RasPutin came again for food and I gave him plenty, he didn’t leave the breakfast bar hungry.  It was hot, I’ve spent all day watering the vegetables, which were flagging.  I think the squashes would be dead by now if I hadn’t given them a good watering this morning.

Last year, for the first time ever, I was short of courgettes.  I sowed two seeds and only one came up and that plant didn’t do very well.  So I sowed three this year, all germinated and have thrived and I’ve been caught out twice already by fruits that hid under a leaf until they were nearly marrows.  So I found a recipe for courgette chutney and that’s what I’m in the process of making – the ingredients have to steep in vinegar overnight.  I also made bread – this on the hottest day of the year in an Aga-heated kitchen.  But I put the extractor on and an electric fan on, and opened a window too and it was not too bad.  All the same, we relaxed on the lawn for a couple of hours this afternoon and I was quite hot and bothered for a while.

The good thing that happened this afternoon was that Hannah turned up with our box of wine from the village winery’s wine club.  We opened a bottle of rosé this evening to go with our lemon sole and approved.  The less good thing was that I went in to unpack the dishwasher and found that plates hadn’t washed very well.  I put them aside to re-wash, then discovered that the bottom of the machine was full of dirty water.  On the assumption that the filter was blocked – the machine had turned off rather than interrupt the programme – I looked to see how to empty it.  Then Tim did.  As a last resort, I looked out the instruction book and Tim took over – this is brilliant, I’ve always been the one to have to deal with this sort of thing my whole life – and he was very puzzled and quite indignant.  The instructions seemed to bear no resemblance to the controls, he said.

i know, darlings, it would really help if I hadn’t fished out the instruction booklet from the old dishwasher.  How we laughed.  And then I put the book back in the drawer, until he pointed out that it might be better to throw it away.

Turned out – once we’d looked at the instructions and found that nothing was wrong at all – that I’d leant on the dishwasher when I went in to make tea and accidentally turned it off.  And that’s all I’m going to say on the subject.  Except that, with all the faff, I completely forgot about the bread in the oven and, by the time I came back from feeding cats and chickens, the timer had been beeping for at least five minutes.  It’s only a bit browner than it’s supposed to be, I’m sure it’ll taste fine.

I blame it all on the hot weather.  We’re not used to it.