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Growing Goats and Girls
- Living the Good Life on a Cornish Farm
- Narrated by: Olivia Scarlett-Watts
- Length: 8 hrs and 56 mins
- Categories: Home & Garden, Gardening & Horticulture
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Nick and Lesley Albert yearn to leave the noise, stress, and pollution of modern Britain and move to the countryside, where the living is good, the air sweet, with space for their dogs to run free. Suddenly out of work and soon to be homeless, they set off in search of a new life in Ireland, a country they had never visited. As their adventure began to unfold, not everything went according to plan. How would they cope with banks that didn’t want customers, builders who didn’t need work, or the complex issue of where to buy some chickens?
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Lovely, relaxing listen!
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Great light read
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Sally Urwin and her husband, Steve, own High House Farm in Northumberland, which they share with Mavis the sheepdog, one very fat pony and many, many sheep. Set in beautiful, wild landscape, and in use for generations, it's the perfect setting for Sally's (sometimes brutally) honest and charming account of farming life. From stock sales to lambing sheds, and out in the fields in snow and on hot summer days, A Farmer's Diary reveals the highs, lows and hard work involved in making a living from the land.
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Wonderfully written, charming, funny and real
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A little over 10 years ago, Janine Marsh and her husband gave up their careers in London to chase the good life in the countryside of northern France. Having overcome the obstacles of starting to renovate her dream home - an ancient, dilapidated barn - and fitting in with the peculiarities of the locals, Janine is now the go-to expat in the area for those seeking to get to grips with a very different way of life. In this book, Janine regales us with the delights and dramas of a year attempting to live the rural idyll.
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Poor narration
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If there is one thing that most of us aspire to, it is, simply, to be happy. And yet attaining happiness has become, it appears, anything but simple. Having stuff - the latest, the newest, the best yet - is all too often peddled as the surefire route to happiness. So why then, in our consumer-driven society, is depression, stress and anxiety ever more common, affecting every strata of society and every age, even, worryingly, the very young?
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Fresh Eggs and Dog Beds 3
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For Nick and Lesley Albert, swapping the hectic intensity of modern Britain for the peace of a tumble-down farmhouse in rural West Ireland was like a dream come true. But three years later, with the economy crashing and the house refurbishments unfinished, their plan for a tranquil life is falling apart. Are they in danger of replicating the very lifestyle they had hoped to escape, or can they get their lives back on track? Only time will tell.
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Interesting humor
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Fresh Eggs and Dog Beds
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Nick and Lesley Albert yearn to leave the noise, stress, and pollution of modern Britain and move to the countryside, where the living is good, the air sweet, with space for their dogs to run free. Suddenly out of work and soon to be homeless, they set off in search of a new life in Ireland, a country they had never visited. As their adventure began to unfold, not everything went according to plan. How would they cope with banks that didn’t want customers, builders who didn’t need work, or the complex issue of where to buy some chickens?
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Lovely, relaxing listen!
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Still Living the Dream in Rural Ireland
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My Four Seasons in France
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A little over 10 years ago, Janine Marsh and her husband gave up their careers in London to chase the good life in the countryside of northern France. Having overcome the obstacles of starting to renovate her dream home - an ancient, dilapidated barn - and fitting in with the peculiarities of the locals, Janine is now the go-to expat in the area for those seeking to get to grips with a very different way of life. In this book, Janine regales us with the delights and dramas of a year attempting to live the rural idyll.
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Poor narration
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A Year of Living Simply
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If there is one thing that most of us aspire to, it is, simply, to be happy. And yet attaining happiness has become, it appears, anything but simple. Having stuff - the latest, the newest, the best yet - is all too often peddled as the surefire route to happiness. So why then, in our consumer-driven society, is depression, stress and anxiety ever more common, affecting every strata of society and every age, even, worryingly, the very young?
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If Joe and Vicky had known what relocating to a tiny mountain village in Andalucía would really be like, they might have hesitated. They can have no idea of the culture shock in store for them...no idea they'll become reluctant chicken farmers and own the most dangerous cockerel in Spain...no idea they'll help capture a vulture and be rescued by a mule. Will they stay, or will they return to the relative sanity of England?
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living in Spain and wish to go rural
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Born on a Somerset pea-field in 1941, the second of eight children in a Romani family, Maggie Smith-Bendell has lived through the years of greatest change in the travelling community's long history. As a child, Maggie rode and slept in a horse-drawn wagon, picked hops and flowers, and sat beside her father's campfire on ancient verges, poor but free to roam. As the twentieth century progressed, common land was fenced off and the traditional ways disappeared.
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Cushty
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Thinking on My Feet is an inspiring journal of walks divided into seasonal sections. Discover the joys and benefits of walking, encounters with the natural and urban world, with the familiar and strange, with animals, people and events. Kate charts her feelings and impressions throughout, capturing the perspectives that only a journey on foot allows. Find out what makes you curious, what makes something memorable.
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Joan Bomford, BBC Countryfile's Farming Hero of 2015, has lived all her life in the lush, rolling countryside of the Vale of Evesham, where cows graze the water meadows of the River Avon and modern life seems far away. Farming is in Joan's blood. Generations of her family have worked the land, and in Up with the Lark, Joan tells us with warmth, wit and great insight what it's been like to live through an era of such enormous change.
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One grey dismal day, Janine Marsh was on a trip to northern France to pick up some cheap wine. She returned to England a few hours later having put in an offer on a rundown old barn in the rural Seven Valleys area of Pas de Calais. This was not something she'd expected or planned for. Janine eventually gave up her job in London to move with her husband to live the good life in France. Or so she hoped. While getting to grips with the locals and la vie Française, and renovating her dilapidated new house, a building lacking the comforts of mains drainage, heating, or proper rooms.
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The Olive Farm
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For many, Carol Drinkwater will be forever remembered for her part as the wholesome Helen Herriot in the television series 'All Creatures Great and Small'. But since being a successful actress in England, she has spent the past thirteen years in France with her husband Michel.
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A charming easy listener
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When Tamsin Calidas first arrives on a remote island in the Scottish Hebrides, it feels like coming home. Disenchanted by London, she and her husband left the city and high-flying careers to move the 500 miles north, despite having absolutely no experience of crofting or of island life. It was idyllic, for a while. But as the months wear on, the children she'd longed for fail to materialise and her marriage breaks down, Tamsin finds herself in ever-increasing isolation.
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Emotional
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Homesick
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The story of a personal housing crisis that led to a discovery of the true value of home. Aged 31, Catrina Davies was renting a box-room in a house in Bristol, which she shared with four other adults and a child. Working several jobs and never knowing if she could make the rent, she felt like she was breaking apart. Homesick for the landscape of her childhood, in the far west of Cornwall, Catrina decides to give up the box-room and face her demons. As a child, she saw her family and their security torn apart; now, she resolves to make a tiny, dilapidated shed a home of her own.
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Very interesting
- By Mr Chops on 03-10-19
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Afloat
- A Memoir
- By: Danie Couchman
- Narrated by: Danie Couchman
- Length: 6 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
Danie Couchman grew up on the move, her family never staying still long enough for her to say where she's from. At 25, and living in her 17th home, she finds herself drowning in the rush of London life and makes an impulsive decision: to buy a narrowboat and make it her home. Surrounded by an eclectic and itinerant community in the uncharted territory of the capital's urban wilderness, Danie becomes fully immersed in this hidden world. Each day on board her boat, Genesis, is an adventure full of disaster and magic.
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Amazing real life adventure
- By Anonymous User on 18-04-19
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The Way Home
- Tales from a Life Without Technology
- By: Mark Boyle
- Narrated by: Gerard Doyle
- Length: 8 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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No running water, no car, no electricity or any of the things it powers: the internet, phone, washing machine, radio, or light bulb. Just a wooden cabin, on a smallholding, by the edge of a stand of spruce. The Way Home is a modern-day Walden - an honest and lyrical account of a remarkable life lived in nature without modern technology. Mark Boyle, author of The Moneyless Man, explores the hard-won joys of building a home with his bare hands, learning to make fire, collecting water from the stream, foraging, and fishing.
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Life changing!
- By Kindle Customer on 22-08-19
Summary
Ever dream of packing up and escaping to a simpler life on the land, just the Cornish landscape and a few cows and goats rising up to greet you each day?
When Rosanne and her husband left city life for the Cornwall idyll they knew little of farming, the seasons and milking, but over time they found their way, rising to each new challenge and embracing all that the land gave them.
Growing Goats and Girls lovingly and invitingly charts the rural, hardworking and joyfully haphazard lives of Rosanne and her husband as they escape London to live off the land.
In their tumbled-down farmhouse in Cornwall, they learn to rear goats, chickens, cows, bees - and two children - get to grips with unruly machinery and cantankerous farmers and chart the changing seasons in glorious countryside over 30 years.
Heart-warming and uplifting in its celebration of the simple things, this earthy portrait of life on the land taps in to our collective imagination. After all, who hasn't dreamed of new beginnings, escaping into nature and living more simply.
Growing Goats and Girls reminds us to appreciate the fleeting, timeless moments of beauty, nature and the simple comforts of family life.
What listeners say about Growing Goats and Girls
Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- Unsy
- 19-01-21
Entertaining and informative - but no storyline
I enjoyed listening to this audiobook because it was well read and because I am interested in the topic of self-sufficiency. The only problem with this book is that there was no storyline. Each of the many chapters consists of a dozen different stories (like diary entries) but there was no linking or flow - no explanation of time scale or background or emotion.
Nevertheless I did enjoy listening and would recommend it to others.
1 person found this helpful