Nuts.

The day began with sea mist which gradually got heavier and heavier until proper rain began to fall and continued to do so steadily for the rest of the day.

I'd put some peanuts on the corner of the terrace for the squirrel, now named Squirrel Nutkin by Peter, who turned up while we were eating breakfast. He kept taking the peanuts and dropping down into the gap between the terrace and the street wall where presumably he was hiding the nuts for winter. When all the nuts were gone he ran up the handle of a broom leaning against the hedge and explored the chairs before disappearing off.

At the same time the house sparrows were also helping themselves to the peanuts followed by a Great Tit and a whole family of  Blue Tits who were also after the peanuts. I would have thought whole peanuts would be too big for such small birds but obviously not. Once the terrace is done I'll have to fix up a bird feeder in view of the dining table but out of Speedy's way. I better clean the salt spray off the the windows as it does make for blurry photos.

After breakfast we attempted to beat the rain and do some garden work. Before we began a chap came round to borrow Peter's chainsaw leggings, gloves and helmet. He'd put a request on the local FB page asking if anyone had any chainsaw protective gear he could borrow so we'd offered him ours. Once he was sorted all we needed to do to put up the very last section of trellis was to fix one baton to the wall and screw the cobbled together bit of trellis onto it and the baton that was already there. That was after I prised out the staples holding a piece of wood onto the end of the trellis, moved the wood over and then replaced the staples. I got my job done but fixing the trellis to the wall proved difficult mainly to to the slightly awkward position it was in. We got it done in the end and turned around one of the big panels that had been put on the wrong way around. By that time the rain was quite heavy and we were happy to head indoors.

Where I got straight into making my Christmas cakes. I thought that by doubling up the amounts I could make three cakes in one go. All was going well until I realised that the mixing bowl was getting fuller and fuller and I needed to find a larger container. In the end I cleaned the washing up bowl and used that to mix the ingredients in. I will confess to eating nore than a few of the nuts; walnuts, almonds, cashews and hazelnuts as I worked and of course there was a bit of cake mixture to taste. Not the best day for my diet. The hardest part of the job was tying string to hold baking parchment around the outside of the silicone cake tins. The recipe said to use brown paper but who has that nowadays? I made two round cakes and one in ring, for us, but the book said to leave the cakes in the tins until tomorrow so I didn't take a photo.

We've become real homebodies after all the various lockdowns so it was a noticeable change to our evening routine when Peter left to drive to town. He'd been sent an appointment for his Covid booster at the same place I had my earlier jabs. However as they are now doing appointments only he got through very quickly especially as he wouldn't sit for the required 15 minutes and was back home well within the hour. And he practised his Welsh by getting the nurse to run through the questions in Welsh first.