The following text may have been generated by Optical Character Recognition, with varying degrees of accuracy. Reader beware!

- 2 "BLESSED ARE THE MEEK. FOR THEY SHALL INHERIT THE EARTH" or: THE TALE OF TWO HIPPIES (My title for an extract from "The Magic Apple Tree" by Susan Hill) Many is the tale of woe I have heard about people who moved into the country, got "a bit of land" and were bent on self-sufficiency and organic gardening, the good life. The acquired chickens and a pig and some goats - always goats - bees and perhaps a spinning wheel, dug up an acre for vegetables and, sooner or later, came to grief. The Bruins are both in their twenties, and struggling, in a dilapidated, rented cottage-plus-couple-of-acres, to be truly and completely self-sufficient. They make pots and they paint, and Nell does woven pictures; they have enthusiasm and starry-eyed ideals, and two young children and no money and the water is fast closing over their heads. They will have to give in, I know it. They are cold in winter, and she is weary and worn-down, and the children are constantly ill. No one buys their work, or not much, and their animals get sick, because they do not really have enough expertise to cope with them, nor can they afford to pay a vet's bills. Yet I am on their side, because their ideals are right and good, in spite of being ill-thought-out and impractical, and because they are so happy together, and so kind and gentle. Their house is a mess, a homely, scruffy, impecunious mess, but they have reclaimed an unpromising field, and made things grow. They have rotten luck. Their first seed potatoes were given to them, and all diseased; they tried to sell their produce at the gate, but no one knows they are there, so there is no passing trade and everyone in the village itself already grows their own. When they put up signs on the main road, a man from the Council came and told them they were trading illegally, so they took their produce into the city markets, and there they continue to sell it, but the traders take a large profit from them first. They staggered from season to season, and now think they might try and acquire a caravan and become gypsies, or a canal boat, and become water gypsies. What they do know about, though are goats, or at least Nell does, and she sells the milk to quite a few customers in Barley (the village), and her own goat cheese, too, which is salty and creamy, tangy and crumbly and altogether delicious. She has six goats now, so there are always kids about the place. They graze both the meadow, the orchard and some scrubland which a farmer lets them use in return for cheese, and make a pretty sight, and a pretty sound, too, because Nell has put bells on the woven collars round their necks, so that it sounds like Switzerland, near to their house. By the time I had spent an hour with her, I had confirmed my feeling that I wanted to keep goats very much indeed, and that I could not possibly do so. Not yet. So we shall just go and visit Nell's and buy their milk and cheese. As long as the Bruins are up there, that is, but they seemed very depressed about their prospects, although quite firm in their commitment to a country life, to self-employment and self-sufficiency. But I suspect that, to make it work, you have to be both larger, in terms of the amount of land and animals you have, and more ruthless and efficient and blinkered than Nell and Rod are or could ever become, and, also, rather more professional about what paperwork has to be done and cannot be evaded, and better at producing pots and paintings than either of them, with their modest talents. A lot of people derided the Bruins when they arrived, and a lot of people would gloat if they threw in the sponge, but I should be sorry, and for the village, too, because they bring the right spirit to us, unacquis'rtive, loving, relaxed, the opposite of time-serving, and they have a contentment and a stillness, in spite of their troubles, which makes their company so refreshing. .../3