There are a couple of things that I am equally sure will not happen this summer. The first is that I will not be announced as the new face of L’Oreal. Let’s face it, I’m not exactly Cheryl Cole am I? Actually strike that, if I EVER start to develop any similarities to Cheryl Cole, please take me to the nearest river and drown me. Well, I suppose Ms Cole and I do have one thing in common and that is that neither of us can sing a note.

Even if L’Oreal suddenly decided they wanted a BOB to front their next campaign I would, of course, turn them down flat because let’s face it if they are a company with any morals, sense of dignity or scruples at all, then they don’t ever show it. They are, in my humble opinion, the epitome of greed and immorality and all of the so-called celebs that prance around advertising their wares deserve to be ridiculed for their vanity and avarice.

Ha – I do love a good rant to start my blog.

The other thing that I can be sure of this year is that I won’t have a vegetable garden of which to be proud. In fact, I’ll be extremely surprised if anything gets planted at all. This is a combination of wrist-slashing misery after last year’s disastrous efforts – rain, more rain and yet more rain, cold, the biggest slugs on the planet and then a desperate infection of blight meant that there was almost no harvest here at all last year. Given that my veggie patch got abandoned in a sea of mud and mire and has remained in its desolate condition ever since and that I have no time whatsoever to start afresh this year because my finals are at exactly the wrong time of year to allow both to happen. So it will probably stay a tangle of weeds and be monument to my failure. This, then, is as close to a real crop of my own veggies I’ll get this year – a pot of supermarket chillis.

So, there you have it – no new face of L’Oreal and no vegetable garden. It’s a great pity because there is something so indescribably good for the soul about having mud under your finger nails.