I often tell people I think I have the best job in the world because I love my job. I don’t earn lots of money but I have tremendous job satisfaction. What do I do? I design and build houses using only natural materials, and teach others how to do the same, particularly women.

For instance, I recently spent some time living in a caravan right on the edge of the east coast of Yorkshire – literally 29m away from the cliff edge on one of the eroding coast lines of England.

We’re slowly building a house with ring beams of wood, foundations of car tyres, walls of straw and internal plaster made from clay that we’ll dig for ourselves from the cliff below us. During this process we are teaching as many as we can the joys of working with your hands, being outside, design for simple living and sharing fun and friendship.

Two wonderful women, Salli and Jude, from our School of Natural Building came to learn and work with us and Hedera, aged 74, looked after us whilst we worked. My partner Rae and I worked with the others on the carpentry for a complicated double semi-circular three-bedroom house that will one day be a home, a retreat, or just a place to relax.

Away from the floods in London we took an Angel card every day while we learnt, laughed and lived together all week in hot sunny weather. The sun rose out of the sea in front of us, the moon sailed across the sky when it wasn’t cloudy, and we had fires every night with offcuts from our day’s work. Finally, we returned home bronzed and happy at the weekend.

It wasn’t all easy: there were some head-scratching moments to work out how it would all fit together; there were logistical difficulties in getting cheap telegraph poles via expensive hired transport to the site but we managed it.

The referendum result on 23 June was a shock to all of us as we didn’t really expect to lose our friends and community in Europe just like that. We don’t know what will happen to the community straw bale building we were hoping to construct for disadvantaged people in Hastings with Interreg money.

We will be sorry to lose our Erasmus trainees who come to learn about natural building with us. But, we embrace change and talk turned to how we can expand the School and find ways of doing all those things anyway. I guess entrepreneurs like me will always suffer from optimism.

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