I doubt DM would claim to be the fittest man alive but he’s surprised me of late with his tennis skills. As a boy, he claimed he always avoided sport because of his asthma yet now I hear he was once quite the tennis player.

We bought this cheap tennis racquet in Woolies for £2.99 and we use second hand tennis balls from a colleague at work and take them onto the dressing floor and whump them around for Rosie’s exercise.

She loves it and charges around like a mad thing chasing them and returning them to DM for the next go. He is excellent at getting the shots where he wants them to go – I’m so crap that I can’t get them anywhere near on target. He has two techniques, the first to just belt it as far as he can in a direction that we know she can run safely along without looking!!! The second is to send them high in the sky where she can’t see them so she has to wait for them to bounce to get her bearings and go after them.

After a hard day’s grafting, we decided to cool off in this manner. Archie was occupied with the stream (trying to eat waterfalls and running back and forth barking) so I sat in a dip below David’s feet and took a few pics of the fun and games.

We’re making progress with our urgent mission so that’s good but boy am I still stressed and tired.

Weirdly last year's pic was echoing my this year's thoughts - too little courage to go for my dreams and two years ago, I was thrilled with my conversion of DM to the faith.