SPECIAL SCHOOLS AND SHOOTING ANIMALS

We have now got our off-grid farm to a point where we are able to welcome visitors. I am also very excited to be the writer-in-residence at a special school, three or four miles away from the farm. Once a week, they will be bringing ten teenagers with various learning difficulties who aren't quite fitting into a classroom environment for some outdoor learning experiences. I have just employed two people to manage the visits and deliver a mixture of lessons, activities and jobs to help around the farm. There are also some other special schools in our part of Essex who are interested in visiting too. It looks then that through following the river of possibilities, we might be turning into a place where children can learn about permaculture and sustainable food production and we will specialise in catering for those who are recovering from trauma, are autistic or have other flavours of neurodiversity.

I'm writing this in my notebook on the side of a mountain in the southern Scottish Highlands where I'm taking a break and getting some slopy running in the bank as I'm training for the Brecon 100 mile ultra marathon in July and there aren't many mountains in Essex to practice on. While I'm up here I've remembered a man I ran into in a hotel near Forfar about five or six years ago.

I'd been climbing mountains in Caenlochan Glen in the Cairngorms and had a frankly terrifying midnight encounter with a gang of wild horses. My dog was on heat and I'd spent half the night trying to out alpha-male a wild stallion who could clearly smell my cocker spaniel's oestrogen and wanted to know where I was hiding the sexy horse!

The dog and I escaped to a very tartan hotel which specialised in entertaining American golfers, hunters, shooters and other people with whom I have nothing in common.

While we were there, drying out by the antler-poxed fireplace we got ambushed by Brad from Texas who was in Scotland for two weeks to shoot as many creatures as he could. Brad looked like a cartoon of an American tourist. He'd had a tartan suit made especially and it was tailored to be as wide as it was long to fit with his disturbingly square frame. Imagine if Mr Strong was advertising short bread.

Now, I'm generally not keen on people who kill animals for sport. I'm not even sure they should call it sport unless the animal they are hunting has the chance and ability to hunt them back. Kill a bear with your hands I might be able to respect you but overall, I don't think hunting is necessary and if there really is an excess of a particular animal in an area then culling should be done quietly and efficiently by a stern-faced gamekeeper who says a soft prayer for everything he dispatches and can't look people in the eye without sighing.

I tried to explain my views to Brad from Texas but he would not take the hint. He insisted on telling me not only how many stags he had shot that week but how he had shot and killed dozens of creatures on five continents just for fun. He's killed giraffes, sharks, camels, capercaillie, kangaroos and gnus. He loves it.

Realising that he wasn't going to leave me alone I tried to divert the conversation from gleeful murder to what he did for a living, half expecting him to be the owner of a gun shop or a tobacco plantation. But no. I was wrong.

It transpired that Brad and his wife were foster carers and had looked after dozens of autistic children whose parents couldn't handle them. Not only that, Brad explained that once these children reached 18 there was no more funding from the government to look after them. He couldn't bear to see them try and fend for themselves and so he used his own money to build a second house next to his own. A home for adults with autism and learning difficulties. There were currently twenty of them living under his care. They didn't receive any money from the government and so Brad and his wife had just decided to devote their life to giving these neurodivergent people a place to live and be happy and useful.

And once a year, Brad would go off on holiday somewhere overseas, and shoot animals for pleasure.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about this encounter, trying to work out what the universe was trying to tell me. I've come to the conclusion that quite simply, people are complex.

My son is autistic and nearly 18. I don't know how his life will pan out and where he will go when he's finished college. My partner is autistic and is also a headteacher, expert on change management and has just written a book on governance. She is one of the many people the universe seems to have sent to remind me that anything is possible.

I don't know where the farm is going to take us next. I'm really looking forward to welcoming the young people from special schools. I hope they don't fill me with the desire to go and shoot a giraffe though.