Eloise cat has been very affectionate since we arrived home.  She’s not usually very demonstrative, though she likes to be close to us but she’s even been sitting on my lap, when it’s usually Tim’s she prefers.  The outside cats are evidently feeding themselves – only Freddie came to greet me this morning though his father, RasPutin, was surprised napping in their straw shelter.  Freddie only wanted a cuddle so Ras ate most of the breakfast and none of them was there when I went out this afternoon.  I put a little food down but if they’re living off the land it’s all to the good.

The old asparagus bed had become thoroughly overgrown and it was too old to bother to resurrect.  I asked Wince to rotovate it last week as it was really beyond digging.  I know there will be a lot of roots left but I’ve covered the whole bed with garden membrane, so that will keep down weeds to an extent.  I expect I’ll cut holes and plant squashes in there to use the ground and by next year it should be all right.  If you haven’t seen my vegetable garden, it’s got six long, narrow beds – the other, larger areas have been grassed over now as we don’t really need them.  I wasn’t sure how to spell rotovate, by the way – if it might be rotavate, neither looking quite right to me, and even t’internets seem to use either spelling.  So I don’t know and I can’t quite be bothered to fetch a dictionary.

Young Stevo has been great – he’s been demolishing an old play house which Al and Russell made for the children some years ago and has been able to use the tongue-and-groove back to mend the shed roof.  If the weather is fine tomorrow, he’ll add the roofing felt.  He’s working hard and I’m glad to have him back for a few weeks.  As for me, the extra work I’m doing in the garden is very good for me, in that I quite often sleep all night, for a change.  Which may indicate that I previously hadn’t been, of course.

This new advice to eat ten portions of vegetables every day.  How on earth do you do it?  It’s a substantial amount of each, you’re not *allowed* to count potatoes nor more than three helpings of fruit, nor a double amount of anything.  The other day, for instance, we both had a freshly squeezed orange at breakfast, Tim had some strawberries too and I had some lychees later.  Then we had bean salad for lunch.  I think the beans are allowed, then there was onion, red pepper, tomato, cucumber, garlic in the dressing – but relatively low amounts of each, once we’d shared, and we couldn’t manage the tinful of beans.  We had a Spanish omelette for dinner, which included more onion and red pepper, courgette and mushroom.  So allowing for quantities of each being relatively small but what we had at both meals adding up to one portion each, I still can’t make it more than five or six plus two helpings of fruit.  Yet it was a fairly veg-heavy, vegetarian day.  Yesterday was almost veggie (a little chorizo in the lunch menu) – leftovers for lunch plus more cucumber and tomato, egg curry for dinner which had a lot of onion and tomato in the sauce, but I can’t make it add up to more than six, even including our breakfast orange juice.  LT finished the strawberries, so he can have seven.  Today – I know I’m banging on, but this is really puzzling me – I made soup for lunch with leek, onion and potato; but we’re not able to count potato so that’s two plus oj so far.  We’ll add three more veg with our pork steaks this evening.  I’d count twenty portions in three days as okay, but the random number the health people guess and dictate gives it only two-thirds of what we should be having.  Bunging more fruit in would be easy, but that wouldn’t count because of the fructose.  As I said, potatoes don’t count, but please don’t suggest that the lovely first Jersey Royals we had the other night have less worth as a vegetable than a cucumber, which is mostly water.  We are naturally inclined to eat a good balanced diet and we don’t indulge in fads or take notice of temporary scare stories, but we do get tired of the absurdities.