Land girls do time travel

Pete, Nicola, Lola, 9, and Nell, 6, spent three happy months during the summer of 2007 traveling around Britain. Now we’re home but the travel bug is still there. Join us for occasional sightseeing plus tips on how to shrink your carbon footprint…

This month our nearest church, St Thomas’, is running an environment month with lots of activities ranging from the harvest festival and showings of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth to birdbox making and wild food walks. Best event so far turned us all into Land Girls (the blokes were busy watching England beat Australia in the rugby). Equipped with scythes, rakes, mattocks, loppers and gloves mums, kids and staff from Islington Ecology Centre cut a good chunk of the hay meadow near the east coast main line. Repetitive hard work outdoors with people to chat besides is fun especially on another nice October Saturday. When the gang of kids tired of working they played chase through the Michaelmas daisies in the nearby meadow until distracted by the splendid site of the Duchess of Sutherland (a steam train) puffing into and out of Kings Cross station.

Work just about completed – it’s harder than it looks to mow a meadow with hand tools – we sat around the bonfire eating baked potatoes and beans (see pic).

For my family the slip into the 1940s didn’t stop there as we then spent the evening at an outdoors barn dance (to raise funds for Highbury Roundhouse). The organizers had managed to turn the car park into an atmospheric post-scything party place thanks to gazebos, scattering several bales of straw on the tarmac and the guest appearance of Jasmine, a fluffy white Sultan hen from Freightliners Farm.

Time traveling is definitely a lesson in how fit you used to have to be! If I hadn’t needed to run a deep bath to soothe out my aching limbs I would have probably had an exemplary eco weekend…