It feels as though progress has ground to a little bit of a halt this past week. Ade’s waiting on a delivery which will enable him to complete the hard landscaping of the kitchen garden, so has been at a loose end. He wanted to mow the lawn but I asked him not to. The grass is covered with dandelions at the moment, and as our garden has little else in the way of flowers, apart from a small scattering of forget-me-knots under the apple tree, I thought we should keep the dandelions until they’ve gone to seed, so at least the bees have something to feed on.

Progress on the house renovation has also come to a standstill. We’re nearly there with the plans for the new kitchen, and we’ve found a good local builder who should be able to squeeze the work in over the summer, but we’re just waiting on a couple more things before we can go ahead with it. I cannot wait for our new kitchen, our current one is in a very sorry state, hence the lack of recipes from me in recent months. In case you were wondering.

In the meantime, we’ve had Storm Hannah come and batter us this weekend. We didn’t suffer as much as some parts of the UK, but I got up this morning to find overturned plant pots and our fruit trees robbed of their blossom. Ade and I had only just commented on how pretty they were looking!

But tomorrow’s the start of another week, so let’s see what that brings. We’re hoping to get our bikes sorted this week. They were hung up in our previous garden shed, unused, for the entire nine years we were there (I know, shameful!), so we’re taking them to the repair shop tomorrow, to be fixed. The countryside around here is just begging to be explored, and we can’t think of a better way than a bank holiday weekend bike ride!

That’s the plan anyway.