It’s been such a fun day here in Cornwall – we’ve been out sorting out paint and other decorating stuff while BT have been up a pole outside our house giving us a phone line that means we can get broadband here…..but it’s still not finished so we’re still dialing up, at least for tonight.

We’ve bought some furniture and got ourselves a few gallons of pale, buttery yellow paint. There was also quite a bit of wood – to box in our open tread stairs. Tomorrow, we start work ‘in anger’ on the final stages of this development. We’ve set ourselves a task of doing at least four hours work each day while we’re here instead of sleeping in late and walking all the time. Sooner or later we had to get on with it!

When we got home, the usual welcoming committee was waiting for us and since then we’ve done nothing but giggle and tell shaggy dog stories. Our neighbours are here as I type this and a story about a trip to the local and a local boxer has taken two and a half hours to relate.

Without going through all of the details that led up to the punch line, it was about telling a boxer that he obviously wasn’t any good because he had a squashed nose!!!

During this epic, we’ve consumed a couple of bottles of beer and I’ve made pizzas for supper that are in the oven now.

While all this has been going on, I’ve noticed everything in the garden burgeoning. This fern was growing out of our dry stone wall and it’s probably the nicest thing (well apart from all our friends of course) I saw today so it gets to feature in my pic. The wall is north facing and there is no sun ever gets down there so only those things that are really happy in the dark. At the moment, it’s flourishing with these things.

Last year we were tucking into our home-grown asparagus and two years ago we were 'doing battle'.