Now that I'm a working-from-home sort of person, part of the morning routine is to wave the giri off to work. The neighbourhood marauding kitties have (of course) figured this out and most mornings there is at least one lying in wait at the front door, desperate to get in. Some mornings there are several, circling like sharks and eyeing each other with fake loathing in a competitive spirit (they know we won't let them all in at once). We have clearly become an extension of "their" humans - scritching and stroking on tap! I have just turfed out an extremely unhappy cat. He came charging in like a small buffalo as soon as we opened the front door, but made the mistake of dashing into the lounge (the sofas are, apparently, great scratch posts). Precisely because of the way he treats the furniture in there, out I threw him, and a very disgruntled cat he is. If looks could kill, I'd be dead.

Autumn is coming. The car in the morning is covered in wet dew and at night there's a chilly crispness to the air. The trees are all still in leaf, which is lovely, but some of the plants are thinking about settling in for winter. Pumpkins in the vegetable patch are huge, and in the borders the fennel is flowering again. One of my great delights this year were artichokes in amongst more formal border plants. Ours were dwarf, so not too big, although they have such spectacularly vibrant purple flowers that I might go slightly overkill next year and grow both dwarf in the border and normal enormous ones amongst the vegetables. We don't actually eat them (although if the harvest was big enough next year, we would), instead we grow them for insects - certainly the butterflies tend to get really excited by both them and the lavender bushes. Apparently they are great overwintering houses for insects so we've left all the brown shrivelled up heads for the moment.

There's still weeding to do . . . there's ALWAYS weeding to do . . .