The grass was in desperate need of mowing, due to the continuing wet weather; all the locals claim they’ve never known such a wet few months as we’ve had since January. Even Joel’s given up on us, claiming that every time he comes to work on our house, he gets soaked; he’s told us he’s not coming back till June, by which time even our Englishness can’t make it rain!

But Wednesday was dry, and even slightly sunny; so I started mowing the grass. All was going well until suddenly the mower began to make a strange noise, started rocking back and forth and making a burning rubber sort of smell; I turned it off and did what every good mechanophobe does in such circumstances – felt horribly guilty for not having seen whatever I’d run over, hidden in the long grass, that had caused such a disaster. I could clearly hear Kieran’s voice in my head – “You’ve broken it!” I called in the resident engineer, who muttered about women drivers, sucked his teeth and shook his head; it was completely locked up, even refusing to move when pushed. I could see the repair bills mounting, maybe I’d wrecked it completely and we’d need a new mower…… Nick felt about under the body of the mower until finally he found the cause of the problem; the belt had broken and got caught up in some of the workings. What a relief! It wasn’t my fault after all, but a perfectly ordinary, repairable fault. We bought a new belt which Nick will fit tomorrow (hopefully) and I can get back to the mowing.

In the meantime, the weather hasn’t stopped fruit and veg growing; we’ve had our first mange tout peas and our first strawberry this week. I’ve sown seeds for all sorts of stuff, but as nothing had germinated by Thursday, I went to Eauze market and bought plants for courgettes, aubergines, tomatoes of every conceivable shape and colour (blue tomatoes?!), peppers, chillis, basil, and a few things I can’t even remember. If all the seeds germinate too, I could end up digging a lot more garden to plant them all!