Hot, hot, hot

And so it is up here so I don't know how they cope in the cities. I managed to do some work outside this morning, my fruit garden looks 100% better but round about noon I had to give in.

More problems with the animals, this time the donkeys. They get really hot and uncomfortable in this weather and have been rubbing their faces on trees and posts etc. The all have bare patches on their faces and Millie our Poitou donkey has a big scratch down her face halfway to her nose. Looks very strange and very uncomfortable. Adrian and Tabby have bathed it in tea tree oil to soothe it and keep the flies off but she will still rub.

Adrian is in the barn now with the clippers; every summer we try and clip Millie off. The Poitou donkey is really hairy, it has a coat a bit like an afghan hound actually. As a result anything you put on her tack-wise slides round. Clipping her down as far as we dare-well, as far as Millie will let us- sort of gives us a fighting chance to stay on her back and not end up hanging underneath her belly or sliding over the top of her head like I did once. As I type Adrian is all in one piece and despite the odd rear hoof flicking up, Millie is being very cooperative about it all. Trouble is that she is easily bored and he may only get one side done before she decides she has had enough and won't stand still or wrenches the clippers out of his hand. She does that with a smile on her face as well, a huge joke to a donkey.

Also arrived today was the dvd of our television debut. We were one of four groups of people, oddly enough one other couple came from Ipswich, that's two of us from East Anglia looking for new homes. Interesting isn't it? I wonder why?

Just arrived is our first foray into on line grocery shopping from a well known supermarket. We worked out how much it would be to take our Ford Ranger into a large enough town to do a reasonably priced big shop and the amount that we were charged for them to come out and deliver it to my door was several pounds cheaper. We have to go at least 6 miles to get a decent shop and a really big shop would be 30 miles from here easily. That's one of the disadvantages of living up on a mountain. My dream is to grow enough of my own stuff and hopefully have a milking goat as well to stop me having to dispose of all those plastic milk bottles that you get. I fear that is some time in the future though. And if you look at it, the driver is delivering all round this area so that means there aren't an extra lot of cars polluting the atmoshpere. Rather him in a hot and stuffy vehicke today than me, he looked well broiled.