We will be having real straw in our bales …not sure where they’ll come from, but they’re being grown, somewhere, as we speak.

In the next blog I shall tell you how much money we’ve got to spend and where we hope to save money on our build, and what progress we’ve made so far.

Let me know if you think a vlog would be a more interesting way of imparting information about our build.

Thanks for being there.

Justin

Phoenix from the Ashes

Canvas Flying, Seagulls Crying

Maritime Artwork

This is a cow.
Cows eat Straw Bale Houses.
Your home is not safe if you own a Cow.
Be like Justin.
Don’t buy a Cow.

Those Dyson’s are bloody brilliant! Until they’re about three months old. Then when you get a blockage it’s overalls-on, and half-a-day dismantling to rod out the rabbit warrens …and clean all meeting-surfaces with a toothpick on re-assembly. I can see the blockage because everything on it is see-through …like one of those Ant Farms. But I can’t get to it. Fortunately I’ve got a broom.

Linda and I are leaving our luxury accommodation tomorrow. Because we’re so disorganised we don’t know where we’re going next. My Mum’s gone to Spain for a few weeks so I asked her if we could stay there but she said ‘No’. She’s afraid we’ll disturb the cats. ‘You know what I’m like about my cats,’ she said; ‘they’re like children to me’. My mother doesn’t have a sense of irony.

We’ve been looking for an old caravan. You get to meet a lot of dodgy people when you’re buying a Caravan, bottom-end. One bloke let us into his caravan by banging a screwdriver into the lock. He’d got two stories about how it came to be in his possession and he kept forgetting which one he’d told us. As bits came off in our hands he was full of re-assurance: ‘You won’t need that bit, anyway.’

Have you got any experience of Yurts? We were thinking one of those might suit us? Are they like wedding marquee’s – all very well on the big day but you’d have to be a right old hippie to live in one? You probably think we are a couple of old hippies, me and Linda. they say you’re always the last to know.

I was going to tell you I don’t know when I’ll be able to write the next instalment of this blog – now we’re going to be living in a Yurt – but god knows you’re used to that by now. Tell you what come and visit us in our Yurt -that way you can get all the latest news – don’t forget to bring a handful of sawdust for the composting loo.

Im getting quite into this yurt idea – get in touch if you happen to be flogging one …or failing that a caravan that you can get into without a screwdriver.

Here, for no good reason, is a photo of a wood in Cornwall in Springtime. Because it’s cheerful, and fills me with hope.

Spring is just around the corner.

Justin

One Card???

I can’t decide whether you’re determined to have the last laugh this year or I forgot to give you the address Linda and I will be staying at for Christmas (Batsom Farm, Withypool Somerset, TA24 7RG – if there’s still a card left in your box).

In making the following observations I take into account that I have spent the last eight years hibernating from society’s ebullience by hiding on a Scottish island. We went to the Bicester Outlet Centre. OMFG – what a mistaker to maker.

Wandering along its tinselled precinct, with deeply unhappy-looking women and men clutching braces of plump bags, waltzing right across my path without so much as a Pardon-me – I wasn’t looking where I was going, I felt bewilderingly out-of-style to notice that shops with names like Oscar de la Renta, Ermenegildo Zegna and Vile brequin meant nothing to me. What merchandise do they offer, I wondered? Walking past Door-Security l Forest-Gumped in to find out.

If the stuff they were offering for sale was in a Salvation Army Hall it would fetch 10, maybe 20 pence – yet here it flies off the shelf at £200. Visitors literally can’t get enough of it – and then rush home to leave bragging reviews about what a bargain they’ve just snapped-up. Do you ever feel like you’re on the wrong planet? If the Sally Army had better lighting and employed surly, airbrushed, centre-fold staff who sneered at all new arrivals in their shop they’d raise all the money they need in an afternoon.

Prêt A Manger was my favourite. I didn’t buy anything in there because the prices were so high – but I had the pleasing sensation of recognising the goods they were selling.

I can’t tell you how relieved I am to have just this morning finished the job of designing and preparing the ‘Building Regulations’ drawings for our house. Doing them myself has saved me a fortune. (Do you see a pattern emerging here?) If you’re planning to build yourself a straw bale house but can’t be arsed to do the design yourself – don’t hesitate to ask …but we’ll need to be on your christmas card list if you want to curry that sort of a favour.

I arrived back on Exmoor this week. Spiritually I mean – we’ve been coming and going for months. I went up to the trig point on Court Down (SS915297 for those of you who know about these sorts of things) and I climbed onto it for the first time in 17 years. Last time I surveyed the hills beyond my parish from its vantage was when we were building the boat, and I begged it to let us go. Tired of its folds I wanted to see the country more at large.  This time I asked if it would have us back …I am not one of its native sons, but adopted. That same day we got an email from the National Park telling us they recognised as locals, giving us the right to live on the plot we’d bought.

Need a christmas prezzie for someone who has everything? Excuse my merciless advertising, but I guarantee they won’t have one of these: Don’t worry about Christmas posting times – I’ll get it to them on time if I have to deliver it myself by Tall Ship. You’d be well-advised to invest now – but if you miss this, there’ll be one more chance – I’m going to rent a unit in Bicester Village for the January Sales and I’ll be offering my wares for five times their usual price.

If, wisely, you only buy from bonafide retailers try this and this.

HAPPY CHRISTMAS! Thank you for following this blog – without you being there all would be wasted. I wish you and everyone you love a fantastic Christmas, and a prosperous and successful new year.

At the time of writing, in 33 hours summer will be on its way.

Summer

Justin.

There can only be one of two reasons for Yachting Monthly – Britain’s favourite boaty mag – choosing to publish a 700 word excerpt from Canvas Flying, Seagulls Crying: the first is that they thought it was bloody brilliant; the second, more plausibly, is that their feature writer has gone on leave. Look out for it on the shelves of all good newsagents from Jan 7th. Smarm.

bloody brilliant…

At the grand age of about 70, Mary has cut a few peats in her time. It’s a calendar event in the Hebrides. Islanders go out ‘onto the moss’ to dig peat in the spring for burning during the long winter’s nights ahead. I’d gone along to see how it was all done under the pretext of being there to help. So it was embarrassing that whenever I grunted from exertion I’d hear Mary’s sympathetic voice in the vicinity of my backside as I bent over my work:

Are ya knackered, Chustin? …Eh?  Are ya buggered?

Mary and Linda

Her son, John – about my age – was cutting the peats like a perpetual-motion machine …sending them flying up from his ditch to land heavily on the bank. From deep in the bog I heard his voice confirming the worst:

Aye – you’re knackered boy …you’re knackered.

John, holding a ‘tsgeir’.

With that they both leant heavily on their tools and turned toward me with a pitying look -wondering, perhaps, whether it might not be kinder to have me put down. Eventually their expressions softened and I knew they’d spare me. Never-the-less, they continued to gaze for a while – an Englishman holding a fork, standing in a Hebridean bog being something of a novelty for its own sake.

I don’t mean a ‘fork’ – in the Hebrides it’s known as a ‘g-r-r-rip’.

In a completely uncalled-for act of generosity they gave us thirty sacks of peat and there was absolutely nothing we could do to refuse them: We don’t NEED them, we insisted. ‘But your GETTIN them! John said, raising his voice.

Bearing in mind that Mary’s head had spent the morning a couple of feet from my bum it gave me a hell of a shock, when we’d all got back home and my hand fell into my lap whilst drinking tea, to discover that the gusset of my trousers had a huge hole. Let’s be honest – when I say ‘hole’, there was actually no ‘trouser’ …just that folded seam which is meant to hold the two legs together. A moment later I remembered I’d fallen out of love with wearing underpants six months earlier, preferring to go commando. It dawned on me that poor Mary would not have been able to avoid having both an intimate and prolonged examination of my reproductive equipment – swinging like the hammer in a bell as I worked – and getting to know it all far better by the end of the day than I knew it myself. I flushed with horror – first hot, …then cold. I looked over at Mary who paused as she raised her teacup. She looked at me, held my gaze, then winked.

Linda and I have come ashore now for a couple of months. I’m nervously looking forward to having a hot bath …’looking forward’ because I haven’t had one for a while; ‘nervous’ because if I get into difficulties – will the coastguard think to look for me this far inland?

There can only be one of two reasons for Yachting Monthly – Britain’s favourite boaty mag – choosing to publish a 700 word excerpt from Canvas Flying, Seagulls Crying: the first is that they thought it was bloody brilliant; the second, more plausibly, is that their feature writer has gone on leave. Look out for it on the shelves of all good newsagents from Jan 7th. Smarm.

bloody brilliant…

At the grand age of about 70, Mary has cut a few peats in her time. It’s a calendar event in the Hebrides. Islanders go out ‘onto the moss’ to dig peat in the spring for burning during the long winter’s nights ahead. I’d gone along to see how it was all done under the pretext of being there to help. So it was embarrassing that whenever I grunted from exertion I’d hear Mary’s sympathetic voice in the vicinity of my backside as I bent over my work:

Are ya knackered, Chustin? …Eh?  Are ya buggered?

Mary and Linda

Her son, John – about my age – was cutting the peats like a perpetual-motion machine …sending them flying up from his ditch to land heavily on the bank. From deep in the bog I heard his voice confirming the worst:

Aye – you’re knackered boy …you’re knackered.

John, holding a ‘tsgeir’.

With that they both leant heavily on their tools and turned toward me with a pitying look -wondering, perhaps, whether it might not be kinder to have me put down. Eventually their expressions softened and I knew they’d spare me. Never-the-less, they continued to gaze for a while – an Englishman holding a fork, standing in a Hebridean bog being something of a novelty for its own sake.

I don’t mean a ‘fork’ – in the Hebrides it’s known as a ‘g-r-r-rip’.

In a completely uncalled-for act of generosity they gave us thirty sacks of peat and there was absolutely nothing we could do to refuse them: We don’t NEED them, we insisted. ‘But your GETTIN them! John said, raising his voice.

Bearing in mind that Mary’s head had spent the morning a couple of feet from my bum it gave me a hell of a shock, when we’d all got back home and my hand fell into my lap whilst drinking tea, to discover that the gusset of my trousers had a huge hole. Let’s be honest – when I say ‘hole’, there was actually no ‘trouser’ …just that folded seam which is meant to hold the two legs together. A moment later I remembered I’d fallen out of love with wearing underpants six months earlier, preferring to ‘go commando’. It dawned on me that poor Mary would not have been able to avoid having both an intimate and prolonged examination of my reproductive equipment – swinging like the hammer in a bell as I worked – and getting to know it all far better by the end of the day than I knew it myself. I flushed with horror – first hot, …then cold. I looked over at Mary who paused as she raised her teacup. She looked at me, held my gaze, then winked.

Linda and I have come ashore now for a couple of months. I’m nervously looking forward to having a hot bath …’looking forward’ because I haven’t had one for a while; ‘nervous’ because if I get into difficulties – will the coastguard think to look for me this far inland?

I went on a walk four years ago when we were living in the Hebrides which bloody nearly killed me. Mentally, I’m not quite over it yet. The difference between walking in the Hebrides and walking in, say, Cornwall – where we’re living now, on board our boat – is that if your spirits flag and you begin to fall behind, in Cornwall you can slip into a coastal hostelry for a restoring pint – or if you’re on a low-alcohol diet, a cup of coffee in cafe with steamy windows – before having a quick pee and heading back out to catch everyone up …whereas if you lag behind in the Hebrides, your a dead man.

I like to travel with my medical team Dr. Chris (l) Dr. Sandy (m),  Nurse Linda (r) ….together with a mountain rescue dog in case we become separated and it begins to snow.

I bought some straw bales last week. I’m not a very good at buying straw. The bales required for building (did I mention we’re building a straw bale house?) need to be bound so tightly that you’d struggle to push your fingers under the baler-twine, your finger tips turn white, and when you attempt to lift them they’re so heavy – and you unused to dealing in agricultural quantities – that the bales pull you off balance throwing you face down in the dung. It gives the farmer something to chortle at – for which purpose he excuses himself and tells you he’s got to go …back up the ‘ouse a minute.

The bales I bought weren’t like that, though. I could float my arm freely in the space under both strings and when I braced my feet to lift the bale – 1 – 2 – 3 heave, it was so light it shot over my head, dislocating my arm in the process. It’s still hanging in the rafters now (the bale, I mean) – we tried poking it with a stick.  In my embarrassment I pretended the bales were ideal and gave him a £200 deposit. The farmer supplies Waitrose with free range eggs. Did you know he has to write the date on 3000 eggs every day, and then paint a little tractor on them?

Living Off-Grid

Linda and I are living off grid.

Now that I come to work out for how long we’ve lived off grid I feel quite proud: it’s not many people who can claim to have lived without electricity for fifteen percent of their lives.  Well, ignoring two-thirds of the world’s population, I mean.

I’m going to be perfectly honest with you – I was hoping that all this greeny eco-living would be brought firmly to an end with our Straw Bale house and that we’d supply it with real electricity. But in order to get mains power – it turns out – we’d have to run a cable underground through a field belonging to the Bath & Wells Diocese (Crosses himself). B & W strenuously champion two causes: Enabling affordable housing; and Raising money to repair the crumbling fabric of their buildings. After battling with their emotions they decided that crumbling buildings were the things closest to their hearts and asked us for £5000 (plus costs) so they could repair some, in exchange for which they’d allow us to dig a trench and then fill it up again, thus ‘enabling’ our house. You can buy a lot of solar panels for five thousand quid.

We’re falling into a similar trap with our mains water – but let’s not go there. Let’s not go there isn’t really one of my expressions – but my Mum uses it a lot. So do two-thirds of the world’s population …but let’s not go there.

In a week or two’s time we’ll hear whether or not we have got our planning permission. Did I mention that we are building a straw-bale house? We were at the plot the other day and our nearest neighbour on the other side of the lane, who has lived in his house for 45 years, came over and introduced himself with the words “I’ve been in favour of this from the beginning, you know?”; forcing us to contrast him with our nearest neighbour on our side of the road who moved in last Tuesday and who has listed his objections in a letter to the planning authority which runs for eight pages.

I know that one of you kind folks has mentioned my book Canvas Flying, Seagulls Crying in a blog or something because sales on Amazon have been soaring. Relatively speaking. Thank you.

 Can I ask you to hold off buying presents for your family for about two weeks? In two weeks’ time I’ll be announcing a promotional price reduction from £48 to £39.95 (inc p+p) for my Limited-Edition Fine-Art Prints.

In my gallery you’ll find an image suitable for every member of your family …and if you can’t, why not surprise them by sending them an image you know they won’t like?

If you’d like to pre-order a piece of artwork today for delivery in about two weeks visit the gallery, fill out your delivery address on the order form, and insert the words justin tyers blog in the message field –  you won’t be charged any money now, and we’ll know it is to be charged at the promotional price when we send it.

If your loved-one just isn’t into works of art – but owns a dog, or a cat – what about some straw?

Justin