It was still pitch black when Kieran left, at 7o’clock on Saturday morning; he’s gone back to England for 10 days, to see friends and, I suspect, to have a rest. 35 hours and 987miles later, he arrived at Alex’s.

He told us we can have a break too while he’s away, once we’ve finished doing the hangar (have to start calling it the garage) roof, dug the grange floor out to 50cm depth and re-sealed the shower -again! Yes, the shower’s leaking again and it looks as though we’ll have to dismantle the whole thing and build a wooden, frame-type structure under the basin to stop it flexing. Nick didn’t seem too impressed at the idea.

Still, he’s getting on with the garage roof; the back is done and the front has lats in place now and is ready to tile tomorrow, with tiles that we exchanged for breeze blocks with Adrian.

I haven’t been twiddling my thumbs while all this progress has been progressing. We tried the solar fruit dryer; it was OK, if rather slow, while the sun shone, but it did have certain problems, for instance, you had to bring all the fruit in at night and find space for it in the fridge since it took 3 days to dry a batch of figs. It was also considered a very desirable location for the many ants that live in the garden – not ideal. We tried standing the legs in water, but then the sun disappeared for several days. I borrowed an electric dryer from a neighbour; I wasn’t keen on the design as you had to slice things thinly before putting them in; no chance of drying whole figs, so I bought one online. It has removable shelves to accommodate larger pieces of fruits and veg and seems quite good. So far I’ve dried a batch of halved figs (the whole ones are still drying) and have put in a load of cherry tomatoes. It may sound ungrateful, but I think I’ll be quite glad when the tomato season is over; I weighed the first 50kg of tomatoes our little potager produced, but we must have had at least another 20kg since then and I’m sick of picking them! There’s no room in the freezer for anything else at all and the shelves are groaning under the weight of bottled produce; hence the dryer, to produce our own un-sun-dried tomatoes and figs.