From Rigoletto to Roadkill

They met in the library of the Guildhall school of music, some five years ago. He was puzzling out the meaning of a French song by Ibert and she came and helped him with it. Her translation includes the prophetic words "He lives on a happy isle where all is pure and truthful…where you will also come, one day". Little were they to know that before very long they would, indeed, be sharing an idyllic life, as pure and truthful as you can get.

It's hard to imagine a more romantic story. Emily, from a complicated, high-achieving suburban family, now lives in an ancient clapboard cottage with ducks, geese, chickens, ferrets, a tumultuous adolescent spaniel called Treacle - and Michael. It's chilly, for their heating and hot water are all supplied by an elderly Rayburn, hungry for logs, and the only hint as to their remarkable musical gifts is a piano.

It's fiendishly hard to get into the Guildhall, yet neither of them felt ready for real singing careers when they graduated. Michael, whose parents have a Kentish smallholding, was inexorably drawn back to the land and Emily was drawn to Michael. She moved into his parents' house, where she was given a warm and loving welcome and fabulous, regular meals, and each set about testing the water.

He worked as a builder, then won a prestigious Winston Churchill Foundation award that allowed him to travel to Poland and Hungary to study wild boar management (it's a skill waiting to be used, but its time is fast approaching: wild boar, he says, are amazing colonizers and survivors and their presence in the Weald is growing by the minute). Emily worked in a shop, then as a nanny for twin boys. But they were harbouring ambitions....

....which were realised when a dank and mouldy cottage became available for an affordable rent. Michael set to and made it habitable and a few months later the pair of them moved in and began the dream.

They've been there for a year now. They help with Michael's parents' sheep and pigs, in exchange for meat, and they work very hard to be as self-sufficient as is humanly possible in Kent. Immediately upon arrival, the curious visitor is offered a cup of dandelion coffee – rather tentatively, for Michael is not a pushy type and realizes this may not be to everyone's taste. But it is not at all bad. You make it, he says, by roasting dandelion roots then crushing them up.

That is one of his simpler recipes. For grander occasions he recommends a classic dish of roast woodcock, which involves removing its gizzard but not its entrails – at which point, I'm afraid, he lost me. But he is clearly a great cook. Emily smiles happily at the memory of all the delicious meals she's eaten at his hands. For her birthday, he made a dinner for 12 people which included pike broth, wild mushrooms, wild duck, chestnuts, gooseberries and elderflowers – all of it food for free.

Emily herself, however, is not one to sit indoors and do nothing. She is prepared to get her hands dirty with plucking, cleaning and skinning his trophies and, until recently, took nearly her full share of responsibility for the livestock, though the ferrets, understandably enough, are his and his alone. Their range of activities is astounding. They make wine, cheese and honey, cider, chutney, jam and mead; they smoke bacon, ham and even eggs (delicious in salad apparently); they shoot game in season, they forage and they fish. Hoping for some razor clams one day, Michael was delighted when Treacle bettered this and trotted up to him with some live scallops in her soft mouth. Another feast that night.

What can't be consumed at once they dry, preserve, bottle or freeze, and what they don't need they use as barter – or as gifts. Even offal is deliciously transformed into haggis, faggots and brawn. Some of this work demands a strong stomach: to turn a pig's head into brawn not only must you brush its teeth but remove the wax from its ears. Nothing daunts Michael, and nothing is wasted, not even roadkill. He has developed a bit of a local reputation for being unafraid of a carcase. If someone hits a deer, he is often called and butchers it, wasting not a scrap. Smaller mangled animals are useful ferret-fodder and, at the very bottom of the food-chain, hopelessly squashed squirrels, rabbits and foxes are fed into a large drum in the chicken-run, with holes at the bottom for maggots to escape and provide protein for the hens. Michael teaches country pursuits at Bethany School, where his lucky students learn many of these skills, though possibly not the bit about the maggots.

But always, at the back of their minds, the music called. It was while she was nannying that Emily realised that she couldn't quite leave singing behind her. Mimi's first aria from La Boheme kept bursting forth – and not just because she was espousing a Bohemian lifestyle (nor that her tiny hands must often have been frozen). She had sung in the chorus at Salzburg in a Rattle/Nunn production of Britten's Peter Grimes and the memory was powerful. She decided to try for the Guildhall opera course and won a full scholarship

Now well into her second term she's clearly loving it. And Michael too has taken up singing again. He will be performing with the Battle Choral Society on May 17th, in works by Bach and Haydn and plans are afoot for a local concert in the summer. Ultimately, they'd love to sing together professionally, always provided Michael's obliging parents will take care of the livestock. One day, they might perhaps become another Angela Gheorghiu and Roberto Alagna? It's certainly a possibility. Remember, you saw it here first....