My name is Lara Armitage and I'm 46. I'm the director of an animal-assisted activity and crafting centre in the Scottish Borders, called At Birkhill House CIC. I'm from the Boston area in the US, but have lived in Scotland since 1994. My husband is a vet and we have two teenage children. We love animals and crafts, and we wanted to share that love with others. So, in 2017, we bought the nine-acre estate Birkhill House and we run workshops out of four renovated stables here.
I get up between 6.30 and 7.30, drink tea and play Wordle and other games to kick my brain into gear. I then go around the estate checking on the animals, which include alpacas, sheep, goats, cats, dogs, chickens and peacocks. We have a part-time animal-care assistant and 14 regular volunteers to feed the animals. Afterwards, I check my e-mails, sort through bookings and do paperwork. We're a non-profit, so we are always filling out paperwork to get funding.
On most days, I lead group sessions, which can take up to three hours. Our motto is improving mental health in the Scottish Borders through caring and creativity. We collaborate with support and recovery groups. People come to us for the therapeutic benefits of crafting, gardening or animal-assisted activities, or a combination of these.
Local experts run workshops on traditional crafts - everything from pewter casting to leatherwork - and we offer workshops on fleece processing, using the fibre from our alpacas. We recently started a dye garden, where we grow the plants to dye our yarns, so some people want to work there or in our polytunnels, planting or harvesting fruit and vegetables. A group might want to participate in animal-assisted activities, which means just being with the animals, grooming them, filling up their hay feeders and so on.
The afternoon is an endless loop of tasks. For example, I'll help a chicken who's got her foot tangled in some string and then I'll card alpaca fibre to spin into yarn. After that, I'll clear a stable for a knitting workshop and then look at faecal samples under a microscope to make sure the animals are healthy. I'm always multitasking!
In the evening, I cook dinner. I make big hotpots, or lasagna, chillis and stews, using the food we grow here and locally produced meat. My husband comes home and the kids come in and they tell me about their day. And then we all watch something fantastical together, like Game of Thrones, while I do some knitting. I usually go to bed at 11 and read for an hour. I studied English literature at university and I'm always reading some great novel that somebody amazing wrote. Right now, it's Eva Luna by Isabel Allende.