A bit of a day of false starts today. Firstly the drystone walling. Got there, but no-one in sight. So called around to Eleanor's and apparently it was all off. So we exchanged preserves (apricot and ginger jam, apricot chutney from me, raspberry jam and red currant jelly from her) and gossip and she mentioned that there was a dig starting at the old Gaol site in town. So I called in there and various archaeologists were standing around clutching plans and kicking dirt to one side and working out a datum point and so forth, but they were apparently self-sufficient so I left them to it. On the way back to the car was waylaid by the plasterers who want to come and look at their handiwork and tried to imply that all that weatherboarding must be the cause of the cracks, so I put them straight but agreed to them calling by one day after work and set off home.

Once home I cut a bit more wood up for the fire (which was lit this morning and has been chugging away at low speed all day) and had another look at the place the cupboard used to be and a fiddle around with that. I think I have worked out a way forward that does not involve un-doing work later on, but the bits of wood required are under the plastic out in the yard and the various rain showers deterred any attempt to remove them and bring them in where they might be useful.

So I decided to do my English tax return, which absolutely MUST be filed today, but when I opened the letter from HMRC that I received last week and fondly assumed was the activation code I was waiting for, it turned out to be a reminder to file the return by today and not a second later pending all manner of dire consequences. So I guess I will be phoning England tonight for an activation code so I can get it sorted. At least I have managed to find all the relevant statements and so forth, and so have transcribed all the info into an excel table for ease of access and calculation.

Meanwhile, the internet signal has been even more erratic than usual so I may yet need to drive into Oatlands tonight to get the darn thing sorted out. Sigh.

Then having yet again failed to do anything useful, I went into town once more and called into the home of the chap who was supposed to be sorting out the drystone walling and had a chat to him. He is a difficult person to have a conversation with as he tends to get distracted into other lines of though halfway through a sentence, so it was sort of subject a, to subject b to subject c, to subject a, to subject d, to subject a to ... and so on. Anyway, it turns out that they need to collect the stone, store it somewhere secure, then get a digger to excavate the footings and perhaps remove some more soil from the heap that we will be retaining with the wall and so forth, and the diggers are all in use at the archaeological excavation or elsewhere an the stone lifters are out of action and there are no trailers strong enough to move more than a few stones at a time and .... it may be some time before we get going. Patience, I have discovered, is a virtue ....