Two steep streets, two sets of steps and two staircases up to my bed

Allowing myself one last look over my shoulder, this is the cherry blossom tree in the front garden of my old house. I collected enough blossom to make two gallons of wine, which is fermenting in a bucket in my new house.
It was a long, tiring weekend of moving that started first thing on Saturday and ended about 8pm on Sunday, but I had my sister and two of my best friends helping me move each and every item. I am now safely installed in my new home, on a surprisingly comfy sofa, with my cat purring away next to me. I made it.

To get to our new house, you have to climb up two of the steepest streets I have come across in Leeds (and that's not me exaggerating for dramatic effect), then from our street into our garden there are a couple of steps, and then at the end of the path two more steps up for good measure, before you are finally at the front door. And then my bedroom is in the attic. Both flights of stairs up there are pretty steep too...

I have done this journey with all my possessions by car and van, and after that I have pushed my bike up carrying groceries, and in today's case, a vacuum cleaner strapped to the pannier rack. I just hope my legs get strong soon, I'm still finding it pretty tiring.

I haven't finished unpacking yet, and the kitchen is full of crates of homemade wine stacked up all over the place so I have been eating a lot of pasta, as this requires minimal cooking preparation. I'm hoping to carry all the wine down to the cellar over the weekend and set up some makeshift shelves out of bricks and planks, not least so I can start cooking meals involving vegetables and more that one pan, which is all I have access to at the moment.

But I love the house. I love the wooden floors, and the alcoves for my bookcases, and the fact that I live in the attic bedroom, and the fact that we can have our own wine cellar. I love having a window in the bathroom, and a gas cooker in the kitchen. I love having a mantelpiece to put my toy canal boat on. I love being so close to woodhouse ridge that I can take an alternative route home through the trees without making a detour.

I think I'm going to be very happy here.

Regeneration

At a party this weekend, a friend was telling me about woodland management, which is something I knew nothing about. He was telling me there is more to it than simply cutting down trees. I'd always thought that our need for wood had to be an endless compromise, with the trees always losing; we've decided that whatever we need the wood for is more important than having a living, breathing tree, and that decision is final. I'd always thought that a tree grows, and gets cut down, and then that's it.

What I hadn't appreciated is that trees grow back. Even if you cut the tree down to a stump, almost to ground level, it will send out shoots that will grow into new trunks, and in the meantime the space you have made allows the light to get through to give everything else growing in the woodland a better chance to get big and strong.

This initially sounded like magic to me - self-regenerating trees - but the fact that all it takes for trees to do this (species permitting) is a little care and planning , that you can manage a woodland so that it can keep providing you with a source of wood but at the same time still be a functioning part of its ecosystem, that cutting down the tree to make something doesn't need to be the end, that if you treat it well the tree will keep providing for you and those who come after you, all this made me really excited. A woodland can be sustainable if we just allow it to be so.