The good life

If someone had told me 10 years ago that I would meet and marry a modern day dairy farmer, a trim six foot blonde with whom I shared a mutual love of skiing and strawberry jam eaten in copious amounts with cheddar cheese, I would scarcely have believed it. At the time I was living in a smart south London townhouse, working as an account manager for a restaurant PR consultancy with a view to setting up on my own, was very single and enjoying a rather glam life of cocktails, restaurant launches and press lunches.

Yet here I am, back in the bonnie Highlands, food editor turned restaurant PR turned food journalist turned farmer’s wife...although I can’t honestly claim to be a ‘proper’ farmer’s wife. True I have the black labs, a smart black Barbour, two pairs of (designer) wellies and live in a traditional stone farmhouse surrounded by sprawling fields. But I don’t do the farm accounts and certainly don’t get up at 3am to help with the early morning milking. (I don’t even get up at 7.30am to make my hardworking hubby a full cooked breakfast when he comes in, as a proper farmer’s wife might.)

What do I do? I write freelance, mainly commercial copy nowadays, and make an evening meal from scratch every night, because I love home cooked food - if only I could get someone else to make it! - as well as selling our rare breed pork to local farm shops and private customers. So from city slicking to country living, food pundit to pork purveyor, I really am living the good life. But as this blog will doubtless show, living 'the good life' doesn’t automatically turn one into 'the good wife'...