Although I enjoy eating the fresh fruit and vegetables that grow here in abundance, for me it’s the animals and their characters that make this place so very special.  Chasing ducklings up the garden as I bring them home from their daily visits to their parents in the poultry run.  My tussles with the geese to avoid being pecked by the gander and my arguments with them over bedtime.  Taming the bullocks so that they will come close and eat from my hands and fighting off their greedy mothers, Lucy and Beattie, who practically bowl me over as I try to push a wheelbarrow of hay into the barn. Pinky and her white horned ram lamb and Tufty the father and the other 12 spotted sheep each with their own personalities.  The crazy chickens who eat the duck food even though they have plenty of their own layers mash and the six bantams who regularly put themselves to bed well before dusk.  And, the loves of my life ( and the favourites of my grandchildren) Mack and Mabel who sit outside the back door every morning crying out that they are “starving” until I follow them to the hay barn to feed them where they nearly bite my fingers as I give them their herbal biscuits followed by fishy cat food. And above all the sight of buzzards wheeling on thermals and kestrels hovering above their prey and the brightly coloured goldfinches and the spotted woodpeckers coming to eat from the bird feeders outside the window thrills me day after day. And the huge, ever changing Bedfordshire skies……….