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First frost of the winter and it became clear how hard life was in the winter for the professional stone clearers of yore.
The stones clenched in the rigor mortised jaws of the earth. The few that are retrievable so cold that they burn your fingers een through gloves. What a fool I was to not spend the autumn preparing for this eventuality. Even with my three long months of stone clearing experience, the stones can still surprise me and the once fecund stone-giving vulva of Mother Nature can become frigid and fridge-id o’ernight. Then like the contrary stone-whore that she is, later the same day her soils are moist and she invites you to plunge your fingers into her and get her rocks off.
I have nothing against stone-whores by the way. Or any other kind of whore. Whores are the best. I am one myself.
Also Mother Nature has every right to say no in the morning and yes in the afternoon. We must respect that.
I realised that for all my three months of stone clearing, I actually know very little about it. Wise old stone clearers must have been looking at me, like I was a frivolous grasshopper, chucking all my stones off the field, thinking I was the bees-knees (it’s still possible for a grasshopper to think that, even though his knees are actually much more impressive than a bees), whilst they tugged on their old stone pipes and wiped their dirty hands on their smocks and spent the autumn clearing, but also diligently nudging stones lose with their feet and making mini-cairns along the paths across the field, which they could harvest even in the coldest conditions and even dig up if covered in snow.
I can’t believe I thought the stones were cold in October. November stones are cold enough to extinguish the sun, if you are able to throw them that far.
Even on my walk the beshrouded sun did manage to melt the ice enough to make my job a little easier as I was homeward bound and enough stones remained scattered along the long diagonal that I still shifted a good few stones. But the idea that because I could easily clear 200 stones a day in the autumn sunshine, that that would average out at 1400 stones a week all the year round was insane. The winter stones are few and far between, even with preparation and my chances of clearing the many billion stones that are on this field in my life time have diminished significantly.
Yet I shalt not surrender.
My actual paid workload is a lot lighter now that Relativity is done and RHLSTP is finished for 2018. I do have a TV script to write and a book introduction to do and I want to start work on my Thriling Three book, but there was time to step away from both words and stones today and do chores and childcare. I took Phoebe to her swimming lesson. She is getting pretty good in the water and though they all swim with those big noodle things round their middles, she is the fastest of the four kids who attend this session. But it’s mainly great just to see her having such fun - doing the tasks, messing around, making people laugh. She is brave and confident and I want to do all I can to keep those qualities in her, even though I know the world will attempt to beat her down.
I spent the afternoon tidying up the garage, which in a few short months of being a viable place to park my car, has become full of junk, boxes of unsold merchandise, old programmes, RHLSTP chairs and fuel to burn over the winter. I did a pretty solid job of squirrelling everything away and may even have space to take on all the other unsold Emergency Questions books that Chris Evans (not that one) has stored in a lock up in Cardiff. Though as a special Christmas treat we are going to introduce an offer at
www.gofasterstripe.com where you can buy all three of my Emergency Questions books as a bundle for just £20 - saving £13 on RRP. And giving you an incredible 2000 questions (with only around 200 repeats). So that’s a great way to sort out some Christmas gifts and help us resolve some of our storage issues. And £5 of every purchase will be put directly into making more podcasts.
