Right everybody!!

You know how sometimes you want to do something that makes a difference? Well my lovely daughter Rosanna s fiance.....is cycling from Lands end in Cornwall to Frome in Somerset in 24 hours next Saturday.....to raise £2000 for Cancer Research

For a keen cyclist that would be a doddle...well maybe not a doddle but a good leg stretch...
For Philip on his mountain bike its the equivelent of me climbing Mt Everest!
He has been training by cycling to work in Bristol every day and will make it if he has to pick up the bike and carry it!

so can you sponsor him? If so visit his just giving page http://www.justgiving.com/Phillip-Morris
None of us know when we may be very grateful for the work done by Cancer Research.....we toddle on through life putting a penny or two in collecting boxes but its only when it hits us that we are grateful...so dig deep chaps and you will be rewarded with pictures of the event!!!

Life has a habit of making one make decisions! So what do I mean...? Well we have to decide what to wear, when to eat, where to go etc we are making decisions each and every day which makes our life path the way it is....confused?
Well each day we make decisions that may affect the rest of our lives without even realising it....for example we decide to go out and down to the supermarket at 2pm, we bump into a friend there who imparts some information that impacts on our thoughts and future decisions, its interesting is it not?
I have led a sustainable lifestyle all of my life..some have thought I was just a skinflint and my father bless him kept reminding me that rationing ended in the fifties and there was really no need to reuse and recycle old stuff...he had done that as a lad in the war and 'things were different now'....Oh but how that attitude and the desisions made by the 'modern' post war generation have affected the world and our future! When China finally gets a standard of living deemed modern for all its inhabitants we will need several worlds to supply it...yet we only have one!
Blimy...I am getting philosophical....or cynical!

When it comes to decisions I have made a big one....
I am going to downsize the 'Woolly Shepherd' no not me on a slimming fad...but me being sensible. Green business is big business and usually not at all ethical! I have built up a small, award winning, permaculture based sustainable ethical business but to compete I must forever be striving, fighting, working silly hours, stressing and so on because business is business. It has interested me a lot that often folks who consider themselves ethical in their private lives consider business to be neither ethical nor unethical and are quite happy to metaphorically speaking stamp on the head of their competitor at work whilst at home raising a pig or two for their freezer and keeping a few rescued ex battery hens because they do not want their families to eat battery produced eggs and pork....mmmm!
so I am going to take my little business back to its roots and work at the grassroots level supporting the way of life I have practised for ever and leave those who cannot equate ethics to do their thing.
I am going to stop and 'smell the roses' financially it will be ten steps back but personally I am going to be a richer person for it too!....I wonder exsctly where the head stampers riches really lie?

Happy New Year to all!
Crikey have we had a month or two....what with no hair from chemotherapy making it extra cold around the head it then decides to be the coldest December on record brrrrrr! The sheep have looked very bemused as their world kept disappearing under tons of snow. They usually dig to find some grass but just gave up, looked depressed and ate haylage sugar beet and barley. After 10 days of it they had obviously decided they had woken up in the north pole and perked up a bit. Once it had disappeared the relief on their little faces was quite apparent! Now we have rain instead...urmm not sure which I prefer!
I am now 3/4 through the good old chemo...blasted stuff...it kills all the good cells too hence the hair loss so also kills your white blood cells and leaves you open to all sorts of bugs and I endured a short break over the new year in isolation at my local hospital with septicemia....just the start to the year I wanted. Now back in the thick of it and having taken delivery of 3 new sheep this week plus a spanking new hen house I am sure things can only get better.

Very interesting world this year and will get even more interesting as climate seems to have gone haywire all over the world this last year...global warming methinks and they now admit world food stocks are dangerously low with oil prices climbing to record highs. Cotton prices and man made fibre prices are rocketing making wool look even more attractive....things are changing folks and I cannot forsee a time when anything is going back to the so called easy life....the future? Well lets not look back and shake our heads at our age of stupid eh?