Yesterday, young Stevo came over with a new tyre for my wheelbarrow and he kindly fitted it for me (I did pay him for his time, but he is a kind boy).  And then he agreed to work for me for the rest of the morning, so we turned out my potting shed.  And that’s a misnomer – it was put up for that purpose and I forbade Russell putting anything else in there, but of course he ignored me.  And before long, it was so full that you couldn’t get in the door and you couldn’t find anything.

So Stevo and I took out everything.  A lot was rubbish – Russell could not be bothered to walk ten yards to a bin to throw a bit of rubbish away, but stored it instead – and some was stuff I’d been looking for, such as my pruning saw.  I bought another one a few months ago, I thought I’d never see it again.  Last time I did see it, it was where it belonged in the porch, so why it went down there is anyone’s guess.  Anyway, we emptied it out and barrowed away the burnable rubbish and the bin rubbish and I swept it out and put the tools back.  Then Stevo went off to have lunch and sit his final GCSE exam in Physics.

A couple of hours later, he was back and we turned out the coalshed, which contained three sacks of coal, several of coal dust, a couple more sacks of coal I didn’t know were there, some scuttles, a couple of barrels of logs, two lawnmowers, an Allen scythe and something else that I think is a biggish stationary engine.  We got the lot out and put back the coal.  The rest has gone in new designated places  – I don’t need any of the machines and will, I hope, sell them.  Now, Roses and I can buy coal for the winter and have room to put it.  We also put lawnmowers in the empty garage and I went online to buy a new blade for the electric one – I used it in long grass and gave it a really hard time, it’s surprising that it’s only the blade that packed in.

That was fun, I went on eBay first and looked, and put a bid in on one, then checked it out elsewhere and found that the maximum price I’d put in was only 50p less than the cheapest elsewhere.  But my bid at that time was £1.50 less – it so happened that I came in for lunch when there were only a few minutes left to go, so I sat and watched.  An auction is always fun, even when the result doesn’t matter much … anyway, I wasn’t outbid and got it for £14.50.

Those cats.  Hm.  When I went to put the chickens to bed, the mother was sitting near the hen run and she hissed at me, but I felt sorry for her.  Why was she there?  It seemed a cry for help.  I went into the kitchen and found a tin of cod roe that had been there for years, and took it out and put it for her.  She came within a minute and started wolfing down the fish.  After a while, the two black kittens came to join her and one ate but the other seemed to be too cowed.

Darlings, there was no help for it.  Today, I bought a couple of tins of catfood and, this afternoon, I went out between rain showers and she was there again.  So I fetched the food and started forking it out.  She came at once, she was too hungry for fear.  She snatched it from the fork and I ventured to stroke her.  She didn’t mind, she seemed to like it.  I left her, she having eaten three-quarters of the meat, to fetch in the last of the chickens and, when I came back, two kittens were there with her.  They ran away.  I went and got a jar of meat paste (Russell was very limited in what he could swallow last summer and fingers of bread with paste on was something he could manage).  I forked that out too and she started on it at once.  I went and fetched a scoop of dry catfood and put that out too and watched from the henhouse as all three kittens came with their mother to feed.  At last, they were all satisfied and left the final few bits.  They must have been near starvation to eat so much, especially with me watching.  I can’t let them die – actually, what really prompted me was that I hadn’t seen the black tabby kitten for a few days and I thought it might have starved.  After the weekend, if I haven’t heard from the cat place, I’ll look up a smaller, local society and talk to them.