Grey.

Still grey and windy today but no rain.

The recent rain has revealed that the new guttering was not quite doing its job or rather that I had failed to get sufficient fall in the level to allow the water to drain away completely. That's what happens when you do a diy job for the first time. I thought I'd calculated the drop by measuring from under the overhang of the terrace but hadn't taken into account that the terrace was also on a slope to allow water to drain off it. In the morning, that is before the zoom class, I got all the tools and stuff together and cut back the woody stems of the escallonia growing under the terrace as I was fed up with getting scratched as I tried to work there.

Then it was time to prepare for Welsh class. It's not just the 2 hour lesson but setting up the microphone and web cam and then reading through the course book, translating words that I've forgotten and quickly going over last week's homework. This week we did more work on the past tense of to have/ to go and to do. That involved remembering to change (mutate) the initial letter of the following word (if it begins with T,C,P,B,G,D,Rh,Ll or M but then to confuse us even more you don't if you're using a negative. If that wasn't hard enough the negative of have takes a different mutation itself and the initial g changes to ch. That'c not ch as in cheese but Welsh ch which is more of a khrri sound.

After class was over it was a relief to change into work clothes and head back out to the guttering. Having decided there was no other way than to redo all the brackets it was relatively simple to do the piece at the side. It was harder doing the long piece across the front and I had to call Peter to hold up the sagging guttering but by the end of the afternoon there are only four brackets and the down pipe left to redo. I'm contantly checking with a spirit level as the gutter looks as if it's going down at a really steep angle but that's only because the terrace slopes in the opposite direction. At least the white gutter doesn't stand out so much.

It all quiet here with just Speedy and myself at home. Peter went off earlier to have a meeting about rowing club stuff and afterwards it's the rowing club's curry night.