Now that all the family has left, it’s time to get some work done; until Wednesday anyway, when the next visitor arrives. We still have no car, but a friend has offered to take us to the airport if necessary, to pick him up.

The big project at the moment is the hangar, so Nick and Kieran have been busy preparing that for its new roof, where we hope to have photovoltaic panels installed, to feed electricity into the grid. There are big cracks running down the side walls, so now that the roof has been removed, there’s less holding them together and they’re not very stable. Kieran describes them as “flapping in the wind”; so as they’re going to cast a lintel across the front, above the doors, they’ve decided to cast a complete reinforced concrete ring around the whole building. It was also an opportunity to play with the new toy, a petrol-powered Stihl saw, (very carefully as this is a bigger version of the one Kieran used in an attempt to amputate his leg!) safely cutting the tops off the walls to bring them to an even level all the way round. The shuttering and casting of the concrete will be done tomorrow

I’m still spending hours in the kitchen, preparing fruit and veg for the freezer; at the current rate, we’re going to need a second freezer; the first one is nearly full already. I don’t know how many apples I’ve stewed so far, but the tomato tally now stands at 30kg!