I was hoping to go to Charmouth this afternoon and have a windswept walk. However the architect was supposed to tip up for a meeting and he is seriously late so I won’t be able to go as I have to hit the tides right…much irritation. Everybody round here is moaning about the mud. They’d probably pay a lot for some clean concrete to walk on but it is still not half as bad here as it is up there in Cumbria with rivers breaking their banks, flooding etc. Just been out in the barn to look at another limping alpaca. We had one yesterday as well. Sometimes it is an abcess but often it is just a strain and they are slipping and sliding all over the place on our steep hills with this amount of water everywhere. We washed her foot but couldn’t see anything. She goes on the ‘have another look tomorrow’ list.
Quick wizz round the market this morning to buy fish. On Fridays our neighbour Alistair has an excellent vegetable stall, nearly all local stuff and some of it from the Knightshayes kitchen garden, the National Trust property at Bolham. I have ordered two lambs from Lynette, sheep shearer extraordinaire, mother of three, milker, excellent singer and generally disgustingly talented. She does a bit of cleaning for us and also comes in to inject the animals with us on the days we do routine worming, vaccinations, ADE etc. Lynette and her mother Maureen know most people around here. You say something like, o dear I haven’t ordered a turkey yet, and they have a relative who breeds them and so on. Our postman is a mine of information too, just as well as we are newcomers having been in this house for just two years.