Watched last night's episode of Build a New Life in the Country. You can read more about it on the programme website, http://homes.five.tv/jsp/5hmain.jsp?lnk=451
A Whitby middle aged couple bought a ruined farmsteading and bastel house and spent a year making it habitable. Reminded of my own early years in old farm cottages, some of them needing major renovation in days before makeovers. But this project was in a different league. No roof, with decades of weather damage,it was an 18th century bastel house - that's a fortified farm house on the Scottish borders to deter Scottish cattle stealers! Walls 2-3 feet thick, and parts of the floor feet deep in centuries of dung, muck and rubble; the cows shared the building nights and winters to protect them from the Lowland rustlers.
It takes a combination of desire, acquired skills, co-operation, muscle and perhaps a little oddness, to envision such a ruin transformed into a dream home. Centuries of dung removed, tons of concrete laid by hand, the stone tiling roof rebuilt, floors, windows, electricty, plumbing, the lot. As an example of a marriage of minds and sharing of a life project it was simply inspirational - and I was moved by the indomitable, resilient, optimism of this pair - and the way they simply, 'got on with it', through snow, flooding that washed their building materials away, and serial night shifts of hard graft.
This would be the place to get homiletical and expand on dilapidation and ruin as metaphor of life, and how vision and passion can make the impossible achievable - but that would be to look for spiritual lessons. And it trivialises the realities this programme was about. It was about stone tiles, hung floors, bolted cross beams, hard packed dung requiring pick-axes, a 50 odd year old 5 foot grandmother revelling in the power of a power hammer. Lord Macleod's doctrine of creation was deeply biblical because he took matter, the sheer materiality of this world, with theological seriousness. That's what I saw happening last night - two people tackling ruined chaos with creative energy fired by a vision of the beautiful. Great television!
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