"What's that thing in the sky? It's hurting my eyes when I look at it!"

Couldn't believe there actually was sunshine when I woke up this morning. There's a weird weather rule in this country that the sun will disappear on Friday evening and not rise until Monday morning when everyone has to go back to work. It sends the rain instead. If the government decided to shift the working week from Monday to Friday to, say, Saturday to Wednesday, when would the sun cotton on?

Report from the estate:

On Thursday night I went out slug-hunting with my flashlight and caught dozens of the buggers sliming over our greenhouse seedlings and sitting chomping in amongst the runner beans. That's why I'm not getting any joy out of the beans this year. I'm too soft-hearted to kill the snails though, despite my militant rhetoric, so I simply threw them far into the garden and thought, well, why don't you munch your way through some ground elder if you're that hungry? Do some proper damage there for a change. Or get eaten by a hedgehog. Or frog. In any case, happy hiking that distance back up to the patio, my friends -- if you manage that before the morning, and before the song thrushes come out for their breakfast, then you deserve a seedling. But only then.

Last night, however, I wasn't in the mood. OH and I had been to the plot and had harvested rhubarb for a rhubarb crumble cake I'm planning to bake this weekend plus lots of herbs for our dinner. OH, at my request, had been to our fishmonger's earlier in the day and had come back with a bag full of tiger prawns. He cooked these in their shells on a bed of chopped tomatoes, onions, flat-leaved parsley and rice. Alongside, we had a bottle of Spanish cava and finished the meal an hour later with a big dessert bowl each of home-made tiramisu. It was a fab meal, with tealights and nice table decorations and decent cava glasses, exactly what I needed.

So I wasn't feeling particularly up to hunting slugs, especially once we'd finished the cava and OH had whipped out the tester bottle of his turbo raspberry cider (Random passim). We tried it, and at first I didn't know what to make of it. It tasted of Ahoj-Brause, a sherbet powder I enjoyed as a child, and disconcertingly adult since the alcohol content was so high. It felt as though an innocent memory had somehow been contaminated, a feeling a bit like wandering around a fancy dress party and witnessing Gromit in a corner sticking a tongue in Wallace's ear.

Didn't take me long to get over that though: we're taking the bottle to the allotment today. 

Breakfast now.