Wednesday 14th July 10

Spent the morning reading and writing.... wrote a letter to the Press about a carfree York, in reply to a letter published yesterday.

But in the afternoon I did quite a bit of garden work, including transferring the contents of one dalek into the one next to it for maturation, and harvesting a load of worms to restock a wormery. I shredded the large pile of woody shrubbery which I cut down before my ankle broke to give the redcurrants more light. I despatched another two rodents to rodent heaven (a hot compost pile!)

In the house I did some washing up and hoovering. I had several Fiddlesticks phone calls. Gill has just about finished the accounts and this past year (09/10) is about £2000 down on last year on the gross income. In a recession, people cut out non essentials, and bought-in entertainment is in many cases a non essential. I really do have to find some other way of generating income.

After the children came home I cycled down to Country Fresh and got some veggies plus 4 boxes of 'resources', some of which I was able to load up into a dalek which has space.

After tea I cut some hedge with shears and the sky got dark and thunder rumbled in the distance, then got nearer and there were a few flashes and a bit of rain. I came in and dried off.

I got an email from a neighbour up the road saying there was a branch waiting for me outside their house so I went out again to pick it up in my bike trailer, and found a couple of broken chairs too which had wooden legs and backs which looked suspiciously like kindling to me...

I popped into see my friend who is fighting alcoholism, and they had news of their friend who has had a liver transplant, needed because of the same illness. Later on I chatted with two friends both of whom are fighting difficult internal mental battles.

Later, my laptop developed a problem with the power supply and kept on shutting down. I wonder if the battery needs replacing, and why was the mains power not keeping the machine going? I wonder if the mains power thing has gone wrong. I feel a visit to Ben might be in order!

But, I was able to use Gill's laptop to type this up, but it's not the same as my machine which has all my bits and bobs on it... like a button which sends me straight to a dictionary website.... and a 'favourites' list, etc etc.