Rain!

Very pleased with my output so far. Screwed and bolted the old dismantled patio table back together out of the two castiron side supports and 10 new slats that I had to pre-drill. My measurements are what people would charitably call "intuitive" and involve a lot of squinting and using thumbs instead of tape measures, which I think are as lethal as that hot wire in Johnny Mnemonic. But the slats all go in where they should and the table is standing up fine and looks very impressive so I must have been doing something right.

I need to pack my trusted handcart with the drill, various bits, mounts and some plastic guttering that we had left over. They've finally predicted that rain would absolutely definitely come this afternoon and I want to catch all of it for our allotment water butts. Right now, there's only guttering down one side. OH is having to finish a timed project so can't help me this time but that's okay. I've fixed guttering before, about 6 years ago. How hard can it be?

On my way to our plot I run into the guy who had wanted to know where we got our cart from and I  get enmeshed in one of those slightly scary conversations which usually feature evil Eastern Europeans and England needing to belong to the English again. When I tactfully mention that I too am from Europe and an immigrant, I'm gently told that I am totally different from “that lot”. Conversations like these tend to leave me profoundly ambivalent: on the one hand, I want to mollify him by bringing a tray of my best German baking round one sunny day and try to persuade him of the utter excellence of cultural mixing; on the other hand, I just want to set fire to his shed.

Working on the shed a few minutes later and thinking about what he had said, I could see why he was angry. He had argued that the Poles and Ukrainians and Lithuanians got a much easier deal working on building sites while his qualifications are constantly being challenged. He's the one being told his City and Guilds quals taken decades ago are now obsolete, as is his decades-worth of hands-on experience. I've seen this qual creep happen in my line of work too and think it's simply a vile form of keeping wages down by telling experienced staff that they have to “update their skills” all the time and that they couldn't progress unless they had this or that piece of paper, usually acquired after taking time out to train, and paying whopping course fees, which, in this day and age, are no longer borne by the employer. Matey on the allotment is basically being edged out by Europeans who probably have their national certs, which the Bologna Process recommends should be transferable across the Union, but they can be plonked in much more cheaply than Matey who wants his expertise properly represented in his wages. I did tell him that he should really be angry at the banks, who got us into this mess, and the corporations who think they can boss elected governments about. He looked a bit uncertain when I said this. It's so much easier to blame some Pole with croaky English after all. I nearly told him that, frankly, the Eastern Europeans that I encountered in my line of work were without fail very polite, kind, hard-working, and incredibly focused and committed to quality work whereas quite a few of the English were rude and obnoxious blobs of uselessness with sweet FA to recommend them.

I was thinking all these unkind thoughts while I mounted the guttering, and that probably accounts for the screw slipping off the plastic and my drilling into my left ringfinger. Serves me right.

In the end, I tested my contraption with some water – it worked! It looks a bit pants because now there's a honking great gutter running in front of what will become the windows but right now it's more important that we collect every drop that comes down from the sky. I can worry about aesthetics later.

I decide it's time to go home and have some lunch and put my feet up. Halfway down the path, I encounter OH who has taken a break and is carrying some lemonade and biscuits and peanuts. Bless him, how lovely! So we have a picnic in the shed. OH admires my DIY skills (as he should!).

John across the path is down the plot with his grandsons. He reckons the rains will start at 4pm. It's spitting down already, a little bit.

Back home and lunch being over, my friend is giving me a ring: could I come over with my tools? She had offered dinner in return for some serious prunage. Of course I can! She picks me up and we set to work before the rain starts. She's got a massive bay tree that's suckered freely and is about 5 metres tall now, struggling with a fungus, completely congested and just generally in the way. I quickly fell 3 suckers. Her OH, who is majorly into animal rights, bewails a bird's nest high up that he now thinks we've disturbed. I think it's probably last year's but to calm him down, I leave it alone. I hack and slice into the rest though, which is great fun. My friend admires my Fiskars lopper, which takes anything up to five centimeters' branch thickness. It's ridiculously powerful.

Then the rains begin. We retreat inside for a tea and some biscuits. It's still raining. Coffee then. Finally, there's a lull and I venture out again. I chop up the bay tree suckers and cut the rest to shredder-friendly sizes, sweep up and put the chopped greenwood out of the way. And it's time for dinner again. My OH is called and, for the second time in a row, we're having dinner at our friends'!

The plan for tomorrow is to get cracking on the buddleias down the back.

My energy levels are still strong even after dinner (no alcohol is probably the secret) so I tackle the mound of last year's potatoes in the loft that are now beginning to sprout. I am amazed at the longevity of these roots: we harvested them in September and now it's April and they're still good to go! I pack a 20 kg bag of the biggest spuds. Most had slug damage and need careful peeling and processing so really only the biggest are worth the hassle. I leave the rest upstairs. They'll probably go on the compost.

I manage to peel and process about 5 kilos that night, ensconced in the kitchen corner, with an old German detective series from the 1970s running on my laptop. That, to me, is bliss. OH has inherited an old Braun moulinette from his grandmother and that gets activated now. He teaches me how to put it together and use it and those potatoes are grated in an instant. They all go into the freezer. I'll make Reibekuchen with them. Tomorrow, I'll hit the internet to find out how to pre-fry potato chips for the freezer.

Off to bed now – it's been a long and productive day.