Even though this farm is more isolated than I’ve ever been, and I’ve left all my friends and colleagues six hundred miles away, for the first time in the two years since my parents died, I feel like I’m not alone.

***

While Noel’s upstairs hammering boards across the window frames, Glenna and I tackle the rest of the kitchen, and it turns out she’s an expert cleaner with tips and tricks for everything, and between us we make fairly quick work of the kitchen and bathroom, to the soundtrack of Gizmo’s adorable snores as he sleeps on the sofa with Noel’s jacket covering him.

Noel’s moved onto the roof when Glenna and Gizmo leave. I’m on a roll with cleaning now and want to keep up the momentum because I know I’ll probably fall asleep if I sit down. I tell Noel to shout loudly if he falls off, slip my welly-boots on and grab one of the garden forks and a scythe from the barn, and head out to tackle some weeding, pulling on gardening gloves as I walk.

One of the books I bought says that Nordmann firs and Norway spruces are the most popular trees sold in Britain, so I decide they’re the two fields I need to get ready to open first. If that’s all I can do, then it’ll be better than nothing for this year. With Iain starting next week and the seasonal workers in November, if we can get all of them sheared and the two fields weeded between us, that’ll be a good enough start for this year, especially with the Peppermint firs as well. The balsams and the spruces will have to wait.

I try not to acknowledge how daunted I feel as I open the gate and look out at the vast forest that greets me. It looks so much bigger now than it did with Noel explaining things and Gizmo running around tree trunks. Now it looks like there are at least a thousand firs spread out in front of me, the staggered planting making them all different ages and heights, branches so overgrown that they’re tangling with the branches of the next tree, and so many weeds that I can barely get near some of them.

I knew it would be a challenge. I wanted it to be.

I just didn’t expect it to be such a jungle that I half-expect Ant and Dec to pop out looking for some celebrities.