Working holiday

18th June 2026

In April 1990 my buddy Craig and I embarked on a year’s backpacking around the world. After three extraordinary months in southeast Asia we landed in the Lucky Country – Australia 🇦🇺 . We were the proud possessors of ‘working holiday visas’ which, as the name suggests, allowed us to work and earn money to fund our stay and contribute to the next leg of our travels. We spent three months in Brisbane earning a very modest crust in our newfound professions of optometry and law, and it was a fabulous life experience, gathering a couple of lifelong friends and one wife (not mine!) en route. It also enabled us to spend six months in Oz before slingshotting on to New Zealand, the South Pacific and the USA before jetting home from New York. Magical times ✨

Fast forward 36+ years. About a month ago in Blighty I gave up on sleep in the small hours one night and came downstairs to write a ‘brain dump’ in my occasional journal. Thinking about our approaching return to Barbados and how best to balance our leisure and active time on this relatively short visit, I must have triggered a long-dormant memory, as the first line I wrote was ‘It’s a working holiday’. Well – ain’t that the truth? No prizes for guessing which has predominated so far…

This is because we have decided to be brave, invest in the estate and embark on Project Cottage Renovation. With an extremely capable project manager on board we have begun to overhaul Dovecote Cottage, the three bedroomed property we have neglected to tackle to date (other priorities have kept us a tad busy) – and which will end up being rechristened as the more appropriate Carriage House to reflect its heritage. Like all good projects, we started with the roof:

Keen-eyed readers will note that’s not me up there, though amusingly I was in fact blowing leaves off the roof of the main house at the time! No, that’s our new roofer Robert and his crew, stripping off the ‘torch-on’ felt. Just the beginning. In the meantime, our latest fencer (the third incarnation 🙄) Don finally plugged the longstanding gap in our boundary with a gate. Hallelujah!

And none too soon, either. Near the former gap I stumbled upon the unfamiliar object below. Hmmm. Fungus? Tree root? Meteorite? Nope. It was a desiccated cowpat:

Hopefully installing the gate will keep Ermintrude and the rest of her herd at bay 🐄 🤞

Don has a lot more to be going on with around the cottage, as we can see from the stockpile of materials awaiting his attention:

All in all the roofers and the fencers are going great guns. So were we today – reunited with our lovely gardeners Jason and Chris, we spent hours working with them in the grounds. I think Nicola never wants to see another fallen leaf, and I may have a burgeoning case of Weed Whacker’s Wrist. We thoroughly earned our large Wye Valley pink gins courtesy of our two-time visitors Sarah and Chris. Iechyd da!