Lush

I've been lucky with my farmer. Others have had awful experiences and tell terrible tales. When your garden is mainly surrounded by crops you're rather at their mercy. They can spray the fields with deadly fertilisers or pesticides when you're sunbathing outside, and all you can do is run indoors with your hand over your mouth and nose. They could, like mine did a few weeks after my new summerhouse was built, put a gas gun right beside it to scare off the birds and nearly make me jump out of my skin (they don't work, but farmers don't seem to have noticed). I dashed around to see Alyss, all hot and bothered, and she calmly shook her head in disbelief and said it was done by a thoughtless farmhand and she'd tell him to move it. Oh, right. My relief was massive. This time it's nettles. They are on the outside of my boundary, growing thick and lush against my fence, and in the more than three years I've been here it never once occurred to me to mention them to Alyss. So I get Did up with his sprayer and he tackles them as best he can while I pay. But it's not my land, it's theirs! So I rang Alyss, told her my problem, and she said (calmly again) "I'll come up with the knapsack and give them all a good dose." Er, OK then. I thanked her profusely because she is so nice and her attitude is so positive. Not like the farmer neighbour of a friend of mine who can't get the plough into a tiny tringle of land against her boundary but will not sell it to her for less than £25,000. It's smaller than my kitchen for heaven's sake!

In other news, I've put a new catch on my gate. Almost since I've lived here it's been loose, and twice I've put new rawlplugs into the holes to tighten the screws, to no long-term avail. Almost every single man (and not a few women) who has come to my house has felt the catch and said, let me just get a screwdriver out of my car/get me a screwdriver and I'll fix that for you. Then, a few minutes later, there you are then, that's sorted. I've never had the meanness to say, thanks superman but it won't hold. I've tried that already. Duh.

I would now appear to be the Neighbourhood Watch person for this half of the village. And Patrick and I are spearheading a village-wide campaign to get rid of those wretched chicken huts once and for all. We are determined not to let this opportunity slip. Between us we are going to galvanise our neighbours and bombard the council with letters and emails. I'm also involved in another small action group, the Gang of 4, who are about to put a small rocket under another large organisation, albeit one with a much friendlier, gentler face. I thought my militant days were over but it seems they have been reawakened.

Hugo amazed me the other morning. While I prepare his breakfast he sits nearby and waits until I've placed the water bowl on his mat before looking at me for the signal to eat. Yesterday he sat quite a way away from his mat, and when I put the food down I told him to wait while I went down the garden to turn a hosepipe off. I expected him to be tucking in when I returned, but he was still sitting there. Has there ever been a better boy?