Finding Enough

We started the month with a week in the Isle of Man to look after 2 miniature schnauzers called Stanlee (grey) and Gracie (black). Their owners were new to house sitting, but were very welcoming and very organised. We were greeted with glasses of champagne and they cooked us an amazing meal the night we arrived. We had use of their hot tub (that they had cleaned out specially) as well as their very spacious home. They even have solar panels and an EV charger, and wouldn’t let us reimburse them for charging our car. Despite the weather being forecast as a washout all week, the rain stayed away until the last day and we had a lovely time exploring the island with the dogs.

It is an island of varied landscapes and the roadside grandstands and crash protection on corners, walls and lamp posts was all still in place from the famous Isle of Man TT races a couple of week before.

I think we may well be invited back, and there is certainly still plenty more to explore. There is just the matter of the pricey ferry to factor in. Maybe we will go via Belfast next time.

Back at home, we collected a borrowed scaffold tower, which wasn’t as hard to disassemble from the side of a neighbour’s barn as we had feared. We have not yet reassembled it, while we work out access past where it needs to go. We also started work to clear / organise the rubble in the ruined barn. We have a huge amount of stone, but want to clear the concrete floor it is piled on, to use as an outside dining area. We have built a low dry stone wall with some of the larger stones and bought the first, of probably many, gabion baskets as a base for seating. It is a tricky project, as you can’t reposition the baskets once they are full, as they are too heavy to move. On the other hand, we can’t put them in their final position until we have cleared some rubble………

It turned out to be a giant game of 3D Tetris to get as much stone as possible into each basket. Most people try to use a little stone as possible to fill a gabion basket, often using cheaper ballast in the centre where it can’t be seen – we are the opposite!

We plan to get some long thin, but tall, baskets to form the legs of an outdoor dining table, but we’re going to have to shift a lot of stone before we can make space for that. It is very hard work, as most of it is granite and very heavy, so we’re tackling it a bit at a time – when it’s not raining (and we’re not out walking or swimming to celebrate the fact that its not raining 😉).

The great news in July on the house front was rapid progress with the new garage / workshop, which is now nearly complete. There is just a bit of landscaping to left do (so we can drive a car in), some guttering and the internal fit out in the workshop end.

Financial Update:

Freedom fund value – £1,315,420 (up £17K on last month)

Expenditure – £3,089 (or a 2.8% withdrawal rate)

Earned income – £0

Another month of healthy growth for the freedom fund meant we cracked £1.3M for the first time in July. I haven’t added it up, but I suspect the picture has changed somewhat since then. I wonder what level we’ll be at next month……..

We did what we had been talking about for a while and liquidated some extra cash for a dedicated travel fund, and in fact spend a little of it almost immediately. We had been keeping an eye on possible winter house sits in slightly warmer climes. We had envisaged somewhere Mediterranean, but this month one came up in California which we quite liked the look of. An international video call later, and the owners offered us the sit. We offered to fly out a few days early to ensure any flight delays can’t derail their plans, and a few days later had booked our first long haul flights since 2016. It worked out especially well, as we were able to use some avios points we had been collecting slowly for years to reduce to cost to £280pp.

That extra £560 on flights did push our monthly expenses up a bit. Without that, we were running at a fairly average level (£2,469). The tax and MOT for the sports car needed renewing this month, as did the tv license, but with the arrival of the new garage, we are hoping that August is the last month we will need to pay £50 a month for storage in a local barn. Our grocery total was also a bit higher this month after some foody friends came to stay at the last minute, and we also had a meal out with them.

The cost of the new garage build will probably be due next month, and we are planning to make our first bulk lime mortar purchase, so next month’s costs are likely to be far higher on the home renovation front.

Non-Financial Goals:

Forage something every month – Chantarelles!!

I follow a Scottish foraging group online, and started to see people finding chantarelles and a few porcini mushrooms this month, so decided to head out into the woods near us after a couple of days of rain, to see what I could find. I found a few things I was not confident enough to identify, and quite a few of what I was pretty sure where chantarelles. On my first trip I brought a handful home and spent far longer verifying what I had found than I did collecting them! Confident they could not be any of the possible look-alikes, I cooked them up for breakfast. Delicious! I have been back a few times now after rain and I seem to have found a fairly reliable spot.

Wild swim at least once a month in as many different places as possible

I took my kit with me to the Isle of Man and swam next to Ramsey Harbour (right) one sunny evening after the dogs had been exhausted with a long walk and fed. That was the only new swim spot, but once home I squeezed in x swims in July.

Back in Scotland, I managed 6 more swims in July, in 2 places, but neither new. and all freshwater.

I am no longer tracking how many books I read, but I am still a keen reader, and have got into a good routine of using the local library. In July, I took advantage of the library transfer service to reserve a book I had been meaning to read for some time: ‘Ultra-Processed People’ by Chris Van Tulleken. It had a big impact on me, and I would recommend it to anyone who wants to better understand how the body regulates appetite and fat reserves and how eating ultra processed food undermines and disrupts that system.

My mother always warned of the evils of ‘junk food’ and E numbers, so I learned to cook ‘proper food’ and to appreciate a diverse diet from a fairly early age. I never really doubted this message, but could never explain exactly why it was true.

I like theories to be backed up with facts and evidence and this book does a good job of this, despite the vast majority of all nutritional studies in the last 50 years seemingly being funded either directly or indirectly by major food producers (or producers of ‘industrially produced edible substances’ and the book refers to them).

A very interesting and eye-opening read, but one which, for me, felt like a logical explanation of why rates of obesity and type-2 diabetes have soared in developed countries. It has certainly made me read labels more carefully and make a few changes to what I eat.

Other highlights of July included using blackcurrants from the garden to make jam and cordial (homemade Ribena is amazing!), seeing my first noctilucent clouds at night (it looks like dawn but was taken at 2.50am looking north). As well as wild mushrooms, the wet summer seems to be good for potatoes. My charlotte second early salad potatoes are monsters!