The met office and the weather broke their promise to us today. We’d been promised sunshine in Cornwall while the rest of the country got wet……they lied! We got wet too!!!

For whatever reason, we always get up late here. I don’t know what they put in the water but it is soporific in the extreme…….well, either that or it’s the fresh air we consume hungrily while we are here. When DM finally surfaced from bed and let the dogs in to the bedroom, Archie got himself a spot in the window with his front paws on the windowsill and was staring intently into our next door neighbour’s front garden. I thought he’d seen a neighbourhood cat and was watching that so I was a bit tardy looking out myself.

When I did though, I was enthralled by the sight of three tiny lambs on our next door neighbour’s front lawn. One of them was getting a head-butt from a ewe, after trying to suckle her when presumably the lamb belonged to another mum. Pah, pah and double pah – by the time I’d got my camera, they had all disappeared up the road, stopping every so often for a quick chew of something in the hedgerow.

It’s been an unusual day in as much as we’ve spent it out visiting. We went off to see Stuart, David’s best friend from school, who lives about twenty miles from our cottage and yet we’ve only seen him a handful of times since we’ve been here. He’s a work traveller and when we try to see him, he’s often away in China or some other such far-flung place.

This weekend though he was at home, doing his tax returns and I suspect that even a visit from us is preferable to that.

When we arrived home, our friends, neighbours and plasterers were anxiously hanging around by the front door – they were clutching my diary pages from yesterday, printed out onto paper and mortified that they'd interpretated my comments as that I’d been fed-up with them for not finishing the plastering before we’d arrived. I’d inadvertently upset them by my comment about wishing we’d not come down.

The job is a big one and it’s well underway. I’m pleased with progress. My musings were really about whether we should have interrupted the flow or not – I’d just felt we should have stayed away until it was completed. You know, we’ve held up proceedings by being here and we’ve had to bring some of the furniture out so we can ‘camp out’ in the sitting room. DM disagreed. He loves seeing progress and has been observed stroking the new plaster around the fireplace and uttering things such as ‘oooohhhhhh yes’ and ‘just look at that curve, isn’t it wonderful’.

Our day ended with a walk down the course of the river Seaton, with Archie sloshing around in the water, Rosie practicing her hurdling, chasing tennis balls and generally charging around the place while we ambled along, enjoying the last of the daylight (it’s so nice now we can walk early evening and it’s light) and loving the break in the rain. Archie is on the bank of the river, after a big shake!

Two years ago I was trecking to and from Manchester to a meeting and last year and last year I was once again in Mother Nature's Kitchen!