More rugs than Charlie Sheen

 We actually had a shower of rain on the weekend and the lambs hid in the shed, while their mum's danced about in it. At 5 weeks old, that was the very first rain they had seen and they had no idea what it was! As you can imagine they are getting slightly short of grass after a spell like that, despite the long wet winter we have endured, but what has compounded it is these persistent frosts we are still getting at night. Twice they have nipped the tops of my young potato plants, the herb garden has been in and out of the house on a daily basis and the lemon tree has seen more rugs than Charlie Sheen!

I have been kept busy by barricading in our brown dog whose failing eyesight now has led him to stray onto the road a few times. So the bullet was bitten and, after much work and expense, we now have two shiny new pairs of gates on the front of Chauffour. It would have been far cheaper to get a new dog, but at least it keeps Mrs F happy. I have also been busily concreting over various places, a pastime that plays havoc with my knees, but at last we have somewhere to park the camper rather than under my window. I say camper, I mean campers, plural, as we have still not managed to sell the old one. It's not that nobody wants it but more it is in some sort of bizarre state of Brexiteer limbo. As it is left hand drive, we have now got a French MOT (called a CT over here) on it but are unable to persuade the local authorities that it is road worthy in France without a certificate from the original manufacturers to say so. Except the original manufacturers no long exist, having been bought out by Hymer and they say they are unable to furnish us with such document. This is despite the fact that it was originally built for the French market. So it sits on the drive on British number plates, awaiting the bureaucrats while just about every day someone stops and asks if it is for sale. From where I sit, you folks who put your cross in that box a few years ago have a lot to answer for!

It's not that we can drive it anywhere, even it was legal, as we are still in bloody lockdown 3. Which means everyone can mingle together in the supermarket, garden centres and hair dressers, but we still can't go out for lunch or to the pub. We were planning on heading to UK in May, just for a pint, but that seems less and less likely since the British government have been taking back-handers from a few hundred companies, all of whom want to charge us three hundred quid each to get a Covid test. Not just one, but a series of them, in case some of them are not accurate, despite the fact that everyone is vaccinated up to the hilt. Ludicrous doesn’t cover it, that's for sure. A friend of mine works for a company that manufactures these testing kits and, trust me, the mark-up being taken out of that privatised sector would make Jeff Bezos blush!

I mentioned Louis the pointless pointer who is now 14 years old and still no more intelligent that a pallet of breeze-blocks. When the clocks went forward a short while ago, his simple time calculator somehow got confused and went in the other direction. So now he has decided that he gets up in the dark, at around 6am, to go to the toilet, every morning. Talk about the days lengthening, ours have just about doubled. I say ours, but really it is my dear wife who attends to that chore as she knows I am only even more grumpy if I don’t get my seven hours these days. Anyway, I find getting out of bed hard enough as it is, lately, after all that hard graft. Anyone got a spare set of knee joints they are not needing? Preferably ones that don’t crackle like a bowl of Rice Crispies every time any weight goes on them!