How an orphaned Devon lamb changed estate agent's life
Flashy cars, a prestige job and plenty of money - high-flying estate Stephen Keighley had it all. Underneath, he knew "something was badly wrong"."One morning I was driving to work, and tears started coming down my face," he said."I pulled over, rang into work and said, 'I'm not coming in' and they said, 'will you be back tomorrow' and I said, 'No I'm never coming back' and that was it."Mr Keighley left his London life of 25 years and moved back to Cornwall, where he had grown up. Despite being back home, he still struggled. That was until five years ago when a friend gave him an orphaned lamb named Benny to care for - giving him a purpose that "changed his life".
"Having to care for Benny 24/7 and help him survive gave me a motivation and a purpose in life that perhaps I had been missing for a few years," Mr Keighley explained."My mental health wasn't in the greatest place in the world and perhaps Benny came along at the right time for me."Mr Keighley, who grew up in Launceston, then bought two more sheep to keep Benny company and soon realised he had found his calling - to be a shepherd. He now has a flock of 38 rare breed sheep having swapped his office for fields near Vixen Tor on Dartmoor, in Devon.
"It's a complete and utter contrast from what I was doing and what I did for the majority of my life," he said."I used to drag myself out of bed when the alarm went off, put on a sharp suit and go to work."Now I spend my days in tatty clothes covered in sheep poo, but I no longer need an alarm - as soon as the sun comes up, I can't wait to get out here."He said he would not change a thing."I've learnt a lot from sheep in terms of life experience," he said."They've taught me how to just 'be'."Just to stand back and watch their social interactions, the way they happily spend their days happily grazing and lying around, that taught me life doesn't have to be as fast-paced as mine had been."It's given me time to reflect and to work out what's important in life." As for Benny, he is now a fully grown ram. Mr Keighley, who kept him as a pet, said he was definitely not for sale.
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The Guardian
4 hours ago
- The Guardian
A moment that changed me: I went to a death cafe – and learned how to live a much happier life
'Are you afraid of dying, or are you afraid of not living?' Last year, I was sitting in a circle of strangers – half Buddhist monks, half morbidly curious members of the public – when someone asked one of the most profound questions I had ever heard. I was at a 'death cafe', at my local Buddhist centre in south London. A plate of biscuits was passed around while people nursed mugs of hot tea. At 29, I was one of the youngest attending the informal chat about death and dying, which was part of an initiative to encourage more open conversations about the ends of our lives. During the session, people reflected on the lives of those they had lost. Stories were shared about the joyful moments they had had together. A woman asked me why I would want to come to something like this, at my age. I looked around before revealing more than I had ever told my own friends and family. I began to talk about how, for a long time, I had considered suicide. Throughout my late teens and early 20s, I was stifled by my thoughts and anxieties, and often felt misunderstood. After receiving professional help (and an autism diagnosis), I became plagued with guilt and shame that I hadn't embraced how precious life actually was. I felt regretful for wasting what some people call the best years of their life. I decided to say yes to every opportunity in a bid to catch up on everything I had missed. I took on endless creative projects, went on holidays, wrote books and scripts, made films, and hosted dinner parties. I'd gone to the death cafe after seeing a poster advertising the meetings. That day, I shared how I'd often fixated on milestones as a way to measure my success, and how I would compare myself with others and feel like a failure. We laughed as we acknowledged how these milestones, like university degrees or property ownership, were never used as a way to describe people who had died. I realised that my newfound zest for life also had its downsides: I felt burnt out, and I hadn't given myself enough time to savour moments before moving on to something else. After a career in acting, I had become a published journalist almost overnight, but instead of celebrating my new commissions, I gauged my success as a writer by counting how many articles I had written. Similarly, I had acted in multiple major TV productions, but panicked when I didn't have the next one lined up. I'd spend eight hours making the perfect cake for a friend's birthday but then be exhausted for the event itself. 'The journey is the best bit,' smiled one of the older strangers in the room. 'The fun is not knowing what might happen.' I realised that my fear of not living meant my ego was fuelling my choices. My desire to be successful came from my insecurities about feeling like a failure to others. So I needed to focus on how things made me feel, not just how great they looked or sounded to strangers. My shame over my mental health had made me defensive, as if I owed everyone an explanation as to why I made certain choices. But at the death cafe, I realised that I could thrive in imperfection. During that evening I met people who were ill, people who believed in reincarnation, parents who had lost children, and a woman who cared for the dying. While many of the questions we had about death were answered, we had to accept that not all of them could be. Before we left, we hugged. I felt a sense of peace flood over me as I realised that I no longer needed to seek validation from others. Instead, I chose to accept myself and embrace my past. Rather than believing that saying yes to everything is the best way to live life to the fullest, I've become more open about communicating my boundaries. I've become a much more patient person, too, and try to be more present when spending time with people. While this shift away from pleasing people means I've lost some friends, I've also gained a stronger bond with others. Since my first visit, I have continued to return to death cafes all over London, meeting new people and having new conversations about death over tea and cake. In truth, I feel more alive than ever for doing so. Elizabeth McCafferty is a journalist who writes regularly for the Guardian In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@ or jo@ In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counsellor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at
Telegraph
18 hours ago
- Telegraph
Our dream country home became our worst nightmare – here's how we rescued it
It had never been the intention of Russell Pinch and Oona Bannon to build a house in Devon. When they started looking for a property to buy, just over 10 years ago, they had something far simpler and more straightforward in mind. The couple, now in their early-50s and with two teenage daughters, are the husband-and-wife founders of the high-end furniture brand Pinch, which has become a British design success story since it launched in 2004. The company is known for its elegant and beautifully made wooden furniture, upholstery and lighting, which appear regularly on the pages of interiors magazines. Over the past 20 years, they have poured everything into their business, so the idea of buying an investment property arose to mitigate the fact that they don't have a pension. 'We're entrepreneurs rather than investors,' says Pinch. 'When it was suggested to us that we should really start thinking about getting a pension, we thought, rather than put our money into something that we'd have no control over, we could put that money to much better use. We own our house in south London, so we decided to remortgage and use that money to buy a one-bedroom flat that we could rent out, and then there would be something we could sell later on.' That was the plan. However, it all went out the window one Saturday morning back in 2014 when, while browsing the website of estate agency The Modern House, Pinch came across a piece of land in south Devon with an old barn and planning permission in place to build a modern home. 'The thing with one-bedroom flats in London is that they're very expensive,' he says. 'It was interesting to find that a field in Devon actually cost a bit less – and could be such an amazing project. So we just got carried away.' The field was being sold by a couple who had run a dairy farm on the land since the 1970s, and who had launched the UK's first organic ice cream company, Rocombe Farm, in the 1980s. When they retired, they decided to parcel off pieces of the land and convert the farm buildings into homes. The outline planning had been done by RIBA award-winning architect David Kohn, among whose previous projects is Stable Acre, a modern conversion of an old stable block, which Pinch and Bannon loved; it felt like a perfect fit. They went to view the land – just to take a look – but found that it was already under offer. 'Our first thought was, 'Phew, because it's four and a half hours' drive from London on a Friday night, so what were we thinking anyway?'' says Bannon. But when the other offer fell through, and the opportunity was there for them to buy the land and create their dream weekend home, they couldn't resist. This wasn't the couple's first property project: they describe themselves as 'project people' and had previously converted an old barn in France, doing all the work themselves, with the help of Pinch's father, over the course of four years – to the point of making all the doors and windows and pouring the concrete floors. But this time, they were going to leave it to the professionals. They collaborated closely with Kohn on the design of the house, so closely that Pinch built a 1:20 scale model of the entire house, complete with kitchen, bathrooms, flooring and miniature furniture, so that they could fully visualise how the house would look. 'With about 80 per cent of what David put to us, we were naturally aligned, especially when it came to materials and finishes,' says Bannon. 'With the other 20 per cent, he challenged us – but in a really good way. There are things he suggested, such as a curved internal window above a door, that we wouldn't have come up with on our own but which really make the house what it is.' Due to planning restrictions, they were unable to exceed the height of the original barn or extend the footprint by too much, so instead they opted to dig down 1.3 metres below exterior ground level. The final design included an internal courtyard, overlooked by a sitting room and library, with stairs leading down to a semi-subterranean kitchen with large windows looking up into the garden and the sky beyond, and further stairs leading up to the bedrooms and a gallery with internal windows overlooking the rooms below. 'It was a lovely few years actually,' says Bannon, thinking back to that time. 'We were daydreaming, really, about how we wanted to live.' They got more than a wake-up call, however, when the design was finally ready to go out to tender to contractors. 'We had a budget: we'd remortgaged our house to what we thought was an affordable amount, and it gave us a certain amount of money,' says Pinch. 'It was based on the original QS [quantity surveyor] report – it wasn't a back-of-a-fag-packet estimation,' adds Bannon. They had chosen every detail, down to the handles and the window finishes; yet when the quotes came back, they were wildly over budget. 'It wasn't a case of, 'Can we scrimp and save?' It was completely unbuildable,' says Pinch. One issue was that the cost of materials had suddenly gone through the roof, due to a cargo ship full of building materials sinking off the coast of Scotland. As Bannon puts it, 'You come to realise that there are so many unknowns with a project like this. Obviously, the cost of materials depends on the moment and that varies all the time.' So they started a process of 'value engineering', a means by which the cost of a build can be reduced – which, ironically, required a further fee – swapping poured concrete walls for breezeblocks, for instance, and wood-framed windows for stainless steel. Eventually they got to the stage where the build could begin, and things began to move relatively quickly. 'We've got amazing memories of coming down here and walking across this sort of half-built castle – it felt like it had ramparts,' says Bannon. 'We'd sit in this space, and you'd just be sitting under the open sky, but you'd be thinking, my bed will be here. It was such a special time.' The build took about a year, but their original dream of finally getting the keys to a finished home had been somewhat modified. Instead, all of their budget was swallowed up by the exterior of the building, so they got the keys to a beautiful but very raw shell, with no staircase, kitchens or bathrooms; with plumbing in the walls, but no taps. They spent the next year travelling down to Devon at weekends with their daughters, then aged 10 and 11, and staying at a nearby campsite so that they could build the kitchen, fit the bathrooms, lay the floors, paint the walls and do everything else that needed to be done. 'We knew every single square centimetre of this house intimately,' says Pinch. At the end of that year of work, they had reached the point where they could simply enjoy spending weekends in the house as a respite from their busy lives in London. 'It was feeling like it was an operating home for us that was all about the future,' says Bannon. Then one Friday night in November 2019, the story of the house took a completely unexpected turn. 'It had been raining a lot: proper Dartmoor weather, very intense and incessant,' Bannon recalls. 'Russell woke up in the middle of the night and said, 'What was that noise?'' When he went downstairs to investigate, Pinch walked into what was, he says, 'the weirdest, most dramatic scene. It was like something from Titanic. Water had got in under the concrete floor, which had risen to the point that the dining table was touching the light fitting. Because underneath the concrete there was polystyrene for insulation, and concrete is not designed to take pressure from below, only from above, so if water gets underneath it it breaks very easily. If it floods, the polystyrene floats, so the concrete floats. There were tins of food floating past; it was completely discombobulating.' As the house is part subterranean, it had been fitted with underground pumps, but these were unable to deal with the sheer volume of the water ingress. The couple's first instinct that night was to try to get the water out. 'We had an old cool box and a bucket, and we started trying to scoop it up and throw it out the front door,' says Bannon. 'I did that back and forth a couple of times, and then I looked up, and the water was just gushing down the steps that go up into the garden, like a waterfall. We were basically throwing the water into a lake.' At this point, it was 3am. They called Pinch's parents, who drove the two hours from their home in Gloucestershire to pick up the children, then called the fire brigade, who advised them not to get stuck in an upstairs room. The water rose for three hours, up to 70cm, then slowly the pumps were able to take back control, and managed over the next few hours to pump the water back out into the garden. But the catastrophic damage had been done. The next day, the shock fully hit them. The house was a complete write-off. 'You see those stories on the news about people's houses flooding but it's very hard to associate yourself with it,' says Pinch. Even several years later, it is still clearly a difficult memory. 'When you go through that, it is unbelievably stressful. You feel very alone, because who's going to help you? It's the middle of the night, there's no back-up. You're really on your own.' They spent the next several months feeling 'progressively more alone'. The contractor they had used for the build had (for unrelated reasons) since gone bust; the quantity surveyor had little confidence that they would be able to rebuild the house safely and protect it against future floods. It took a year for them to get the insurance money, with the help of an insurance litigator. Over that winter, the house flooded again, more than once; it was an unusually wet winter, and the water table was extremely high. Despite being 200 miles away in London, they knew every time this happened, due to security cameras they had installed at the house. 'I'd get a notification on my phone from the Blink app to say that the power had gone off, and I'd know the house had flooded again,' Pinch recalls. 'I remember a time when that happened during a meeting and you almost passed out from the stress of it,' adds Bannon. Eventually they were put in touch with an architect in Devon, who was able to find local drainage experts and mechanical engineers with a special interest in water management, so that they could go back to the building phase and start again, doing the painstaking work of repairing and making safe the outside of the house before they could start rebuilding it on the inside. It took a further year; a fraught process compounded by supply-chain delays caused by the Covid pandemic. This time, they installed a whole new system of flood defences. 'We did put in flood defences the first time,' says Pinch. 'But it's not an area that had flooded before. We got planning [permission] based on the fact that it's not on a flood plain. But it did flood, and we just knew that we needed to protect ourselves. We've built wells; we've built overflows for the wells in case there's a storm and the electrics go off; we've got detention lakes; we've got a moat. If this doesn't work, we're really in trouble.' To see the house now, furnished almost entirely with their own designs, along with some vintage pieces, its calming aesthetic belies that traumatic time, although the house still bears some scars, such as cracks in the floors here and there. 'We haven't totally whitewashed it out,' says Bannon. 'Those scars are part of the patina of life; they happened.' Yet now, more than five years on from the flood, the shock of the experience has eased. 'I remember there was a particular place where I stood that night, rooted to the spot with fear, and there was all this noise, water noise everywhere,' says Bannon. 'For a long time, whenever I stood in that place I would feel that feeling again, but I don't now. It's passed.' 'I used to get PTSD every time I saw a yellow weather warning on my phone, or if the security cameras went off because of a power cut,' says Pinch. 'It was extraordinarily stressful, but in the real scheme of things, people have a lot more to deal with than their second home flooding.' With time, they are able to look back at the experience with something like a sense of closure. 'I'd honestly say, it's still the best project we've done,' says Pinch. 'It's gorgeous and we love it.' 'It's a forever home,' says Bannon. 'You just float around this house. It has a sense of lots of different spaces being connected, surrounded by massive sky and birds of prey and all sorts of Disney animals outside. We've got teenage kids, we're running a business, we're busy all the time but when we get down here, I walk through that door and every cell in my body feels relaxed.' As for whether this experience has put them off future projects: 'We are still, and hopefully always will be, project people,' says Bannon. 'We bring design and daydreams into all that we do. But that experience taught us to be prepared – and to be prepared for things to go wrong.'
BBC News
19 hours ago
- BBC News
Norwich meeting scheme for new fathers launched
A group to support new fathers hopes the sessions will enable dads to feel less isolated by connecting with others while also bonding with their Get Me Out The Four Walls (GMOTFW) charity, based at Mason Road, Norwich, is behind the new project which aims to help fathers maintain strong mental manager Carrie Dagraca said: "Quite often dads are a forgotten group."Blokes aren't quite as good about talking about their feelings, but it's very important for the wellbeing of the whole family that dads just don't suffer in silence." She added: "We know the mums need support, we know mums can suffer from mental health issues, both during and after their pregnancy and we do have a free peer support service for any mum or dad that is experiencing mental health issues."GMOTFW, which has been running for 10 years, said the meetings were focussed around the use of Lego and other modelling bricks, the idea being this activity will encourage all ages to more about why the "construction" idea was adopted, Eleanor Mason, chair of trustees for GMOTFW, said: "We've really tried over the years to appeal to dads and to get dads to come and see us, and we've found activities like coffee and a chat is not working."Dads do not want to come in, sit in a circle and talk about their feelings. So we figured, just do something a bit different, get the Lego out, they can sit down with their children, have a play, build a house, build a car, build whatever and have a chat."Then if they do decide they want to talk to somebody they can do that afterwards, but just coming along and having some fun, that's fine too." The new group's first session was on Saturday and will be run on a monthly sessions are open to fathers with children under the age of two, or dads-to-be who "may wish to come along to experience what it is like to have small children".Older siblings are also welcome, the charity said. Follow Norfolk news on BBC Sounds, Facebook, Instagram and X.
