Sabbatical Letter #4: The In-between Days
Note: This series originally took the form of a newsletter to friends on my sabbatical travels from April to July 2026.
Dear friends,
I've finished up my three weeks on the farm, and am now in London.
My activities on the farm revolved around sowing and preparation — harvest will come in late summer and early fall. I weeded and watered beetroots and saw them sprout up noticeably, while the chard plot remain stubbornly devoid of growth. The tomato seedlings, still small and dainty, needed watering and repotting, patient work so that they’ll crawl up to the ceilings in July. My farm host showed me how to put a pumpkin seedling in the soil, while I enjoyed the pumpkin spiced cake she baked from the previous crop.
Beetroot I watered and weeded
Freshly repotted tomato seedlings, sowing beans
Stages of pumpkin
The weather also threw curveballs. Spring and summer held a battle of wills. Some days brought intermittent rain, and I wandered through long grass in soggy socks to scoop up horse manure and sheltered from hailstones in the polytunnel. Other times, the sun would show up unannounced — Oscar the golden retriever huddling under the kitchen table to find a cool spot to lie on and my host walking around barefoot.
Oscar cooling off
Riding lesson
I've also had my share of unexpected lessons. Living in someone else’s home means adjusting a new set of values and rhythms. My host grew up as part of a generation terrified of nuclear warfare, and in some regards still lives with that mindset. She trained to be a midwife and learned to build a self-sufficient farm that runs on solar power and pumps its own water from the ground. She also ran for office as part of the Green Party and dreams of building a generator for the village hall in case they run out of oil. We re-use plastic yogurt lids and keep water from cans of tuna for the dogs. A fellow volunteer studying conservation made dish detergent out of weeds. Compost is a part of our daily rhythms — we collect daily food scraps to toss into huge bins together with the horse manure, which sits and dries out for months before we filter them into smaller bits to pat over tomato seedlings and bean plots. Several times a day, the lights go off before the person closest to the power runs to switch our electricity between solar and the grid.
Solar panels
Sieving horse manure for fertiliser
My host chooses to live simply and share whatever she has. She rents out some rooms to lodgers who might otherwise be homeless at below market rents, and for free for volunteers like me for room and board. In all her doomsday prepping tendencies, something she said stuck: “What's the point of being safe if you don't share it with others?”
While the processing continues, here's ten fragments I treasure.
- Seeing small village community lived out. The furniture store owner next door to the café I stop at for lunch refers people who need the bathroom over so that they’ll buy a coffee or pastry. A neighbour lets us pop over to her house for showers when our pump stops working for a few days. The Green Party candidates hold a pub gathering to commiserate their loss and band together to support the candidate who won. On a walking tour, my hearing aid-wearing National Trust tour guide, who has been guiding for twenty years, stops to greet different people along the way, including a fellow hearing aid-wearing buddy.
Retirement done differently. I met inspiring older women at the Green Party pub event using their retirement years to campaign for clean water protection. One of them volunteered in India solo and learned to fly a plane.
Cosy, well-harmonised farm and pub meals. Cool mint married with fatty pancetta soaking in brown gravy with pillowy gnocchi, rocket with rice soaked in chicken juices, sausage, feta and pea risotto. I can go a lot longer without Asian food than I thought.
- Saturday mornings driving to the farmers market. Listening to the the genre-bending Beth Rizzo show on BBC Radio 6 and discovering new music, and have a coffee and egg tart after finishing our shopping.
Taking 15 month old Goldendoodle Jasper out to socialise too
- A car blocking the way narrow country lane because the driver stopped to let a trail of baby partridge chicks pass.
Tiny babies crossing
- Learning to cooking on an AGA (a retro stove that is always on and has compartments with different heat levels) with whatever affordable and ethically sourced ingredients are available. The Shanghainese rice cakes I make at home, normally gravy-based and with Korean rice cakes and chicken, becomes an udon stirfry with whatever meat was in the freezer because free-range chicken is expensive (thankfully, monkfish and not partridge). I learn to make perfect rice without a rice cooker. Sharing and learning recipes with other volunteers: teaching a French volunteer about Japanese curry, and learning how to make a divine spicy peanut butter veg fried rice from a vegetarian volunteer.
- More crying over art at the Gainsborough’s House museum, this time over David Dawson’s landscapes that speak of a million things at once.
Stay, 2026, Oil on canvas
The Flood, 2026, Oil on canvas
Winter Feed, 2025, Oil on canvas
Phone calls with friends carrying me through when I started feeling too cooped up, both mentally and physically.
Pushing heavy wheelbarrows — that I initially had to stop and take a break with — with ease weeks later.
- Journalling at the pub where people were having late Sunday roasts.
What I’m thinking about:
What in my life isn’t in alignment with how I aspire to live, the person I want to be? (If it’s limited by the ecosystem I’m in, what are some ways I can make it easier for myself to build my ideal values into my life rhythms?)
What are some lessons I can continue to learn from people very different from me?
What seemingly in-between days had their purpose, years later?
Love,
SH