RIP My Friend.
Survived a Difficult Year But Not Without Personal Losses.
My personal experience of this year has been that it has isolated me more than ever and that is what it is. It is a year when I suddenly had to say ‘Good Bye’ to Flax and on what passed for our wedding anniversary this year too… and I had to look after Rufus when I could not. in all honesty, even bare to look at him without wanting to cry for him and myself.
Maybe because of that, though I think I was already in trouble by then, I was vulnerable to making bad decisions, and took on more goats than we had initially planned for and from then on it was, with hindsight, only a matter of time before my new friends and a new sense of belonging to a community and my new dreams smashed into the truth of the disgraceful mess the UK goat population has been allowed to become. I have had to turn my back and walk away from all of that – I can not, as some can, ‘move on’ – by pretending they are clear of CLA or that half or one test makes them disease-free. I will not sell goats to other people like that. I still have 20 goats who are likely all CLA positive and 5 of them are pregnant so I have to ‘look forward’, to more of them with no future but that on a hook, after we have paid to rear them in time and money. And we have lost a lot of money over this. A lot.
I can only remain as the ‘spectre at the feast’.
At another time in my life, I would get in this fight to educate goat owners and crusade to get vaccines as common as clostridial ones are – but as it is I have to walk away. It is not my fight this time. I am no one’s victim but my own. Others morals are their own and no one has committed a crime. Even I can still show our goats under BGS rules.
This situation with the goats has pulled the plug on the non-fiction project that was running alongside them as I could never encourage anyone to get into goats based on my experience. So that is a lot of work now gone into storage that I cannot bare to see on the desk.
It isn’t all bad though, I had struggled over positioning the fiction before COVID hit us, so all year I have worked on a world series’ bible for all the stories I have set in my fictionalised version of my world – including a timeline – and this has really helped me move that forward – it can be quite left brain to do – but, when I come back to it, with half an idea, I find it easy now to see who is where in the world and that is sparking new ideas and new answers to old problems. Getting something right there improves my battered confidence and with renewed confidence, I can move forwards with fiction.
I have to find a way to go into 2022 with my chin up, and not continue living with grief for losses Flax, community and friends, and allow the shock of failure with the goat project to pass into some other frame of reference. I will have to find a way to make 2022 something more than a trip to a point in time when the unborn kids are grown and gone, as are some of the ‘extra’ goats we now have, costs are reduced and those remaining can exist as retired pets and company for Rufus.
No matter how much I would like to be able to say that all that won’t affect me, and the writing, I know it will – these goats were not bought in as meat animals and it is a frame of mind I had left behind. If I had wanted to go back into meat production I would have bought in sheep.
The garden and Rufus and the writing and ‘caring’ for my mother and being there for husband Gordon and our main business are all things To Do Better whatever else I am doing and we all have to get through COVID crap.
An old friend told me today, ‘Don’t give up.’
So here I am and here I go again… Onwards to 2022 Goats and all 🙂
Happy Christmas and Happy New Year 🙂