Any advice about making two massive feature trusses? I’ve got loads of wood and a drawing that’s almost to scale. It can’t be more difficult than writing a book. Can it? 🙄

Our first arrival of the season has just been born to Hyacinth. A lovely little grey girl – our little Pinterry Princess!

Source: First arrival of 2016!

Friday 26th June – Electra gave birth to our first cria at Arkadia Alpacas.

Orpheus came into the world jet black, fit & healthy.

My ideal day should consist of eight hours alone in my shed beavering away (with odd breaks for walking the dog, making coffee).

My actual day consisted of getting up at daybreak (following a very disturbed night during which the bed collapsed during a dream about born-again christians advertising a combined ladyshave & dew claw remover) to drive seven miles to let out and feed some chickens I’m babysitting. Got back to the farm, intending to launch back into ‘Amelia Wilde & the Shocking Sins of the Mother-in-Law’, but couldn’t concentrate until I’d fixed the bed (with some hastily sawn blocks of wood and a grout bucket), by which time I remembered that I was also babysitting guinea pigs as well as chickens and had to drive back to tend to them. While there, on the way out, remembered that the dustbins needed to be brought in, jumped out of the car (closing the door so Shaggy Dog didn’t run into the road) and watched her stand on the central locking button, locking herself and the keys in the still running car. Meanwhile, my mobile (which was at least in my pocket not in the car) rang – the builder who has just started doing renovations to the Surrey money pit said he had found ‘something odd under the render.’ This is, incidentally, the builder I chose because he had a really lovely voice and hadn’t actually met him. When I asked ‘What, not bricks?’ he answered in a not-so-lovely voice that I had better get down to have a look or he was going to walk off the job. Just to put this in perspective, it’s a four hour round trip to the said house, which is problematic enough without the keys being locked in the car. An hour later, having eventually managed to coax Shaggy Dog to stand on the central locking button again (circus training past not completely forgotten), thus avoiding the humiliation of having to call a rescue service or geographically closest relation, who couldn’t have come anyway because she was dealing with a crisis spookily similar to the plot of ‘Single White Female’, I set off with a sense of foreboding as to what would be lurking under the render…

TO BE CONTINUED…