Living in the Winter Palace, part two

This is (now) a blog (mostly) about building a house. But it's a blog about my life, and my life impacts on building the house. So I'm going to digress briefly; bear with me, it is relevant.

Having spent a great deal of my adolescence in and out of mental hospital, I have an intense dislike of psychiatric drugs. In my adult life, despite three major breakdowns, I'd always refused them; until the autumn of 2010, when, out of desperation, I asked my doctor for anti-depressants. They got me through the crisis of having to sell my home, but I stopped using them as soon as I felt I could. However, in November of 2011 things were worse. I had the shell of my new home up, but I was out of money, and my ability to cope with strangers was almost nil. I again asked my doctor to prescribe anti-depressants. I went, almost inarticulate, to the Citizens' Advice Bureau to ask for help applying for social security benefits; the volunteers there were extremely patient with me, and, in the course of talking to me, asked what I was doing for food. I admitted that I didn't have any, and they gave me a food parcel - including, bless them, food for the cats. I accepted it, gratefully. That's as low as I've ever been. I don't want to go there again; although, having said that, swallowing my pride and going to the Citizens' Advice was a positive step in itself.

I had considered trying to get a job stacking shelves in a supermarket, or something similar; and decided not to, because I thought (and my doctor agreed) that I couldn't cope with it.

And then, completely out of the blue, before the Department of Work and Pensions could even respond to my application, a friend rang up with news of a job in Dumfries which would have been, had I been well, perfect for me: my own skills, my own preferred choice of tools, and a very generous amount of money being offered. My initial thought was that I shouldn't even apply, because if I got the job I would inevitably fail, let my employers down, and further undermine my own self confidence. However, I did apply, and managed, through the interview, to be fairly articulate. I was offered a six month contract. I said I could only work three days a week for the first month, because of finishing my house. That was sort-of true, of course; I was finishing my house. But the real reason was to give myself a more gentle reintroduction to the world of work. I was pretty certain I'd fail.

All through my period of unemployment I'd been scrupulously careful to stay out of overdraft, but now I needed to eat and to be able to put fuel in the car to get to work. So I deliberately used my overdraft. As soon as I'd been working long enough that I was owed sufficient to cover it, I...

OK, so. Manufactured doors and windows come in standard sizes. Patio doors come in a number of standard sizes including eight feet wide by seven feet high. That fact has been built into my design thinking since the original sousterran design. So the portal in the front of this building was made to accommodate a eight foot by seven foot unit. Last November, this portal was closed only by a tarpaulin curtain, and that's how I expected it would remain all winter. I could live with that. But real glass which would let daylight in would be so much better. You can get patio door units framed in uPVC, of course. They're relatively inexpensive. For twice as much, you can get doors framed in 'engineered timber' covered in oak veneer. For twice as much again, you can get doors with real solid oak frames. In an ideal world I would have solid oak; but in early December I used my credit card to buy two enormous luxuries: oak veneered doors, and a steel bathtub, the first significant fruits of my employment.

Having doors to close out the weather was obviously a real improvement; having real glass to let in light, likewise. But for me the bath was equally important. I like to be clean, and, still more, I find long, hot baths relaxing and restoring.

There's a wee design quirk about my bath which pleases me greatly. This is a very small house, and it's a one person house. It was always the plan that the bath would be immediately behind the sink unit. It would, I planned, make the plumbing simpler. Well, or course it would. But it was even simpler than I expected. I had bought the cheapest mixer tap I could get for the kitchen sink, and I'd bought a mixer only because it was cheaper than two separate taps. I didn't know, when I bought it, that it had a swivel mechanism. I didn't think about it. But it does, and, because the bath is immediately behind the sink unit, you can swivel the tap round to fill the bath. It looks like a very clever piece of design, but in fact it's a happy accident.

Straw walls have a number of problems. Firstly - and this was quickly evident - they shed straw and dust, to the extent that particles of straw get into everything. Also - in a house heated by a wood stove and lit by lanterns and candles - they're vulnerable to fire. So it's necessary to seal them. The most usual way to seal them is with a lime mortar (lime, not cement, because a cement mortar seals any damp in and the bales can rot inside the mortar seal). But a cheaper alternative is clay, and because when I started on the walls the budget was extremely tight, I'd decided to use clay. It took a very long time to arrive, because through most of the winter the ground was too soft and wet to get a heavily laden trailer over the hill; but in early February we had a few days of hard frost, and Angus, who'd dug the clay for me, was able to deliver it.

I'd thought of a number of things to do to get the clay on the walls. I'd planned a big tub in which the clay could be trampled with water to get it soft enough and even in texture. I'd bought a number of different floats and trowels to apply it with. Some people had advised me to take a hedge trimmer or even a chainsaw to the walls to get them as flat as possible. In the end none of these things proved necessary. The best way to get the clay into the walls proved to be just to push it in with your hands; and the clay proved to be naturally fairly homogenous and plastic. By the end of February - which is to say this last week - the clay on the interior walls was complete. It's now drying; once it's dry, it will get a coat of limewash, and then I can (at last) move my furniture in. Claying the walls was an intensely dirty job, and it was inevitable that the floor got extremely dirty. I thought it unlikely that I'd be able to clean it up again without sanding it off, but to my surprise and delight a bit of work with a mop got it back to good condition. Let's hear it for the old school floor! It always was my intention at some stage in the future to sand off the floor and oil it, but to do that would be to lose its arcane pattern of randomised gym lines; I'm now thinking I may just use polish on it.

Of course, claying the interior walls was not all I achieved in February: I now have a proper back window, not quite as posh as my front window but still a great improvement over polythene. My bedroom walls are now panelled on the inside. Although I don't yet have my wind turbine and consequently don't yet have electricity, I've nearly completed the wiring. I've floored the storage areas in the eaves. But it is the clay that's made the biggest difference: with the walls rendered and the floor clean, the winter palace feels much less like a building site and much more like a home.

I'm not yet finished. The next priority is the wind turbine; after that, I need some finish for the clay walls that will make them less dusty. But then - by the end of March, I hope - the interior will be substantially done, and I shall be able to move my furniture in. That will be a milestone. There are other milestones beyond that - glazing for the front gable, the render of the outside walls, a more salubrious lavatory - but having my furniture, my books, my computer once again in my home will be a step change in my comfort, and will mark, clearly, the beginning of the end of what has been a very tough couple of years. Life is getting better, and will soon, with any reasonable sort of luck, be good.

This job, of course, may not last for ever; my present contract lasts only until May. But by May I shall have earned enough to make this house extremely comfortable, to fence my land, to plant some more trees, possibly to buy myself some cattle, and to put some aside to pay my taxes and to live on through the summer; so if my contract isn't renewed it's no tragedy. Furthermore, if my contract is not renewed, I've regained confidence in my ability to hold down a job, and do it reasonably well.

So, to go back to the beginning: in the beginning, I was not coping. I was, in strict medical terms, insane. Am I now sane? As I've said before, I'm not really persuaded by modern psychiatry's account of mental illness. All human life is ultimately performance, and the psychiatrist's art borrows much from ornithology and from drama criticism. If it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, it's a duck; if you can give a convincing performance, over an extended period, of sanity, you're sane. I'm still the same person I was with the same vulnerabilities and weaknesses, but over the past couple of months I've performed consistently well enough to not worry my colleagues - and, more significantly, to earn my not inconsiderable wage. Of course, it helps that they don't know me well enough to know how much less well than my best I'm performing. But the very fact that I'm able to give a convincing performance of coping raises my self confidence and makes it easier for me to cope, and consequently my performance is improving. Furthermore, to have got through the dark of the year with improving performance is an achievement in itself, and that, too, increases my self confidence. The anti-depressants? I stopped taking them at Christmas. I have, as I mentioned before, an intense dislike of psychiatric drugs.

Living in the Winter Palace, part one

It's a long time - four and a half months - since I last blogged about this house. Then, it was three walls of raw straw bales covered with the skeleton of a roof covered by tarpaulins. Now, I'm sitting in my bed in my upstairs bedroom, leaning back against the panelled wall. Downstairs, in the kitchen, a kettle sits on the gas hob - it isn't worth lighting the big wood stove to boil a kettle. But when I want a hot, deep bath, the stove will heat it for me in a couple of hours.

Although it's a cold morning outside, the thick insulation in the roof, walls and floor mean I'm cosy here inside. And as I sit here and look around at my home, I know not only that I designed it and planned it, but that every piece of wood, every pipe, every wire in the house was cut and fitted by me. That isn't to say I haven't had help, of course. I've had lots of help. I have wonderful friends. And I'm grateful to them. But this is still, very much, a home-made house: my home made house.

So how did I get from there to here?

The first week after the build weekend, I planked the roof. This was the first of many jobs which I assumed I could not do on my own, and then - of necessity - found I could. The bale walls were obviously very vulnerable to rain, and completing the roof was urgent. The planks run from the ridge to the eaves, and are each 4.3 metres long. Each plank had to be lifted onto the roof, carried along to its place, and nailed securely to th ridge and to each of the four purlins it crosses. More, the breathable membrane had to be laid and stapled onto the purlins first, and the planks laid over and nailed through it.

Some learning, here. First, my initial plan had been to space purlins at 1.2 metres, because that's the width of standard building sheet materials and also the width of a roll of roof insulation. I don't remember why I decided to space at one metre, but I'm jolly glad I did. Moving up and down the roof on purlins spaced at one metre was sometimes acrobatic, but possible. But it was at the limit of my stretch. To have worked, alone, on purlins spaced at 1.2 metres would have been much harder and much less safe.

Second, the strips of breathable membrane were a metre wide. You (obviously) can't step on the membrane when it is stretched, unsupported, over the purlins. You also can't easily reach across a metre of stretched membrane to position and nail a plank. So I learned quickly to stretch and staple down the further half of a strip of membrane, plank over that half, then stretch and staple the near half and plank that; and so on. The last few planks on each side were particularly difficult because there were no longer exposed purlins to stand on, and as a result there's one very untidy plank on the south side... but it's done.

The planks are 150mm wide and are laid in two layers. The planks of the lower layer are laid with 50mm gaps between them, and the planks of the upper layer are laid over these gaps. I'm told this style of roof is traditional in some parts of Russia; I first saw it (and did it!) on the roof of the cruck frame at Taliesin. That roof is eight years old now and very sound, so I thought I'd do the same here.

By the 16th of October I'd completed planking the roof, and the walls were protected from the weather. That night I moved in, and the following morning - my birthday - I woke up in the Winter Palace for the first time.

Insulating the roof didn't go to plan. The first plan had been to lay polythene sheet loosely over the purlins, lay the insulation into the sagging pockets, then lay the membrane over the insulation and plank over that. That didn't work for a number of reasons, and so I next planned to plank the roof and install the insulation felt between the purlins from the underside, and support it with cheap nylon net until I could afford to line the roof.

The insulation I used was glass wool felt. I used it because it was extremely cheap, and I was by then extremely broke. It is both heavy and floppy, and it proved completely impossible to support it between the purlins while I tried to staple up netting to support it. I was very much at the end of my money, and didn't even really have enough to eat, but something had to be done. I had planned, ultimately, to line the roof with matchboarding, which would have looked beautiful - but there was no way I could afford matchboarding, and, in any case, I couldn't see how I would support the glass felt while I got matchboarding up. So I bit a bullet and bought twenty sheets of cheap spruce plywood, at eleven pounds a sheet delivered. Even with the sheet plywood it was tricky getting the insulation up, particularly the top panel of each bay near the ridge, and, indeed, I only got the last panel up last weekend - but I get ahead of myself.

It had always been the plan to reuse the floor from the summer palace as the upstairs floor of the winter palace, so as soon as the outer cladding of the roof was completed and I'd moved my bed and the few pieces of furniture I'd had in the summer palace, I dismantled it, brought it here, and re-erected it. By the end of October I had the outer cladding of the rear gable wall complete, polythene stretched over the window opening, and the wall packed with insulation felt held in place with more of that wonderful breathable membrane. I moved my bed upstairs.

Meantime, a proper stove which could cook and heat water had always been budgetted for. I knew that, no matter how broke I was, the difference it would make to my comfort and morale was worth it. So I'd ordered a very cheap Bulgarian stove, a Plamark-B, which I shall probably blog more about later. It arrived with its chimney at the end of October, and in the first week of November I got it installed and fitted. Raising the chimney was another of those jobs I thought I couldn't do alone, and then, perforce, found I could. Obviously, a stove with a back boiler can't be lit without basic plumbing, and it took me until mid-November to get that installed.

At that point, I had four straw walls, a good roof, and a stove. I could survive the winter. OK, so the front of the building was closed only by some second-hand polythene sheet and a tarpaulin curtain, but it was habitable. I'd got there. I had, indeed, reached the very end of my money, but I'd got there.

I haven't, in these essays, dwelt much on mental illness, but I was still pretty ill, often unable to talk at all with strangers and sometimes unable even to be with friends. Some days I was unable to do anything at all. I was quite unable to cope with dealing with the Department of Work and Pensions, which is why I'd claimed no benefit (to which I would have been entitled). I'd completed the basic structure of my house, so I wasn't, any longer, strictly homeless, but I was literally starving. Things were extremely bad.

And then I had a quite bizarre change of luck - so bizarre that it merits another essay.

State of Play

Roof trusses for the Winter Palace

I last posted here about my life and the state of the farm in May; it's time to post again. It's autumn, and I have now spent five months living in my simple tree house. And actually, that's mostly been good. I've been, over all, much more comfortable than I expected, and the cats have certainly liked it. But the tree house - my 'Summer Palace' - was always only intended to be a temporary structure. I was going to live here until I'd got planning permission to build the house I wanted. Well, I haven't got planning permission - not because it's been refused but because it's all taken much longer than expected.

The summer has been, as you'll know, both wet and cold, but for me it's been a mostly contented time. My home - not just my little shelter, but my wood and my whole croft - is exceptionally beautiful. It's also a very calm and quiet place, except for the one weekend of the year they hold a rock concert just beyond my wall. I've had a good hay harvest, and still have barley standing which I hope to harvest soon.

But summer is ending, and the Summer Palace will not be a pleasant place to spend the winter. So I'm now working on a Winter Palace, a much more comfortable but still temporary dwelling. Because I don't have planning permission, I'm going to build it in my wood where it can't be seen from anyone else's land. As a house it will be small - six metres by four metres inside, with a sleeping loft at one end. But of course the house isn't the whole of my home, because I have so much space outside.

It will have luxuries: things I've missed, this summer. It will have running water. It will have hot running water. It will have - luxury of luxuries - a bath, with hot running water! Being built of straw bales it will be extremely well insulated. And at the centre of it will be a stove which will warm the house and heat the water. Also, having a watertight, weathertight home means I will be able to bring my books - and many other treasures - out of storage. It probably won't have electricity, but I don't miss it much.

I've already completed much of the main joinery for the Winter Palace. The bales are here in the barn. I have two weeks to complete the foundations and gather the last of the materials, and then, on Saturday 8th October, I'm going to hold a party and all my friends will gather to put the house together. I expect we'll get it up in one day, and that I will sleep in it as early as the 9th.

There are things about the Summer Palace I'll miss. I'll miss the airiness and the simplicity; I'll miss the birds in the branches around and the gentle swaying of the trees. I do plan to take the Summer Palace down - partly because it will suffer from winter weather, and partly because I intend to reuse some of the timber. But I think I shall rebuild it next summer, partly as a spare room but also partly as a place to spend summer nights, especially if I have someone special to enjoy those nights with.

Storm

My summer residence is supported on seven spruce trees. In the time I've been here - since early May - the BBC have twice forecast hurricane force winds. The first time, I abandoned ship - but they exaggerated, it was only storm force. This time, I haven't abandoned, and it's now too late to do so. The wind on the hilltop is too high to safely evacuate the cats. I suspect, and hope, that the BBC are exaggerating again, but earlier this morning I described the wind as the second strongest I'd ever experienced. That's no longer true.

It literally is not possible for a grown man to stand upright in the gusts on our hilltop now. I know that, because I've just been there. So I'm going to have to stay put. On the plus side, my wood shows no evidence at all of windfall trees. So far as I can see, no tree of the present generation has ever blown down. And although I have thinned a little, I've been careful to preserve the green edge of the wood - I really think it's wind-firm.

However, the seven trees that support the summer palace are - like all the other trees in the wood - swaying with alarming amplitude, but, of course, with different frequencies. That gives the platform an uncomfortably sharp, unpredictable motion, like a hovercraft in a short chop. I think it's safe enough. The ropes aren't going to break. As I said I don't think the trees will fall; in fact the trees supporting the platform are less likely to go than others, since they are coupled together and thus none of them can sway to the amplitude they would alone.

I've taken down one of the side-walls the summer palace had, to allow the wind to blow through unobstructed. Having less of a sail, I hope, will reduce the risk of damage. I'm still a little concerned about the roof going.

I've pitched my tent a little bit away in the wood so that, if the summer palace becomes uninhabitable, I have somewhere to retreat to... but actually I think the worst I'm risking is seasickness. The worst of the wind is expected to be through by nightfall. I think I'm all right. The cats clearly don't like the conditions and Ivan in particular is clingy, but I think they're OK.

Things I miss

The Summer Palace

This summer of homelessness - even if I chose it, even if it is a gamble which still may pay off with something wonderful - has been tougher than I expected. This essay is to acknowledge that, and to celebrate those aspects of our modern western lives which actually are to be valued. So here's a list of things I miss...

Being warm

It's a fortnight before midsummer, late morning, and my fingers are so cold as I type this that the joints hurt. My bedding is damp again, not because of rain driving in - except during the big storm, it hasn't - but just because of the humidity in the air. I do have a little woodstove - borrowed - but because I have no walls it's ineffective either at raising the temperature or at cooking, so I don't use it much.

Closely related to being warm,

Hot water on tap

I'm a person who likes to be clean. I like to have a hot bath every night. I like to wash my dishes in hot water. Lots of hot water. Here, I haul every drop of water I use - at minimum from the water trough on the far side of my croft, but in practice usually from the farm, because the trough is open and therefore not clean. I use the wheelbarrow, so I'm not actually carrying it, but it's still five hundred metres over the hilltop; hard work. To heat it, I have my small kettle and my small gas stove. A cupful or two is easy to heat. A bathful (even if I had a bath, which I don't)? Impossible.

And next down the list

Dry boots

I have boots, of course. I have two pairs of boots which cope reasonably well with wet weather. But in the long periods of wet weather I've had I've twice got to the point where both pairs were wet. Boots are important. Wet boots are miserable. And drying boots out once they're wet comes back to being warm.

These are the critical things. Of course, there are things I have which if I lacked them would be critical. I can get clean water. I can afford food. I have friends. I have the National Health Service. And I do have security of tenure - I own this land, no-one can throw me off it. Less critically, but contributing to my quality of life, I also have technology - my laptop, my phone, my camera - and somewhere I can go to recharge their batteries.

Less important stuff

So having dealt with the critical things, what are the other things I miss?

Water on tap

Digging a track down the field and laying in a water pipe is going to cost a big chunk of the money I have, and it can't be a priority. I may not be able to do it straight off. But using water without having to think about whether there's enough, whether it will run out, what the cost of fetching it will be... that's a luxury.

Artificial light

OK, I have a storm lantern. Just at present it's out of oil and I ought to get more but haven't. But it doesn't throw a lot of light anyway, so I don't use it much... of course, it's summer. Of course, it never really gets dark at this time of year. In winter, artificial light may feel more important. Just at present, it's surprisingly minor. But... over the year as a whole... over the year as a whole, rather to be desired.

Broadband

I have had a computer network connection into my home since 1984. Then, it was a 300 baud modem; then, it didn't connect to the Internet, because JANET had not yet been connected to the Internet; JANET ran on coloured books over X.25 rather than on TCP/IP. I used network chat to communicate with my profoundly deaf tutor. Later, I ran UUCP over a 2800 baud modem; it wasn't until 1993 that I had a PPP connection feeding real-time Internet protocol - and the then new Web - into my home.

Of course, I still have a network connection. The GPRS connection that my phone provides is far faster than those old modems. But in the meantime, the Web has developed to assume fast links. Web pages are graphics heavy, and call down complex JavaScript libraries or Flash animations. Browsing the Web on a slow connection is far more painful than it was seventeen years ago. I don't need a broadband link. I can live without it. But... it would be nice.

Electricity

To get broadband here, I'm going to have to relay wifi over the hill. That means I'd need electricity in two places - one on the hilltop to drive the relay, and one in my home to receive it. Trecking over the hill to recharge laptop and phone batteries once a day - as I do now - won't cut it. On the other hand a mains connection is out of the question, since I can't afford one, let alone two. Laying cable is a non-starter, not only because of cost but also because of lightning strike issues. The hilltop relay can probably be solar powered, and reasonably low cost. But if I'm going to power a transciever at my home, I might as well have electricity for other purposes - powering a computer, for one; powering a bit of electric light, for another. So a wind turbine of about 1600 watts - and batteries to buffer its output - is the sensible way to go. And that doesn't come cheap. So electricity is a nice to have. It isn't a priority. But I would like it.

Tactical retreat in the face of overwhelming force

Well, we're no longer in the Summer Palace. Of our twenty days there, it rained on nineteen and blew a gale on five. Last night, the BBC was forecasting gusts of 82 miles per hour - literally hurricane force.

By dawn it was obvious that I couldn't really depend on the roof surviving; even if it did, sheeting rain was falling and fine spray was blowing through the Summer Palace, making everything wet. The shipping forecast was more soberly predicting force ten, and the BBC's 6am domestic forecast had dropped it's prediction to only 70 mph. If I'd just been myself I'd probably have tried to hold out, but the idea of trying to catch the cats after the roof had gone didn't appeal, and I decided to abandon ship while I could. I started to make things as secure as I could.

Neadless to say I didn't have the cat's transport box down at the summer palace. Ivan, who'd slept cuddled in with me all night, was still under the downie, so I emptied the cooking box and unceremoniously bundled him into it. I wheelbarrowed him over the hill to the farm; at the top I could barely stand.

With Ivan in the car I took the transport box back. I was wearing my waterproof sailing jacket with the hood pulled right down as tight as it would go; I'd deliberately left my glasses off for fear they blow away. The rain on my face was like buckshot. Needless to say, the cat  box blew clean out of the barrow.

I'd expected Penny to be hard to catch, but she'd been sleeping in her usual place in the structure of the roof, which was by now moving quite a lot, and when I called to her she climbed up through the roof structure to where she could see me. She was distressed and clearly couldn't get down by herself, so I hauled her out and bundled her into the box. Then I took down the one wall I have at the palace because it was acting as a sail and clearly making matters worse, bundled my bedding into plastic bags and hauled all my furniture into the centre of the platform, covering it with a strongly lashed tarpaulin before leaving. The roof may go but I don't think the platform will.

We're staying with friends for a couple of days while the weather abates and I get stuff dry, but then we'll go back. But after this a more permanent structure becomes more urgent - it won't wait for autumn, or for planning permission.

Transport

One of the things I need to consider about the croft is moving around. Not moving me around, my feet or a bicycle do that. And for getting my groceries home, well, a bike or my feet or at worst a wheelbarrow will work. But while building my house I'm going to need to get a fair bit of building materials in, and once it's build I'm still going to need occasionally to move heavy or bulky stuff around.

The planners, of course, will not want a house which cannot be reached by road. But the planners are not me, and I do. At present, you can get a normal car over the hill to the croft... in dry weather. In normal weather, you can't - not because it will sink in, but because you can't get traction. The hill is too steep and you can't get grip.

So what are my options?

One is, construct a track over the hill so that cars can use it. In theory that's 'free' to me, since the co-op agreement is that the company pays for new roads. But the truth is, a new track to my croft is longer than all the other new tracks the company needs to build put together. And money the company spends building tracks is money the company can't return to us in loan repayment. So actually building me a track does cost me money. More significantly, it costs everyone else money, and that doesn't seem very communitarian.

OK, so next, I can depend on borrowing from my neighbours. In theory it's also 'free', although one has to have favours to trade. But that's what I'm trying at present, and it isn't working very well. Of course, when we're all settled things may be a little easier, but I don't want to have to depend on it all the time.

Third possibility, I fit off-road tyres to my little car. That's actually probably enough. But it means that the fuel consumption on-road would go up considerably. It also means that I would tend, lazily, to drive over to the croft too often, which isn't what I want. And it would mean the little car would get more beat up more quickly, as it was used as a general beast of burden (which, to be honest, it is now).

Fourth is, pony and cart. It would be transportation for which I can grow my own fuel. I don't have the skills, but plenty of my neighbours do and could teach me. However, it's probable that it wouldn't get used enough, and the pony would lack exercise and practice. Also, I don't think it would be wise or good husbandry to expect a pony to pull anything very heavy over the hill, so I would still be dependent on charity of neighbours.

Fifth is, get a motor vehicle for farm use. If it was strictly for farm use it wouldn't need MOT or road tax, and could legitimately run on red diesel; alternatively I could sell my little car and get a vehicle which would do both farm and road use, but I won't do that until I'm convinced I can earn my living without needing to drive to cities.

So what are the options for such a vehicle?

I could get what is contradictorarilly known as a 'quad bike'. They are not very expensive, and reasonably simple to run and maintain. They are what the farmers round here use for moving small quantities of stuff, and the farmers are not fools. On the other hand they're noisy, can't pull anything heavy, and might be too easy to get in the habit of using.

I could get a small old tractor like the grey fergie on which I learned to drive fourty four years ago. It would be simple and reliable, would haul a reasonable weight over the hill, and would additionally be able to do  farming jobs like thistle topping, mowing, wuffling and harrowing, and as much ploughing as I'm ever likely to want to do. Grey fergies are something of collectors items nowadays, but you can still pick up a reasonable diesel for a thousand pounds and spare parts seem easy to find. It's definitely possible.

I could get an old diesel landrover. If more than 25 years old it wouldn't need road tax, but (unlike a grey fergie) could be driven into town if I didn't have to go far. It couldn't do ploughing or anything requiring a power take-off, but it too would pull a reasonable weight over the hill. Again, a budget of a thousand pounds would get something usable.

Of course motor vehicles which aren't used very often have to be kept dry, or they deteriorate. If I can store it in the 'communal vehicles bay' in the Void that will be fine, but I expect that space is going to be oversubscribed. Otherwise I'll need to build myself a shed - which isn't a problem, but adds extra cost.