I am sitting up in the spare room, my "office", watching the rain fall and my beloved husband pottering about doing what is obviously a necessary job today, that of repairing a gate in a man/farmer way which means you hit what ever it is very hard with a hammer.

I have noticed this about most men. Why not use a sledge hammer to crack a nut if that is what it takes? I think it's an ancient guy -type thing going back to a less sophisticated era when drills, tape measures and electric screwdrivers hadn't been invented and the only way to deal with the problem was to whack it back into shape which is what he appears to be doing. Oh well, as long as it works and he is happy that is all that matters. I have also noticed how grey he is going. Poor man, probably my constant nagging has done it.


Across the gate that he is "repairing" the cloud is hanging so low in the valley that in places I can't quite see where the cloud starts and the hill finishes. And behind us I can't see the mountain at all today, not unusual. It looks as flat as East Anglia from here, no sign of anything more vertical that a bowling green all the way to the top lane.

Of course the wet and much cooler weather has meant that we have lots of animals in again. One or two of the very elderly ponies were shivering with the cold and Humphrey and Sadie have both come in, Humphrey now looks like he is wearing his dressing gown though it's really a red flannel blanket. Sadie is fine but once Hump comes in, he must have his woman with him or he worries she might be flirting with some of the other chaps on the farm. To be fair she is a bit of a tart. Always making eyes at Cquirt and Hamish who lodge on the other side of the fence to them. Even though Sadie is only a Shetland pony I doubt if Cquirt could hit the target anyway.

So Adrian will have twelve stables to clear out tomorrow while I get on with housework. His father is visiting for a few days as of Monday and I can't find the floor in this spare bedroom for STUFF everywhere.

But it isn't STUFF in the modern classification of"Items of no real use" type STUFF, this is more like I don't know- pseudo survival STUFF.

There's the dog toy box- fairly crucial if you value your few bits of decent furniture. Then there is all the beer and wine making kit including the 5 gallons of pinot grigio that I am supposedly making in five days but that has been sitting there since I started it in March. I decided that I would bottle it all up today and then spent so long looking for the sterilizing crystals that I lost my enthusiasm for the job. It will have to be done tomorrow which then raises the problem of where I store the bottled wine as this is a really small house, there is virtually no storage space and all those bottles will take up more space than the 5 gallons bucket it is all sitting in at the moment. Might have to drink it then. What a bummer.

There are also several bottles of unopened spring water that we bought when we had the big freeze and bottled water was all we had for cooking and drinking for eleven days. Twenty seven litres in all. Something inside me would be greatly offended if I was to just dump that lot down the drain and as it is unopened it should last for a very long time despite the sell/use by dates on the bottles. How can bottled water have sell by dates anyway? So I need to keep that somewhere and the spare room was a very handy place as you never know we could have another big freeze any day now, this being Wales. I am back into my flannel shirts and the house smells of wet dogs and waterproofs again by the way.

So I don't know where all this STUFF is going to end up. Maybe in the little shed attached to the side of the house that I think was a wash house and is so small and cramped that we call it The Hobbit House. It holds my washer and dryer at the moment with little room for anything else so if I do all the necessary laundry today and tomorrow morning, I reckon I can stand all the various bottles of liquid and the dog toys in there as long as I don't have to do an emergency load of laundry. What do you suppose constitutes an emergency load of laundry anyway? An invitation to the Palace I would imagine. Perhaps I won't worry too much then.

After one whole week of sunshine we revert to normal Welsh weather and so far we have had maybe 36 hours of rain. But even that has a certain charm as there is no wind today and you can hear the raindrops pattering on the leaves of the trees which I always think is a very nice sound to be able to hear, much nicer than the roar of traffic. When I took the dogs for their run they all ran like mad through the buttercups and I could hear a swishing noise as a greyhound shot past me hell for leather on the way to nowhere in particular. There was a look of real enjoyment on their greyhound faces as well as them being covered in wet buttercup petals. There is nothing like a real greyhound grin to cheer you up and mostly that happens when they have a good belt across a field unrestricted and just for the pure joy of it.

Worth standing around in the rain for.