Thursday 5th August 10

Quite a good day... up at 9ish and Gill had already gone to her physio appointment, to see if her leg pain can be cured.

I had the usual muesli and emails... I'm pleased that since paying for extra Tiscali email space, the number of spam emails has dropped hugely. Now I need to contact them about the occasional bounces possibly caused by my sending emails out using the Phone Co-op but with a Tiscali address... Ben has tried to explain this to me but so far the problem persists.

I also got a letter from a friend who I thought I'd lost contact with, but she's a poet and her publisher contacted me inviting me to buy her latest book. I did so, but put in a note to pass onto my friend. I'm glad she's well and is now more easily contactable as the violent man she was hiding from has died. Previously I had to write to her mother who passed on the letter... or not! My last letter (4 or 5 years ago) was not answered.

I got busy outside and continued shredding the holly that Gill took out, and then did some quite radical pruning myself, taking out a lot of dead clematis and honeysuckle from a pergola, and then cutting back a hedge with privet, beech, a shrub with pink blobby flowers and quite a bit of bramble... all shredded! Some of this I used immediately but I also bagged some up for future use.

Then I took the electric 50m extension flex up the garden to the front and did a good load of chainsawing. I heard another chainsaw somewhere near and cycled round trying to find it, n case of some more logs becoming available, but I didn't find it as it kept on stopping. So I visited Debbie to see how she was and then picked up a couple of logs from the nearby woodlands where logs are often dumped.

I dealt with Melody and Simon's redcurrants and later, Gill and I made jelly out of the juice.