The bantams are laying enthusiastically, usually four or five eggs a day and we’re getting a build-up.  LT took half a dozen with him yesterday and I hard-boiled another half dozen, because then there were fewer to reproach me with on the kitchen table.  I ate a couple for lunch with our delicious chilli relish and another two for dinner with some of the leftover curry from the night before.  And I’ll finish the last two tonight and had a poached egg for breakfast.  Which is all very eggy but only keeping pace with them.  Still, I can hardly complain, having done so vociferously when they didn’t lay at all for a month or so.

Muntjak deer have been nibbling the tulip leaves, unfortunately.  I suspect I’ll have to dig the bulbs up, when they’ve finished flowering (though I also suspect the deer will eat the flowers) and replant them in the autumn, in pots by the house.  As Wince and I were standing by the bed looking at them, two deer were popping back and forth through the hedge the other side of the tennis court just a few yards away.  They looked at us quite casually, not wary at all.  Bloody things.  I’d be thrilled if I had fallow or roe deer and wouldn’t care about the damage, but these are a nuisance: neither use nor ornament, as they say.

The insurers not having phoned back yesterday, I rang them this morning and got a woman called Rachel, who was very helpful.  Later, the assessor phoned me and a few minutes later, Rachel rang me back to check that this had happened, which I appreciate very much.  And now I can go and visit my friend Jan, who is still in a nursing home, nearly six months after breaking her upper arm, but still hoping to go home before long.