Just to say...

I may be lying down in a darkened room for much of today, because last night was my first ever proper performance with the ladies choir I joined last September, who were singing in concert with the Loveny Male Voice Choir down in deepest Cornwall in aid of the Shelterbox appeal for Haiti. More of that eventually but I have even more exciting (for Devon) things to report.
It's been eighteen years since this little boy sat as a six year-old, transfixed by the film of Roald Dahl's Danny Champion of the World and I sat transfixed by father and son, Jeremy Irons and mini-Jeremy.
As the titles rolled, we all cheered because was that clever or was that brilliant to drug all the pheasants with aspirin and sabotage the whole thing, the good guys won and Robin (for that is what we know him as) announced that he was going to be a gamekeeper.
We were still rural town-dwellers at this time...
'But no one does that these days and besides, the gamekeepers were the baddies' we said.
'Well I'll be a good gamekeeper.'
We looked at each other and thought thanks a bunch Roald Dahl and I sent the wannabee GK to violin lessons to transform him into a Yehudi Menuhin instead.
But the dream had begun, he was already living the gospel according to the Outdoor Survival Handbook, and would soon worship at the altar of Ray Mears, the late Steve Irwin, Bush Tucker Man and anyone else who lived off their wits, nature and the land around them.
Moving to the middle of nowhere when he was ten fell right in with his plans and he was soon teaching us that the natural world needs people that truly understand what makes it tick and he was going to be one of them. He'd be out walking and watching at crack of dawn and squeamish old me has had to learn that conservation is a question of balance and animals sometimes have to die if others are to survive, and that occasionally I might trip over the evidence on the verandah.
Much of it just can't be learned from a book either so it's been a very long hard slog from those days on the year-long Gamekeeper's Course at Sparsholt College when he was sixteen, to now, and no young man could have worked harder 24/7 to achieve his dream.
Encouraged no end by his father, his mother would like to apologise for those odd moments when she may ever have doubted that he'd live that dream one day and suggested he go off and be a policeman ....you'd look lovely in navy instead of all this realtree stuff, it's like having a mobile forest sitting at the kitchen table.
So Family dovegreyreader just want to say congratulations and good luck to the Gamekeeper who starts his first full time, salaried head keeper's post tomorrow and we are all just bursting with pride.

And if you could know how nail-bitingly tense things have been here since that knock on the door four weeks ago when a local family-run estate came head-hunting through the snow ; the interview, the job offer, the contract signing, the winding up of his own business (and my hair dryer wrecked as he heated the sign-writing off his van) and so much more besides, well you'd wonder how on earth I've ever managed to pick up a book.