So much happens. Even leaving aside the love story, so much happens.

After the wonderful September gathering in the woods where mad folk huddled round cauldrons of dye and did public performance textiles beneath the canopy, Green Cloth ideas ravelled into form. A connection with a founder of that gang compelled us to follow up, and four of us got together for a skills swap camp in Devon. Hedgewitch Sue Craig brought passion, a lifetime’s knowledge of vegetable dyeing, and some inspiring containers full of plant matter, dark colour, mineral waters and sour urine. Journeyman Richard Toogood brought a plethora of rural craft and survival skills, a methodical mind, a listening ear, affection and some fleece to spin. I brought my loom, my spinning wheel, some highly spinnable Jacob’s, my wrong-time-of-the-monthness and my kitchen sink. Cloth dreamer Tallula Bentley travels lighter than all of us and brought serenity and gentle play. We all brought love, fervour, laughter and ideas a-plenty, and it was intense. It poured with rain most of the time – and we had to be towed *onto* the field – but the alchemy happened.

Having been static awhile with access to mains, I’m not sorted on the blown-cigarette-lighter and other fronts, so we were more offgrid even than I usually am all week. However I turned my phone on occasionally because a year after a little contact, Saturday Live producers had got back in touch with me to ask if I wanted to appear on their Radio 4 programme. Didn’t I just! It was a scary, but lovely, experience, which resulted in the highest peak ever in my stats, and more income in one day than in any single month since I started trading. Thanks to the Reverand Richard Coles (for the heartfelt compliment about my weavings, as well as for the sensitive interviewing) and producer Paula McGinley for such an honour.

Just when you’ve had the biggest flurry of interest in your work than you’ve ever had is not the most strategic moment to choose to take a holiday, but after packing up a mountain of parcels I took a holiday. (Hell, I wouldn’t be where I am if I’d thought strategy was the way.)

Murph hates the ferry, and a car alarm went off in the car next to us, which can’t have helped his night. When I let him out, he did the longest pee right by their drivers’ door. Guilty smirk: sorry mate, my dogma just piddled on your carma.

I headed for the woodburner of a borrowed cottage in Brittany where I planned to hole up for a week. However I took my passion with me and it gave me no rest.

I also took my camera manual (that photography A-level was a long time ago, and this digital SLR is one sophisticated machine); my accordion (getting my fingers and mind around 72 buttons, bellows, keys and chords while songs stacked up and poured forth); and my spinning wheel (cursing and fuming as the thing ran away across the floor, the yarn broke a million times, my treadling leg and bowed back ached, and my whole body rocked).

I gathered kilos of ripe chestnuts and spent about ten hours making a lightly-sweet chestnut pie (like a pumpkin pie, but not). Slooooooow living with a frenzied mind. The forest there is especially beautiful in autumn, although even our lovely walks were exercises in photography and French, so they were hard work too. I wish I could go on holiday from myself. (Don’t give me that smug, Western-Zen hippyshit: I. Know.)

One day I walked through the woods to the nearest town as my neighbour had told me they were having a Fest Des of Breton dance, which I love. I didn’t find it, and she was touchingly disappointed afterwards. One evening I visited friends and made music, and another evening I visited a fantastic café-bookshop-gallery-hub-of-resistance in the woods. I only understood half of the talk on a graphic novel which depicted a Chilean activist’s life up until Pinochet’s coup, but it was enough to know that I was in the company of good socialists. Comprehending snatches of some heavyweight philosophers on Radio Culture debating the intersection of equality, social justice, freedom, market and state as I headed for the coast made me feel that yes, France would be a good place to live. I listened to the Italian album that accompanied my mother, father and I in the van we lived in on and off for a few years in the Pyrenees when I was wee, and imagined them as young things – idealistic then, even he. That story is incredibly sad, but I liked the feeling of being a part of mainland Europe, with all its passions and problems and dreams that are the same but different from the passions and problems and dreams of these isles.

Exhausted from sleeplessness too, I extended my stay another week, and decided that this second week I’d work (ha). So then I plugged back into the internet, wrote some responses to a written interview and caught up with customers, colleagues and friends in the Green Cloth Collective, which eased the cabin fever almost as much as it inflamed it.

Then I returned to my Devon park-up and have had to power on at the loom to make orders and winter stock. Here are the last of the autumn leaves.