Back in the old routine

A misty start to the morning

We were back into a more ordinary routine this week. We mainly did ordinary chores around our land. Our regular routine is to get up when we get up, anywhere between 5:30am to the latest 7:45am, but normally around 6:30am. It all depends on how tired we are and how well we sleep in the caravan. It can be a little noisy when it rains overnight, but usually we sleep pretty well, as it is so quiet despite having two cockerels, however they are far enough away to not bother us.

Our kitchen in the greenhouse

I pack away the bedding and Ian gets the breakfast out, which we now have in the greenhouse, since we put the second-hand kitchen in there. It is nice to have our breakfast in a bright and roomy place. I've never had such a big kitchen-dining room. Even better is that spillages on the floor don't matter as it is just the floor of the greenhouse with a scattering of straw to soak up anything. I had better not get to used to that. The downside is we can't leave food in there, because it gets too hot during the day and mice could get into it, or the cats. They do like bread, even when in plastic bags.

Our new animal feed preparation area is in the
corner. This was taken on our workshop by a
friend. No idea what I was trying to do, reminds
me of Tommy Cooper.

Marie on the floor at the back got into a pickle this week. She
must have been trying to get away from the male and ended up
head first with legs dangling in the feed section at the back.
Ian was a little panicky when he saw her and thought she must
have hurt herself quite badly, but no, she was just stuck. To
while away the time, she was tucking into the hay quite
contendedly. At least Ian managed to get her out okay

The daily routine this week has been for Ian to take the boys up to see the girls. A routine that does not need much encouragement and I feed the chickens. This got a little more complicated this week as we put the chicks in with a group of older hens. We were going to give them their own ark, but that meant culling some chickens that hadn't been producing, only of course they started producing again and the other chickens stopped laying. It seems like they have the idea the cooler weather means autumn, after our early and hot spring/summer. They got a reprieve, but we still intend on culling the cockerel because he seems to get in a flap too easily and we wonder if part of the reason for the low egg production is stressed out hens due to his panic calls.

Chicks of a different sort in the girls alpaca house. This is the
first brood of swallows to be raised in that building. They
are so funny with their big mouths and punk hair dos

The older hens have been a bit mean to the little chicks, but the little ones can escape under the ark, where the big ones cannot reach, so it isn't too bad for them. I also push a tray of food under there so that the little ones can eat in some sort of peace. One of the older chickens is particularly mean, but the little ones congregate around my legs when I am around and so I fend off the older one while they eat a bit. It was hard trying to get them all in at night though, but tonight I found a good system of getting the big ones away first and then opening up the side of the ark where we check for eggs and putting the tray in for the little ones in there. Since they congregate around me, they soon found the tray and all hopped in as good as gold - these are certainly the best chicks we've had for doing what we want them to do.

Morning fog hovering at tree line

After those morning chores comes coffee. We don't drink coffee that much, although our consumption has increased after our trip to Estonia earlier on in the year, but the morning cup is a must these days the rest of the day is usually tea. We often sit and chat about what we plan to do during the day, or is it I give instructions to Ian! Most often though we are putting the world to right before our regular daily chores of gardening, cleaning out the animals, moving fencing, or whatever other jobs are needed to keep all in shape.

The sheep behind the alpaca house and paddock area

Our visitors this week have been a motley crew. There have been our friends who wanted to learn more English and they helped us cutting alpaca toe-nails, well the husband helped with that and the children and their mother watched. It was so much easier with an extra pair of hands again, especially one used to larger animals, even Turbjørn couldn't get away, despite trying. The little ones did help at one stage when one of our alpacas looked like she might try and escape out the half door, by standing in front of the door and chatting to her.

The bought in food for our felting workshop last week from
the local hotel

Our next group of visitors were quite a surprise. We are not sure if we have met one of them before or not, but if we have they were young at the time. What was for sure is we know many of the people they know from the camps we used to do when we first started coming to Latvia. In fact they were off to do join a camp at the place we used to visit after their trip to our area. Small world, as they say. It was funny though reeling off names that we knew and they knew, even folks who used to go to the same church that we did back in England - all connected through camps in Latvia. It was really exciting to hear their plans to come and attend the local technical school in our village and use that to earn money in the countryside and run a farm - this is so much on my heart to see and one of the reasons for my research to see how that can be encouraged.

Dessert - rather nice

One set of visitors were more returnees, who had visited in May. The lady had suggested to her mother that since they were going past our place they should call in and see the alpacas, to which her mother replied "what's an alpaca?" Well she knows now and she thought they were lovely. Our next set of visitors were also enamoured with them. They hadn't intended to visit us but were wondering through our woods looking for mushrooms, as Latvians do. Private property is different here and something we have to just accept, which is fine. After all in the bible it talks about gleaning and not harvesting everything so we should not consider our mushrooms as just for us. It's hard sometimes when we haven't had time to look and someone else has got their first though. Unfortunately they came with a dog, which we are not happy about, especially a dog without a lead. It was not an aggressive dog, but we did insist it be kept away from the alpacas, for the alpacas' safety and the dog's. Alpacas have been known to stamp foxes to death if there is a big enough herd, so we cannot guarantee a dog's safety if they feel threatened. Fortunately the visitors were okay with that and they still got to meet the alpacas.

Lunchtime on the felting workshop

Not so ordinary or routine this week as a visit to the doctor's. A couple of weeks ago and again about a month before that, I managed to get a hernia. I have had one before about 20 years ago and so knew what to do and sorted it out myself without resorting to a hospital visit. However, with two occurrences in a short space of time I accepted that I should at least consult with the medics as to what I should do. I arranged for a friend to take me to the local family doctor, which we did on Friday. She got me into see a surgeon today (Monday), as she thought there was something wrong.

Looks like Lady V has found something amusing, she usually
has a Queen Victoria look "not amused!"

Today took a bit of organising, as the only person available was male and not comfortable about the examination, but we managed okay. The only problem is that the surgeon could not find anything wrong and said I shouldn't do such hard work and wear a belt to protect from hernias. Hmmmph! Not impressed really. It was not as if I was doing anything particularly strenuous the second time, just must have moved wrong. The first time was perhaps strenuous, as it was during the time we were shearing, but right near the end, after helping with the shearing of over 60 of them without a problem. Since the surgeon doesn't seem that bothered and I am not particularly wanting to have to go through surgery, I am going to try and see about strengthening muscles around my abdomen and hope that sorts it out. It could be that my stomach muscles are too loose after losing about 9-10kg over the last eight months. Hopefully I can avoid seeing the surgeon again in an emergency situation.

A cloudy sunset

I am not the only one getting articles published just lately, Ian now has an article in "Alpaca World" where he talks about our experience of having alpacas in Latvia. He thought they might shorten the article but they haven't or not noticeably so anyway. He enjoyed the experience and it will be interesting to see if anything comes of it in the future.

Mission accomplished

Brencis just chilling

Well that's a bit how it feels. This week hasn't quite worked out in the way we imagined, but it still went well and we learnt a lot in the process. So  grab a cuppa, put your feet up and follow the antics on our alpaca farm for this week

A calm morning

Morning sunlight through the trees - pictures of the kitchen
will have to wait till next week. We forgot to take some

On Tuesday we installed a kitchen in our greenhouse, as you do. Doesn't everyone have a kitchen in their greenhouse? It was one of my mad ideas but in the end it has worked out quite well. One of our friends was getting rid of an old kitchen that has seen better days, but still useable and so we picked up the cabinets. I helped Ian to load it into the horse box so he could take it back to the land, but I couldn't go back with him, as I needed to do some cleaning at one of our apartments in preparation for some visitors and I also needed to do some washing. That left us with a problem of how Ian would manage at the other end to unload the kitchen. When I got to our apartment to do the washing, some friends of ours were there. I was expecting them to be in Riga to pick up their daughter from the airport but she had missed a flight and wouldn't arrive till that evening. Perfect! Well not for their daughter but for us it was and I quickly co-opted our friends to help. The guys went off to help Ian install the kitchen and I got the washing load on and went to do some cleaning with an assistant in tow. When I got back to the land the kitchen was just about installed.

Eager customers?

Galina, our felting tutor on the right and one our guests for the
course

Wednesday was an early start to go to Riga. First we had to find Baltcom, who supply our electric, because they had a problem with my account. I tend to enter my first name for various accounts but it does not correlate with my full name that comes with the personal code that all residents have here and they thought I had got a new family name. Middle names are not common here at all. Unfortunately the lady in the shop did not speak English and my rudimentary Latvian was not enough. In the end we made her photocopy my ID and put the company stamp on it to prove I had been to the shop and done what they asked me to do. What annoyed me is that there was no note on my account to explain what I needed to do.

Galina's assistant getting to know Aggie

The start of some socks

Next we hurried a little belatedly to pick up our guests, our tutor for the felting course at the weekend, Galina Blazejewska and her assistant. They had had a long overnight journey from Warsaw on the bus, so were tired but we needed to shop for wool whilst we were in Riga. It was the easiest way of making sure we had something that worked well for the felting course even if what we had didn't work so well. We had a very nice lunch in Ala, in Riga - highly recommended for a quality traditional Latvian style meal and fairly reasonable too. It is a little hard to find, if you don't know it and it is like making your way down into a labyrinth, but easy enough once you know. Then we navigated our way through the streets to find the two shops we needed for wool - we managed to make it without too much heated discussion. We don't do cities much!

The finished socks

The back of my poppy bag

Thursday was the calm before the storm, even if it was only a small storm. We took Galina and her friend out to our farm and chilled out on a lovely day. They helped us around the place as we cleared up the mess in our greenhouse, and then they picked fruit off our bushes for us. We also had a visit from a group who had made contact through the website. They were a lovely family and related to one of our neighbours. They even complimented me on my Latvian, which surprises me, it is really bad but I think my pronunciation sometimes isn't that bad, so people think I can speak more than I can. I do understand a bit more if I know the context, so that helps. We also had a visit from a lady who I "met" on the internet. We had been commenting on the same blogs for a while and found out she was originally from Lithuania, so as I usually do, I extended an invitation if she was ever in the area to call in and she did. She was visiting her parents in Lithuania and then making her way up to Estonia, so took a bit of a detour to visit. We had a rather nice email afterwards to say how much her children had enjoyed the visit and said if she was ever this way again, she would be sure to make time to meet again.

Another pair of socks

My completed poppy bag, modelled by
one of our visitors

Friday we got going on the felting course. We started off with a farm tour to meet our alpacas, and because we are English we had a break for tea, coffee and cakes before starting on the felting. We had one paying guest and our employee learning how to make socks or felt house boots and I learnt how to make a rather stunning poppy handbag (I can say that because I had a lot of help). It was a good start to the course and everyone really enjoyed themselves in a very relaxed way. We bought in food from the local hotel as we are not geared up for making anything more complicated than hot drinks and it proved too difficult to arrange a neighbour to do the cooking this time around. Most of the day was spent surrounded by people speaking Russian, as both Galina, our employee and our guest were all fluent and therefore it was easier for communication purposes.

Day two participants

I love this picture because our land looks like a picture stuck
on the wall, but it is the real view from our workshop for the
day

Saturday was a real international day to cap a week full of international connections. It was day two of our felting course and I acted more as a helper this time around as we had three paying guests. One lady was local and two were from America - our friend who has been with us for a few weeks now and her daughter who was delayed earlier on in the week. In addition to that we had two groups visiting us, the first were ones we weren't expecting a young man on his third visit with lots of girls and the other group who we knew about in advance. In total for the day we had at least six countries represented on our farm: Americans, Polish, Belorussian living in Poland, five French, some Latvians and a smattering of Brits (i.e. more than just us). Normally we ask for a contribution but the young man who had visited us before brought a bottle of wine, so that worked, rather nice wine at that.

Working on a bag handle

Having a laugh at the process

Sunday was a quieter day. we were expecting one person for the course, but in the end she didn't turn up until five to take Galina to Riga, but that gave us a chance to make some things for the shop and plenty of food left over to see us into the week. I'm well and truly stuffed with rather good food and found that cakes do not send up my blood sugar, in fact it sends it down rather ironically. It is still the potatoes, rice and pasta that seem to affect me the most it would appear. So as Maria Antoinette would say, "Let them eat cake."

The body of the bag starting to take shape

Gently, gently: the watchword for the course. You can also
see some of the kitchen in this picture

Working outside once the bag was wet and a visit by Brencis

Galina putting some effort in to shrink the
fabric to make some tough socks

Monday was a fairly relaxed day with a second visit by some of the folks who visited on Thursday. After the visit on that day we had a lovely email, asking if we would be interested in trading English lessons for some help - we are! As we were relaxing after the course, we were happy to chat and get to know the husband who hadn't visited before. The little children got a little antsy and so we sent them on a mission to collect snails for the chickens. They were occupied for quite a while and even found an enormous slug, which we don't find very often around here, plenty of snails but not many slugs. We then went on a walk with the alpacas so that the alpacas get used to walking with groups. The flies were a bit of a nuisance to Agnese and she wasn't so happy about Brencis being behind her and she played up a bit, but at least we know now that Agnese has to be behind Brencis to behave.

The husband came back a bit later as the little ones needed a sleep (apparently they both slept very well in the afternoon) and he helped Ian move the sheep. As he is an electrical engineer we explained about the tumbler for the fleece we could do with powering by electric. Something he is going to think about. It would be good to get that up and working well.

Wetting the fleece

Yes! Finished! And a wonderful time was had by all

As I said, the week hasn't been quite what we expected. In someways we were disappointed with the numbers for the course, but it actually made things easier to find out how it would work and what we need to think about in the future. The greenhouse worked quite well as a working space but our biggest problem was a hot day which was windy at times. Cool rainy days were fine, apart from the noise of the rain and hot days when it is still are fine for working outside in the shade. Still we managed and everyone, including Galina, were happy. Galina was even quite sad to go. I think our cats and alpacas were sad to see them leave too, as Galina's friend was enthralled with them and gave them lots of tasty treats. Another unexpected bonus is finding out our sheep were actually better fleece for felting than we expected. Always nice to find out.

Prepping

The roadsides are looking gorgeous this year with the mix of
meadowsweet and rosebay willowherb. I got permission to
cut some rosebay willowherb from a neighbours field away
from the road, as it makes a great tea. That has now been dried
in the solar dryer

Our youngest son surprised us recently, he rang out of the blue and asked us if we would like to go to the UK paid for by him. I was a bit flabbergasted really. He explained that the grandchildren were growing and they rarely saw us together and could we therefore spare a long weekend to come. He realised that longer would be more difficult to arrange since we have to get someone to look after the alpacas. We have been to the UK for longer periods of time, but not at the same time, as one of us - usually Ian - stays behind to look after the animals and the land. So it is all organised for later on in the year, the flights are booked and he has already arranged the Friday and Monday off, so that he can pick us up from the airport and take us back. He is even organising a get together with other members of the family. So I'm looking forward to being pampered for the weekend, I am assuming of course that we will be well looked after.

A rather sweet looking strawberry. The strawberries are coming
to the end but our red and yellow gooseberries, redcurrants
and raspberries are all maturing nicely now. 

It's play, spot Ian time

Besides all the regular jobs we have been prepping the place for our felting course that starts this week. We want the place to look as neat and tidy as possible and so Ian has been strimming round the garden and mowing the lawn. I say lawn, but really it is a rather large lawn and he still bears a grudge that I didn't let him buy the motor driven lawnmower. In my defence we only had a small lawn in the US when we bought it and a driven motor was not really necessary for that. I have to admit it would make his job easier now for those areas we want looking neat and tidy. It isn't necessary to use it all the time though, often he will use the flail mower but that doesn't give as neat a finish, but I can almost hear his regrets for not buying the more expensive lawnmower as he works hard pushing the mower up the hill.

One man went to mow, went to mow a meadow

That was a lot of work! And just in case you thought I was only
taking photos, I tied up our beans and weeded the garden, a mega
task in itself

Chanel having a roll in the dirt

Visitors are still turning up to the land to have a tour to see the alpacas and although they are not coming in droves, they are coming on a regular basis and quite willing to pay too. We even had our first contact through our website this week to book a visit. We have been talking about what we feel will be an acceptable level of visits, as we hear from friends of ours the huge numbers people they have visiting and we have nowhere near the same numbers. We don't have the infrastructure for large numbers of visitors and we are not sure we would want to totally go that route, we like the peace and quiet of the countryside and we think we would lose the joy of talking about our alpacas if we had group, after group, after group. We would want enough visitors to make it worthwhile and to run some workshops through the warmer months. We don't need much and so balancing our needs with what we can provide will be our goal.

He mowed beside the greenhouse so we can hold our course
outside on nice days

Test drilling for the well at 7am. We are pleased that he
decided to drive down where we take the tractor and
didn't mess up the area that Ian has spent all day mowing

We had a visit on Sunday evening from a guy who was recently recommended to us for digging wells. He came by and did the tour of the land with the hazel sticks and decided there was a spot close to where the last guy said. At least they agree! He also came early the next morning and brought a drill to do a test dig. It was encouraging because he had a great deal of difficulty getting the drill out at one point due to the suction from the wet ground. We do indeed seem to have a very wet layer, not exactly gushing at this point but promising anyway and only about 3 metres down, low enough to be below freezing level and not too deep that it will be difficult to dig. We presume he will be back before long to see what he thinks and then we can talk about actually getting the well dug.

The paths to the garden look neat and tidy too

Lady V the indomitable old lady

I mentioned last week that we have started the process of mating our alpaca girls. Our original idea was to put our black male, Mr. P. with our white females, Lady V and Aggie and our white male, Tellus with our coloured females, Chanel and Marie. We had to rapidly change our mind though about Lady V and Mr. P. because she will not let him anywhere near her and has completely intimidated him. She only has to look in his direction and he backs off. At least Tellus is not so easily intimidated, but Lady V. despite her age is giving him the run around. We hope she gives in soon, because we only plan to mate her this year, before retiring her. We think Chanel might be pregnant already though, as Tellus is suddenly not interested in her and she won't let him near now, although she was flirting heavily with him at first, so that is promising at least.

Yes it has rained a lot this week and so we have more rainbow
photos. Our ponds are also still continuing to fill

This fabulous looking spider was not cooperating in having
its photo taken. It crawled along the wire, upside down and
so this the best I could do. I shall try again another day

Last week a friend of ours set off on her travels and so she arranged for us to have the keys to her car. It was a good job she did as Ian suddenly discovered that we had forgotten to insure our car and it had run out the day before he found out, by which time it was too late to get it insured at the office in the village. We discovered later we could have rung and got it insured over the phone and paid today, so we will know if we ever have the same problem again. At least while I had the use of the other car, I could get on with the jobs I needed to do and Ian got the chance to change the brakes and fix the fog light on our car that was damaged by the deer we hit on our Estonian trip.

Finished! Well not quite

This was taken at 9:23pm and it is still quite light for a while
after that.  

It has been one of those weeks when a lot of things got finished off, thank goodness. Firstly the potatoes have finally been strawed up out on the land, a job I have been going to do for over a week and more difficult now they are racing away. We put old hay around the potatoes to increase the potato yield without hoeing them up, which is even harder work when raising potatoes in beds rather than rows. At least the potato plants look healthy enough now and I suppose that has a lot to do with the amount of rain we've had just lately. Some good soaking rain, which is what we needed and so we have gone from just a few potatoes poking through to a well covered bed.

The clouds have been quite amazing this week. One day the
darkest of clouds rolled in and it was as dark as late evening here
even though it was in the middle of the day. It then poured down
so hard it squashed some of our barley. Heh ho!

Our friends collecting some of the hay off the field. This
section will be kept mowed to keep it looking neat and tidy
for our workshop days

We are pleased we got our hay cut last week too and the ski hill where we cut our hay is already greening up nicely so maybe we will get a second cut if we need to - providing the weather cooperates of course. We are also pleased we managed with help from our friends to get all the hay into the old alpaca house, it was tight and two of the bales that we were not so sure about, as they still felt too wet, went outside under the adjoining, very dilapidated shelter. No good putting them inside as they would be a fire risk or spread mould, both not what we want.

A pied wagtail enjoying the view from the top of the girls'
alpaca house

The swallows have also made progress on their new nest and
obviously used some of our leftover hay. Sometimes you
can only see the long grass bobbing through the air, a
very weird sight.

We were going to wait to put some of the hay away as the forecast was for fine weather the next day, but I wasn't so sure when I was looking at the clouds. I suggested we put them away while the weather held instead of getting on with other tasks and I am glad we did. We would have been racing to put away about another 20 bales on our own otherwise. Even better when we were starting the job, we had a phone call inviting us for an evening meal, so that saved us even having to think about preparing that after we had shifted the bales. It was rather nice too, fresh roasted goat with salad and roast potatoes, followed by a selection of goats cheese.

We hope the swallows will deal with these nasty beasts.
At least the girls fleece has grown back enough to make the
horseflies struggle to bite

Although we've had rain, we also have rainbows

It has rained a lot this week, which has meant that I finally also got to put all the squash plants in. Some have gone on our wood/soil/hay pile or to give it its posh name hugekultur, the ultimate raised bed. It is one way of using up rotting wood that has been lying around too long and also doing something about raising the soil level - not that the soil level is particularly shallow here in most places, but the more soil there is the more carbon is stored in the ground. It offsets the carbon we released by digging a pond I guess. The newest pond is filling up nicely with all the rain we have had, which is great. We just have to hope that it keeps its level even when it doesn't rain so much, then we can water the field area when necessary and not have to go down into mosquitoville to collect water from a field drain outlet.

We have also had sunshine and so we have been able to convert
this old greenhouse into a solar dryer using a black plastic cover.
It has now been anchored down with some stones as it blew off
in the storm we had the other day, but at least the dryer works in
the sun and the herbs are already pretty dry. It is so hot in there at
times we half wondered about using it to heat up water, but then
again the water in the pond has been warm enough for watering
can showers. I used an old tin bath for a bathe the other day, it
worked

Chanel enjoying the sunshine

We have had quite a few different groups of visitors again this week. Some have come back for a second visit but brought others along with them, whether that is grandchildren or friends. Some folks were just passing by when they saw the sign and decided to stop. Another one was a lady who was originally from the village where we live and regularly returns from Riga, but we only "met" for the first time on Facebook. We had quite a discussion on what our hopes were for the future and the possibilities, even in rural areas. Something we hope to explore more on her return visits. Its nice to feel we are on the tourist trail and people are quite prepared to give us a small donation for showing them around, some are even quite generous and it all helps towards keeping us here on this land raising our wonderful alpacas.

Mr. P has been up to see the girls. We decided to mate him with
the white alpacas to generate more colours, but Lady V had other
ideas and spit him off. We hope she gives in soon and doesn't
intimidate the poor guy entirely. At least he managed to mate
with Agnese, so that's a start

Ian giving him some grain as a consolation for being the
focus of Lady V's wrath

This week I have finished another course that I was doing this year on Social Entrepreneurship. Our working group nearly missed the deadline as none of us realised that files needed to be uploaded by 9am CET and I found out at 8:45am. I hurriedly sent messages to the other members of the group and I think most of us got it posted just in time. All of us should have read our email better of course, as we should have noticed the deadline time, but all of us have been busy with other things too, some were writing their thesis. It does help to get these kinds of things done and it means I can concentrate on preparing for our felting course we will be holding on the land soon and getting some tidying up and weeding done - in between showers by the look of it though.

Lady V, the old battle axe. We hope to get one more baby off
her before retiring her, so we are hoping for a better outcome
soon

Mr. B has been trying to move up the pecking order in the boys
alpaca house. He is really trying it on with the older ones

With all that we have been doing this week it has been hard to keep up with the political farce in the UK. I couldn't believe it when Farage announced his resignation stating "I want my life back." Well Mr. Farage, I would like my life back too. I would like to go to bed tonight and know that we are safe here in Latvia, that there won't be any moves to make us "go home," and that Mr. Putin is not going to take advantage of the chaos in Europe to send in little green men. Mr. Farage, you have made that dream a little harder to pursue these days due to your misleading campaign - and I'm being generous there.

Nibbling toes, alpaca style

Oh to have the flexibility of an alpaca. I think I would look
pretty stupid or do myself an injury trying to scratch behind my
ear using my feet.

We live in Latvia because the EU allows us to do so as EU nationals, that will be taken away from us. We may be allowed to stay because we have been here so long now, but nothing is certain in this world. I also study at an Estonian university and I don't have to sort out student visas or anything like that because I am an EU national, hopefully that should not change as I should finish next year, but then what? Part of my studies has looked at some of the issues that have arisen within the EU and how it operates, the intentions of the initiatives are good but it doesn't always get the result needed - I never felt this was reason enough to get rid of the EU but enough to need some changes, but what institution doesn't need to change or evolve over time?

I love clouds, especially with such interesting patterns

No it is not the shock of the UK political
scene at the moment but alpacas taking
a sunbathe

A lot of the work that goes on in universities is based on collaboration and that will be affected by the changes if the UK definitely leaves, so even if I had to go back to the UK, would there be funding to work in a university? And the list goes on. So thank you Mr. Farage, thank you very much for your lack of care and consideration for me and lots of people like me, who now spend the next few months or years wondering what the outcome of all this is and God help us if you ever get to be involved in the negotiations - will you bother to turn up?