Interlude: Winter off-grid

Peakrill Press are holding a January sale: 20% off when you buy 2 or more books/zines

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I am struggling to write at the moment. Struggling to do anything. Because life up here, in the middle of the North Pennines, is hard at this time of year.

Here is a description of our house, from the 1935 novel Fell Top by Winifred Watson:

Lonely and drear was Little Todden: a grey pile of naked stone standing gaunt and solitary, with the sweep of the fells on either side. Clustering round the back of the farm, as though even they feared the solitude, were the ragged groups of the outbuildings: the cow-byres and the stables and the hay-loft and dairy: built at hazard through the years as the farm grew in wealth.

In winter, when the ice was on the hills, and snow piled high in drifts, or the rain was like a living wall of water driving over the fells, days on end we'd be bound fast to Little Todden with sight of each other's faces our only joy, or maybe curse. It was no wonder our dread of our father was a sick and dreadful fear, driven in and growing with us as the years went by. For down there, in our dependence, he could have slain and no one be the Wiser. It is a wicked, wicked thing to build these farms, and take a woman there for good or ill and none be near to know the mark of her man's hands are often blue on her arms.

I’m happy to say that we have not resorted to violence. Our arms are not blue. But my mood is.

We’ve been snowed in for most of the week. It’s melting now, but our pipes are still iced solid. We drink from large water containers, filled during the summer and stored under the stairs. We flush the toilet with buckets carried up from the stream.

On the plus side, the days are now long enough that we now have sufficient solar power to switch the lights on, most evenings. I sometimes even put the Internet on, briefly.

But it’s bleak, and my motivation is at an all-time low.

Normal service will be resumed.

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Please support me, if you can, by buying books/zines/comics from Peakrill Press - January sale now on!