Today was our first day of summer, a beautiful day, and this evening I took a stroll across the park and picked some blackberries on a patch of wild land near our house, and it was idyllic. Could have been anywhere in the countryside. Birds tweeting, then someone belched on the other side of the hedge. Anyway, it was lovely to be out and admiring the sky, and to be warm enough to sit outside without a sleeping bag on. The alarming fact I found out from the park noticeboard is that each Thornhill resident throws away half a tonne of litter a year. Now, I did a little calculation to help you visualise that, and measured a banana skin I was about to chuck out of the window. It weighed 54g, but lets call it 50g for ease of calculation. A tonne is 1million grams, so that means that each person in Thornhill, each man, woman and child throws the equivalent of 10 000 banana skins PER YEAR on the streets of Thornhill. Now the maths is getting even rougher, but thats coming up to 30 bananas eaten and their peels thrown on the streets EVERY DAY. Now, there must be a big family of chimpanzees who never come out durign the daylight for that to be mounting up. Obviously it is not all banana skins, some people throw away cigaratte and crisp packets, judging by my front grass most days. But you get the scale of the problem. And if I can solemnly swear that none of my family throws any litter (apart from apple cores into bushes, and nowadays with the food bills soaring I eat everything except the stalk) so there must be some other family out there throwing away our quota of 120 banana skins a day ( or equivalent). Maybe they include fly tipping in this litter figure? A fridge here or there would help get you up to that half a tonne target. A burnt out car would be a majot coup and save on eating bananas for years. If we threw 120 banana skins a day on the street outside our house we soon wouldn't be able to see out. That's if we could move off the toilet. I do see a fair bit of litter around, but not of this magnitude.

A is all better after her recent tummybug which prevented her and R coming on a coach trip to Monkey World with the Thornhill Community Association. It was cheap - £7.50 including entry for H and I. It was a long day, but a pleasant day, H was keen to find out about monkeys and interested in their behaviour, and spent ages playing with a girl she met on the roundabout who came from Cornwall. Weird isn't it, to meet someone who lives in Cornwall on holiday in Dorset? i don't know where I thought they went - I guess I thought they stayed in Cornwall all the time and served ice creams and cream teas from their back gardens to make a little pin money.

Today we reached the second pasta jar treat and went to Manor Farm, which H, R and I hadn't visited for a couple of years. We used to go all the time, as we had a season ticket for a couple of years, and it was lovely to go back and see some improvements and enjoy the old favourites, milked the cow, held the chick and duck and fed the calves from a bottle. Also sat in the Victorian school lesson and did all the things we always did when we went, like those silly animal jigsaws in the barn, looking for the eggs and washing your hands a million times.

I got up and was at the farm shop by 7.30am, then home from Sainsburys before 9am, a very satisfying time to go shopping. R and H then visited a chandlery (in Chandler's Ford, interestingly) and mended the rudder and went for a sail, while A and I baked healthy muffins ( A spat hers out - too healthy for a cake!) and visited our local library, which is great for large print Westerns and small print Mills and Boon. We chose a range of reading matter for H, who has a huge appetite for books of all kinds, and I picked up 'A thousand Splendid Suns' which R is now reading, he just described it as 'gripping'. Then after a picnic lunch we did the farm, then had a beach barbecue at the sailing club, with a couple of bargain drinks from the bar, much cheaper to drink there than at a pub, and the girls found crabs on the beach while we relaxed! Phew! Tonight we have to play Scrabble as R always wins and he won by a huge margin last night. His opening word was 'RENAL' to which I prefixed 'AD'. Later in the game he suffixed 'INE'. Good team work eh?

Sadly my tomatoes seem to have suffered something and I have had to harvest most of them as those left on turn brown and rot. Is it too much rain? Probably. Still, have had some tasty ones and got lots going red on the windowsill. Judi (who has an allotment) said they had the same problem, so not just me.

Haven't we had a busy day? I still need to have a time to do my 15 minute a day German, read my bible and journal and watch the DVD about Psalm 23 that I have found very helpful. I am also reading a book about life coaching and am supposed to spend half an hour a day on that. The last two nights I have struggled to get to sleep, but hope tonight things will change.

I read a book about the Kindertransport, and the experience of Jews in Germany never fails to shock or offend me. Would I have taken in some refugee Jewish children? Yes, I think I have to say that I would. But how hard it would be for them to live with us! Still, with me learning German at such a rate, should it ever be needed again, I will be able to offer them das Fruhstuck and Eine Tasse Tee mit Milch. This is a great German word combination: Die Tasser is a cup. Die Untertasse is a saucer. An 'undercup'. That is one of the things I like about German, how sensible it is to combine words to make new ones that make perfect sense. Worrying now I have given cups and breakfast the wrong gender, but sure they can cope with being a woman when they should be a man.