It started with an early morning shopping trip for pizza ingredients.

When we got to the farm a Common Blue fluttered by, which seemed a good omen.

Sadly it didn’t continue and in the absence of a mixer I ended up making 30 pizza bases by hand. As a result I now have an arthritic hand that feels like a baseball glove. When the mixer finally arrived I managed to do the next 60 bases in half the time the first 30 took.

Meanwhile I had a few incidents with clingfilm whilst wrapping the individual portions. If you’ve ever had dealings with oiled clingfilm you will know what I mean. If you haven’t, I’m sure you can imagine it.

I converted to foil for the last 60 – far easier, though it also had its moments. It was a surprise, on knocking the roll off the work top, to find it hit my foot like a an iron bar. When you look at the thickness of foil wound onto a catering size roll you can see why this feels so heavy.

I did grab a few minutes in the middle of the day – seeing three Small Tortoiseshells on the buddleia – it’s just coming into flower and the weather is coming right for butterflies.

Unfortunately I didn’t have time to take photographs.

I used the new Hobart mixer today.  Once we got it in the kitchen, and once we worked out the way to fit the guard so that the fail-safe let us switch on, it worked well. Our old one doesn’t have much in the way of safety equipment so this was all new to me.

Then the new incubator arrived. More about that later.

Finally, we rushed off and got Julia to work with four minutes to spare. She had been on the farm all day preparing a grant application and we had hardly seen each other. It’s the European grant, which is now corrected, completed and polished. We had an email yesterday telling us the fund may not exist now, but nobody is sure, so all that work may be for nothing.

It’s not quite the relaxed lifestyle we were hoping for, though at least the goats didn’t escape today.