This weekend for the first time ever, as far as I know, the Silver back has struggled with an erection. This is a delicate problem which needs to be addressed with sensitivity but it should be addressed.

It started with the purchase of a shed and went down hill from there. I think that the problems that occurred were mainly down to the weather we had several thunder storms on Saturday and trying to erect a shed in torrential rain is not easy. I did offer to help but due to what I can only assume was a testosterone surge he wanted to do it himself. And so I watched from the kitchen sipping coffee and smiling occasionally (well quite often actually).

The base was laid the walls in place but the roof (two 4' x 6' ' sheets of something) kept getting caught by the wind. The thought of the Silverback para gliding down the field filled me with dread. Given the force of the wind there was no telling where he might land. Still he struggled valiantly on and by four pm the roof was in place and the doors on..... except that the doors wouldn't shut properly. By five the doors were on again and they shut. Hurrah.

Having finally mastered the erection we were then confronted with the problem of a huge damp patch on the floor! Most women are well versed in managing damp patches but this one had to be seen to be believed.

I now have another usable shed and plan, as the weather improves, to spend more time in it and less in the pantry. The question is shall I buy a mini fridge or shall I just carry the bottles of wine from the kitchen as and when they are needed.

I was shocked when I woke up this morning to find that I was not in bed alone. Overnight a spot had crept in a taken up residence on my face. Spots are not what one expects when you are in your forties. Teens yes early twenties yes forties no.

My spot is the size of Mount Versuvius and it seems to be growing, any minute I am expecting to be buried under an avalanche of puss. I am getting to know it quite well so far this morning we have taken the dog for a walk and been to the post office and bank together it was quite brazenly standing in the queue in front of me, age before beauty did not come into the equation.

Following the recent rain Dave the hen needs to be washed again. Chickens are not intelligent creatures, and they peg out at the drop of a hat, I am just trying to fathom out whether it would be best to wash her and risk her dying of shock or leave her until her leg feathers become so clogged up with mud that she can no longer move and dies of shock. Normally the death of a chicken would not be a concern of mine but she is a rare breed and until she has hatched out some chicks I want to hang on to her. I think washing machine on the wool cycle is probably best, without the spin cycle of course.

The weekend is approaching fast and tomorrow will see the Silverback and I erecting a shed. I am fully expecting a period of marital disharmony during the proceedings. Storm clouds will start gathering at about 1100hrs but should be cleared by 1400hrs. Oh the anticipation.

I spent most of yesterday and today making mustard and am now heartily sick of the sight of it the lowest point of today had to be when I rubbed my eye not having washed it properly first, spent the next ten minutes hopping around the kitchen swearing I wont do that again in a hurry. I am as a consequence in a foul mood.

I had to wrestle with a goose today not something that \I relish I usually come off worse. She had been sitting on a nest for far too long and was obviously not going to hatch any goslings out. Did she have the brains to realize this? no she did not. As it had rained overnight I knew that the chances of me doing the deed and not getting covered in goose shit were minimal. In case you didn't know the smell of goose shit lingers, so I also knew that a wire brush and dettol were going to be the order of the day.

I now have one very forlorn goose trying in vain to get back onto her nest. Still I wont have quite so many geese to kill at Christmas, profits will however be down, bugger.

The Silkverback is going out tonight which means that I don't have to spend the evening in the pantry, I can banish daughters two and three to their bedrooms open the wine and listen to some good music I think that I can feel my mood lightening already.

We have been celebrating the fourteenth birthday of daughter number three this weekend. On Saturday night we had a house full of hormonal teenagers. This was not fun and only several bottles of Pinot Grigio made the event endurable.

By eleven am on Sunday due to excessive primping by five teenage girls the house smelt like a Bulgarian brothel,(in reality I can only surmise this as my firsthand knowledge of Brothels, Bulgarian or otherwise is none existent) still the weather was nice and we were at least able to open the windows and let the perfumed smog out.

Once the girls had left, they had decided to go out hunting and they were hunting in a pack, the Silverback and I were left to our own devices, coffee and papers on the patio seemed like the order of the day and the wind had dropped enough not to make reading the papers too much of a struggle.

Papers read and a doze in the offing the bloody teenagers came back. They had with them two lads, who as far as I know came willingly, probably in more ways than one! I felt that a pantry moment was called for and left them to it.

Lunch and a good bottle of wine followed which meant that the afternoon passed in a pleasant sun drenched haze,

The Silverback is in Africa this week Zimbabwe to be precise. I have never been and would love to go it sounds delightful but it has meant for the week that I have had the bed to myself. The joys of sleeping like a starfish not being kept awake by snoring and waking up to the dulcet tones of James No..... have a lot to be said for them.
Tomorrow it all ends and I be getting up at stupid O clock to drive down to Gatwick.

For some obscure reason the girls have a muffti day today I do of course have to pay for the privilidge and so this morning instead of donning their uniforms in five minutes flat and being at the breakfast table at 7.45 they have spent half an hour choosing then rejecting various outfits. All I can say is they didn't do this in my day hurrump.

Daughter number two has just aquirred her first boyfriend. Oh the angst the highs and lows (and that's just me) I havn't the heart to tell her that he just wants to get in her pants.

I have come to the conclusion that our house must be sited exactly where two ley lines meet. This can surely be the only explanation left as too why I begin the day thinking that I have plenty of time to do all of the things that need doing and end the day only having done half of them. You see living at the exact point where two ley lines converge speeds time up by exactly 50% between 0700hrs and 1900hrs at 1901 time reverts to GMT. It's either that or the pantry is in fact some sort of time machine rather like the tardis.

Yesterday was my birthday I know that I must now be really old because daughter number three cooked supper for me. I was shooed from the kitchen and presented an hour later with a beautifully laid table and a well cooked meal. There is at least one advantage to having children.

I finished the day with half a bottle of chilled wine watching pre recorded programs of my choice truly old and happy.

I woke up this morning (which is always a good start to the day) and as I got out of bed to my horror discovered that I was turning into a chicken. That is to say that my legs had gone scaly. Thoughts of "the fly" and Geoff Goldblaum popped into my head before I realized that an overindulgence of sun lack of moisturizer were providing the effect. As far as I know the problem has now been rectified and unless and until I start scratching around in the pantry clucking I will believe myself safe.

I have spent most of the day strimming stinging nettles this is not fun and has to be near the top of jobs that I hate, even cleaning the toilet is below this one. I kitted myself out in jeans wellies fleece and gloves sweated like a pig and still bits of nettle and thistle found their way to parts that they had no right being in.

"When strimming it is advisable to wear a visor" Bollocks is it, I can see the advantages, no nettles in the eyes but within seconds the damn thing mists up and I end up strimming my feet.

Having just returned from taking the dog for a walk I have decided that if reincarnation exists I would like to come back as a dog, my dog to be exact. Problem is that I can only come back as my dog if both she and I are dead and if we are both dead I wont be around to treat her in the way that I want to be treated when I come back as her and of course if I come back as the dog I wont be me, after that it all got too much for me and I felt that as it was after six a large glass of Pinot Grigio was called for. The pantry is calling.

There is nothing like lying next to a nubile scantily clad twenty year old for two weeks to make you realize just how far south your body has migrated (knowing full well that it is not just for winter just rubs salt into the wound). The question is should the problem be addressed by radical surgery, expensive and painful or with a case of Pinot Grigio, cheaper and far less painful. Umm guess the Pinot is going to win out on this one. Bear with me am just off to put some wine in the fridge!

The only up side of this is that for the next few weeks at least my wobbly bits will be brown and not pasty white like most of my contemporaries Its a small comfort but we forty somthings have to hang on to any and all grains of comfort however small they may be.

I knew that I had missed summer it has rained here most of yesterday. I just know that the stinging nettles grew six inches during daylight hours.

I glimpsed an article last night on how to make a broody chicken. My mind boggled at the thought of turning a toilet roll holder some sticky backed plastic and an old coat hanger into a chicken, broody or not. I didn't bother to read the article as I knew that when it got to the gluing and stapling bit I would be instructed to garner the help of a responsible adult, they are fairly thin on the ground around here. I shall trust in nature as two of the hens are becoming broody anyway.

Last night I was wrestling with the problem of how to put leg rings on chicks single handedly. It has to be done and they don't like it much putting them head first into a funnel seems like a sound idea and so today will see me and my funnel struggling with a shed full of chicks and a bag of multi colored leg rings oh the joy.

Daughter number one and I returned from Goa last night, only to find that we have missed summer, bugger. We have however spent two weeks with no news papers radio or TV which means that I have missed out on most of the election hype now if I can just keep my head down for a further couple of days it will all be over. Must do the same again in four years time. Steve and daughters two and three have survived unscathed they do not look mal nourished nor traumatized which dents the ego a little.

I arrived in Goa full of good intentions to blog away whilst there the Goans had other ideas. Our hotel did have Internet access it was however very slow I suspect that postcards would have arrived faster than emails. Having finally managed to log on (half an hour) and write a few words (two minutes) we had a power cut. Power cuts are very frequent in Goa, between seven and ten a night that we were aware of and last between three minutes and half an hour. After three attempts I gave up and decided that cocktails were called for, they were, then some more were called for, sipping cocktails on a balcony overlooking a pool fringed by palm trees on a warm scented evening seemed infinitely more enjoyable than wrestling with a computer. Funny that.

Having given up any pretence of working we decided to head for the jungle as Daughter wanted to swim with and wash elephants. I had no objection to this whatsoever although having spent hours washing and drying chickens the thought of trying to get an elephant into a tumble dryer was somewhat daunting. It didn't occur to me that tumble drying was out of the question due to the power cuts which was just as well otherwise I would have spent hours pondering on the number of pegs it would have taken to hang the bloody things on the washing line.

I had expected to see some fairly exotic birds and so we did on occasion, what I was not prepared for were the crows. There are thousands of them and the noise that they make is unbelievable. Anybody of my generation will recall Noggin the Nog, well the land of Nog is in India and Nogbad the Bad is alive and well and hatching out dastardly plots in a dark turret even as I write. If word were to get out America would be sending in special forces to eradicate the evil Nogbad and his WMDs (crows) before you could say Dubya. Now there's an interesting thought.

There is some very nice wine chilling in the fridge which is calling to me....no I tell a lie it's shouting, I shall have to go and sort it out but before I do, a brief email to the White House is called for me thinks!