In my 'favourite names for shops' feature I need to tell you about the renamed Beauty shop in our local shopping centre. That is thornhill, so stretching it to call it a centre. Anyway, the beauty shop is now called 'Realistic Beauty'. Imagine the interaction between client and receptionist:

Hi, what can you do for me?

I am sorry, madam, you are a really ugly old trout and there is no product, no treatment, nothing on this earth that would make you anything approaching beautiful.

Oh. Goodbye then.

I think beauticians need to be anything other than realistic, don't you?

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.

Yesterday my banana was ruined by being next to a sharp edged yogurt pot, I did eat it but about a third of it was mush and its skin was cut through. I really need a knitted banana protector. Alpaca wool would be nice, or dog fur, if you could contact Libby Crandon senior for supplies. Or Libby Crandon junior, as I hear they are getting a Staffordshire bull terrier to fit in with the neighbours.

Had reason to look through our web search history for yesteday, which threw up some interesting angles. I had asked R what he was doing on the computer, and his answer was
'looking at epoxy resin'. And he really was!!! That and little bits of metal for mending bikes and boats, about 10 of the sites visited were called things like 'Boatyard bits' or 'Bikenuts'. Man, that is a guy with a serious internet addiction problem. I was cunningly trying to hire a car and do a pick up in Southampton and drop off at Gatwick for a upcoming and complicated trip abroad. However, the car hire companies have clearly caught on to this trick and charge you a tank of petrol ( ish) on top, presumably for them to drive it back again? It was a good idea while it lasted, but sadly we are back to the train/cycle option ( put girls on train, us cycle).

I read in one of the cycling magazines in our bathroom that a guy has managed 126mph on a bike. He was on the M40, and I don't know if that was holding on to the back of a car or from a standing star, or on a shopper, or what, but it gives me something to aim for as I cycle down the hill from Bitterne to town. Today I cycled to and from St Denys, uphill on the way home, St Denys being at sea level (what kind of idiot would buy a house on a floodplain, eh?), Thornhill being at altitude where sickness sets in, and above the tree line. Well, maybe not but clearly one of the highest points for miles around as we have our very own cancer emitting mobile phone mast behind H's school playing field. None of this NIMBY business round here! If you want a mobile, you take the risks, damn it! ( What kind of an idiot would buy a house under a mobile phone mast?)

Tonight was my favourite programme, the Secret Millionaire, not so much evidence of Christian charity as is the norm, but a fab moment when the guy got the cheque when he muttered 'God works in mysterious ways'. I had to go to Tescos tonight, despite us having a frugal end of month as less than no money left, we also had less than no food. I did very well in purchasing exactly the right amount of goods to last til after the weekend, and getting to use my £5 off voucher. Tescos were recently voted the most ethical supermarket in an online survey. Well, maybe that is stretching the truth a little, but every little helps, say Asda. Shame there was not a secret millionaire offering to pay for food bills at checkout number 7.

I have started learning German, in advance of visits planned to the German speaking countries of Europe as part of my strategy to take over the world. I did it at school, but can only tell you to go round the corner, I have a brother. So am now learning how to order a coffee. Not much use either as I don't drink it. At the school I first worked at there was a caretaker who had a very distinct moustache which reminded one of Hitler. He told us that his mother worked as a chambermaid in Berlin in 1936. I think he made it up (well, I hope he did) but you have to hand it to him for making a joke out of his facial hair. Few men are brave enough to do that.

Sarah T came round yesterday and brought me some flowers, now she tells me she is knitting a bag. I shall commission her to knit me a vase for the flowers to go in. Today I went to the hospital to be told that my radioactivity was still a risk to mankind and so I have decorated the lounge. If I carry on this way I will be starting on next door. I listened to the Olympics all day and was surprised to hear the standard reached in ping pong. I never got off the radiator in the pingpong room at school long enough to play. And the Dutch won the women's hockey. Good on them. I was surprised also to see that my hockey teacher, Miss Bedford, was not featured in the British team (male or female, she was one of those teachers you were not sure about). No, I liked her, although she was strict and had a reputation, she somehow let me into the school hockey team. It is more an indication of the lack of enthusiasm and skill in the 120 or so girls in my year group than a endorsement of my skill. I played HB - no that's a pencil lead. LH, That was it. I gave up when Ursula Collignon hit me in the teeth with a stick during a sponsored hockey day. Anything I did for the school hockey team was purely accidental, whatever the outcome, the ball always looked shocked when I managed to get near it. I was spectacularly bad at netball, not helped by the teacher calling my name out wrong in the register on the first day, christening me 'Gay Kibbs', for which I have not yet forgiven her. Anyhow, I played the rubbish position near the back where it doesn't matter if you never touch the ball, and that ball used to laugh out loud if I caught it. So imagine my distaste and horror when some weird members of our church, asked me, a few years back to play netball, in my own time, for fun. I hope they went off and joined a netball playing cult. I don't think Jesus ever commanded us to play ball games.

Now, like most people who are not nobility, I struggle to 'get' the modern pentathlon. None of those sports are modern, and only the aristocracy can afford guns, horses and fencing lessons for their children. Absolutely the most elitist sport in the games, surely, if you need a pony, a fencing kit and a gun - not even the Crandons have all that lot in their garden, although if they stretched their family out a bit they could enter Jeremy on a llama. No, I think it is the most stupid event, worse than pingpong and should be dropped before more members of the royal family think the Olympics was designed for them. And what was the even like before it was dubbed 'modern'? Fencing is hardly a modern sport, is it, what did it replace, jousting? No, the modern pentathlon should involve skateboarding, kite surfing, that stupid sport where people run up walls and jump between buildings, and two others I have yet to make up, they are so modern. Spitting, maybe, or pancake tossing? And lawnmowing, that should be the national sport.

Competitions looking up! I entered a competition to win theatre tickets and a shopping spree for R's mum, Granny Mary, and was a runner up, so she and a friend are going to the Rose Theatre in Kingston upon Thames.