Sometimes I think it’d be great to be a calf – someone comes along every morning and feeds you then you spend the rest of the day rolling around in the dirt or picking tasty morsels up from the field and munching…..couldn’t that just be such a wonderful life?

Then I wake up and realise that someone comes along to feed them and lets them have all that freedom so they can be carted off to market and sold for food. Ah – perhaps I’ll stick with my own lot then, however fed up I am with it. I’m not sure if the grass is ever greener somewhere else and mixing my metaphors madly because I’m too tired for anything else, I DID make my own bed and now I really do just have to lie in it. So lie I must.

Today has been another slog for the supposedly greater good of the grand plan – I’m now beginning to have my doubts that it will ever be realised before I keel over with exhaustion and overwork. I’m still ‘on holiday’, laughable phrase though that is. I’ve slogged all day doing boring, physically hard, dirty work and I’ve come home too tired to execute any of the ideas that have been floating round in my brain all day. There is no hot water to get clean and I’m not sure if we will have anything to sleep in tonight – the choice looks at the moment like a duvet that was wee-ed on by Rosie last week when she wasn’t well and because it’s too big to go in my washing machine is still here unlaundered, or alternatively one that’s still damp from going through the washing machine after she knocked a cup of tea all over the other one today. Still – as I keep getting reminded, there are millions of folks worse off……and besides, however much of a complete pain in the bum she is for this kind of stuff, as she's sitting under my desk as I type, keeping my feet warm with her warm body, looking up at me with her beautiful brown eyes, I know I'd forgive her anything. She is, after all, my baby.

There’s one good thing with manual labour – it’s so tedious, if you don’t use the time to imagine other stuff, you’d go completely bonkers with boredom. For now though, I can barely summon up the energy to type, let alone manage to execute a creative, inspirational pic for my photo today – these calves that I snapped this morning, on my way out, will just have to suffice.

Just to add to the spice of my life, PhotoShop has just had the most huge wobbly on my machine and taken the whole thing down, diary entry unsaved, photo unsaved. Joy of joys.

Tomorrow is another day and I’m sure it will be full of much the same as today. Hard graft. The carrot is that there may be a deal at the end of it. I sure hope so because I am losing faith badly in the grand plan at the moment. I wonder if I could downsize from our grand plan and put it in part exchange for a lukewarm idea, could I get back any of my time or effort?

Last year, Jamie Oliver was my hero of the day.....

PS One thing that brings sunshine to my world is the fact that I seem to have a few pics in the popular pics and my 50 ways gallery keeps marching on - many many thanks to those voting for them.