A Holiday at Millstone Farm 1

I bought this notebook from the poundshop.  It looks really beautiful.  Just like you did, Kitty, the woman I was in love with in the university Christian Union.  I have named it after you.  I have decided to begin a diary because I have no friend I can truly confide in.  I also have no wife and no girlfriend.  I will pretend that you are my girlfriend, Kitty, and that I am writing to you.  You will be my perfect partner, the one to whom I can say anything, the one who is unshockable, the one who always understands me.

My Dearest Kitty, 28th February 2019
At last Saturday's meeting, Stanley asked me if I wanted to do a training year at Millstone Farm.  I have been thinking about it very deeply.  The thing is, I've always wanted to be a church pastor but people used to look at me and say, 'You're not married' as if that answered the question completely, and in the negative.  No one could ever be a successful church pastor unless they knew what it was like to be married.  I admit that I would struggle with marital problems and broken relationships if I had no personal experience of them.  What I refuse to believe is that any pastor who has been married actually wouldn't.  Married pastors are no better at handling their marital problems than anyone else.  The divorce rate among pastors is the same as the divorce rate elsewhere.  When a couple in the church are on the verge of splitting up, the majority of pastors seem to give all sorts of reflections and all sorts of advice that have absolutely no bearing on whether the couple will remain together.  They won't.  I have come to the conclusion that there are problems married couples can solve themselves, there are problems between married couples that God can solve, as the result of some sort of emotional healing or miracle, but there are no marital problems that a pastor can solve.  I have never met a Christian couple who were oh, so grateful that they were back together again because of the help and advice they had received from their pastor.  I have never been in a church that has an abnormally low divorce rate because of the brilliant pastoral help married couples receive from their pastor.  A pastor can't solve your marital problems anymore than he can enable somebody who is unemployed to get a job or reprogram someone who has a severe psychiatric illness as if they were a computer that needed upgrading.  I will be a brilliant church leader because I will be one of the few pastors in history who actually realises that they can do none of these things.  The other pastors believe that they can reprogram psychiatric patients as if they were computers, help unemployed people get jobs and help married couples on the verge of splitting up to solve all their problems.  They fail completely to do any of these things and create chaos and carnage in their fool hardy attempts.  I think that the suggestion to do a training year at Millstone Farm came at just the right time.  My father announced yesterday that he was unable to climb under my old car to replace the brakepipes and exhaust because he is now too old and has arthritis.  My mother is talking about selling our house and moving into a 2 bedroom bungalow that would be easier to look after.  She is in her early 70s.  Being unemployed was perfectly OK until now.  I think all single people should live with their parents until their parents are too old to look after them.  During this time they should not be allowed to work.  The amount of benefit they claimed would be tiny and it would make sure that the relatively few jobs in this country would go to people who really need them.  I am going to Millstone Farm.  I emailed Stanley to tell him.  He said that I should come for a week and see how I like it.  I can catch a coach to London and then get the train.  It's a long way from Newcastle to Bournemouth.  It makes me wonder why anyone from Bournemouth would want to be involved in a church plant this far out.  Bournemouth takes a whole day, catching a 7 0' clock coach and getting there at 8 o' clock at night.  If I trusted my old car and had a bit more confidence in my motorway driving and navigation, Bournemouth would take almost as long to drive to.  I've just booked the tickets.  Stanley has promised a lift from the railway station, which, according to the map, is 5 miles from the farm.

My Dearest Kitty, 5th March 2019
What a terrifying journey.  I realise how much of my time I have spent between those 2 little dots on the map, Newcastle and Gateshead.  My grandparents lived there.  The college and university I went to were only 3 miles away.  I ventured beyond those 2 little dots twice a year, once when we had a holiday in the Lake District and once when we went to the seaside on an absolute scorcher of a sunny day.  The UK is wide.  All through the bus and train journey I was reading a book on my Galaxy tablet about a man who went to Australia as a missionary in the 1850s.  His long voyage from Liverpool to Australia on a sailing ship reminded me of this terrifying journey.  Gateshead to Bournemouth is not as far as Liverpool to Australia, but it feels equally far to me.  Stanley drove me to the farm from the station in a very expensive Range Rover which was only 3 years old.  In spite of having stuffed myself with food in the bus station cafe in Leeds and London, and not particularly being interested in food, there was a big bowl of farmhouse broth waiting for me with a thick doorstep of home made bread.  Stanley told me to put the soup into a pan and heat it up.  There was a microwave in the kitchen but it was a small one, and not particularly good.  It was only used to heat pies and things.  It was now 8.45 PM.  The soup made a nice supper. 

The next morning the sirens sounded at half past four.  It is a very carefully designed siren, beginning with a gentle sound, so that it doesn't make everybody jump.  It reminds me of the 6 o' clock whistle in the factory on the children's television programme Trumpton.  Except that it has the completely opposite effect.  Not time to go home, time to get up.  It may begin very quietly but it still wakes you up.  By quarter to five it is a terrifying roar and you are compelled to get out of your bed.  The cows need to be milked.  The chickens need to be fed.  Being a farm hand is hard work and not nearly as romantic as some people like to suppose.  The thought of living off the land is wonderful to people who don't actually have to do it.  Come and live here for a week and you will see what it is really like.  March is the root vegetable season.  Carrots are root vegetables, so are beetroot, turnips, swedes and potatoes, all of which need to be dug up.  Surprisingly, onions are root vegetables and don't grow on trees.  I ruined my new pair of trainers.  I asked if I should put them in the washing machine.  Stanley said no, they would spoil everything else in the washing machine.  The only way to clean filthy trainers like that was with an old cloth, a bucket of hot water and some shampoo.  I cleaned my trainers in this manner, left them in a warm room to dry, and had to do them again because they were still muddy.  The vegetables that we picked and washed were piled up in the farm shop beneath big cardboard signs that said 'Fresh From the Farm.'  There are boxes of eggs and photographs of our free range hens wandering around the farm, in case vegetarians don't believe that they're really free range.  There were sausages from our pigs and beefburgers from our cows, with photographs of contented and well looked after animals on cardboard signs.  I asked Jake why we went to all this trouble.  Couldn't we just sell the food to supermarkets?  He looked at me as if a flying saucer had landed in the yard and I was an alien who had just stepped out of it.  Sell the food to supermarkets?  Supermarkets wanted the right quantity at the right time and everything had to be the right size.  They wouldn't be particularly interested in our kind of produce.  If they did buy it, they wouldn't give us anything like the amount of money it was worth.  What the customer wanted was a drive through farm shop experience, Jake said.  That was our competitive advantage.  We could charge much higher prices for goods sold direct from the farm and our milk was also completely untreated milk.  Untreated milk was a novelty product that people would pay £1 a pint for.  The photographs reassured the customers that our milk didn't come from a place of great cruelty where the cows were kept in big wooden sheds that looked like pig pens, where they couldn't turn around, and that they weren't fed on cow pellets but allowed to roam the fields and eat natural grass.  The customer would pay more for food that they believed had been produced in an ethical way.  Hand made sausages and burgers also had more flavour.  'What is feta?' asked one of the customers as she picked up and examined a packet of white cheese.  'Greek cheese,' said Karl.  
'Is it made in Greece?' 
'No, it's made here.' 
'How's it Greek, then?' 
'It's made using a Greek method.'
'Is it made from goat's milk?' asked the woman's husband.
'Our feta is made from a mixture of sheep's and goat's milk.'
'How come I haven't had to milk a sheep or a goat?' I asked.
'It's a highly skilled job,' said Karl. 'Only Jake and me are allowed to milk the sheep and the goats.'
'Is that because you have to catch them first?' asked the woman.  'Jake and you are the only people who can run fast enough to catch them?'
'It's more difficult to find the udders,' said her husband. 'Only two people know where the udders are.  Any idiot can milk a cow if they've got a machine.'

My Dearest Kitty, 9th March 2019
I know that I will never find another girl like you.  If I had the teleport machine in a certain science fiction book, I could travel to a dozen different dimensions, hop across whole centuries of time, and finally find myself in the courts of Heaven, asking the angels, have you seen my dearest Kitty?  The angels would ask, what is she like?  I would say, when you meet her you will know, because no saint or angel in Heaven has such a warm, cheerful, happy personality or is as kind, as generous, as patient and as understanding as my dearest Kitty.  Like the lonely tree, I know that I will never find another yew.  But some of the girls on the farm come pretty damn close.  I was upset when Sue said she was going out in the Range Rover to pick her children up from school.  Children already?  Married already?  I suddenly realised that I liked her that much.  No chance of asking for Special Permission from the Pastors in this church to be Related to Sue.  I mentioned this to Pastor Peter.  I have rather large feet and was wearing size 11 open toed sandals.  'If you ask for Special Permission to be Related to one of the sisters on this farm again, I will personally stamp on your toes.  Do not let them become your obsession.  You may notice we have a distance between men and women on this farm.  As a married man, I have to be very careful.'  I was deeply hurt by this and took it as a personal insult.  I lay awake all night, thinking about what I was going to say to him, and remembered the Bible verse, 'If a man sins against you, go and show him his fault.'  I marched down to the breakfast table with my Bible open at Matthew 18.  'Peter, the Bible says that if a man sins against you, you should go and show him his fault.  So I'm going to tell you what you did to upset me.  I do not have an obsession with women.  My feelings for them are very pure and very kind.  While I accept that it is different for a married man, I think that if two single Christians on this farm fell in love with each other and got married it would be a very beautiful thing.'  Peter opened his Bible at Ephesians 4.  'In your anger do not sin.  Don't let the sun go down while you are still angry.  Don't let one day's anger go into the next.  I've forgotten about it.  Shouldn't you?  If someone insults you, it's all right to argue about it at the time but I wouldn't bring it up the next day.  I call that bearing a grudge.'  I still wanted an apology.  'Peter, I don't bear a grudge against you, I would never do that, I just want you to admit that you were wrong about me.'  Peter stared at me with a puzzled look on his face.  'Matthew, can I explain something?  The vast majority of guys on this farm ask me for Special Permission once in a lifetime, maybe twice at the most. You have asked for Special Permission twice in the last week.  If Susan hadn't told you that she was married, it would have happened three times.  What is wrong with you?'  I didn't say anything.  I went away to think about what he had said.  At school they used to say that I was gay because I hung around with the girls such a lot.  I am sure now that I am definitely not gay.  Somewhere out there, there is a gay man who is as strongly attracted to other men as I am attracted to women.  That must be so embarrassing.  I'm glad I'm not gay.  How would I cope?  I have come to the conclusion that I like women a lot, I care about them and I think that they're lovely people.  It's all very innocent.  I rarely have sexual thoughts, although I admit to having them sometimes but only when I really want to get married to someone first.  And I'm proud of it.  So proud of it.  This is the way a Christian man should love women.  I am like an affectionate farm cat who rubs himself up against any sister on the farm who is possibly going to stroke him or give him food.  An affectionate cat thinks that everyone is wonderful, everyone is lovely.  I feel that way about women.