Only me by the look of it Pugh!

Polishing cuckoo clocks I expect.

Or perhaps she has taken up growing a new onion, after-all spring is heading your way.

Only 18 more days and we step into the first day of autumn, my favourite time of the year. I love the colours but most of all I like the period of settled weather, warm but not too hot. Just lately we have had some very hot days when the thermometer has clocked on to 36 degrees, nasty. One day last week,  a town in the South Island hit 40.3 degrees, I believe that must be close to melting point and not for this kid. We have found it too hot to go out and the air conditioning has been given a good workout.

A few days ago I had some pictures sent me from the UK, these showed snowdrops just breaking into flower, surely this means spring is on the way.

It's a very strange thing in the UK, when it's cold (in the winter) we use Celsius and when it's hot (in the Summer) we use Fahrenheit. This means in the winter it sounds even colder, for example -2 C = 28 F. If you say -2 C people feel cold. The same in the summer, you feel hotter if you say 104 F – if you say 40.2 C it just does not sound so hot. I have to say I don't like it too hot but I do love the sun – it makes you feel so much happier.

I'm hoping it will be dry at the weekend so I can tidy the garden up. I will trim some things but it's too early to cut hard back because we could still get some cold weather. I remember snow in April. My snowdrops are looking great. I love it when there's a slight breeze and the snowdrops shake their little heads.

Yes, I remember decimalisation, a little, although I don't remember old money as such. I remember getting a sixpence from the tooth fairy. But I was quite young so the only money I got was sixpence and in new money it was 2 and a half pennies. And speaking of metric, we are still not fully metric in the UK. When I was at school it must have been changing over. I did cm and metres in maths, in sewing it was metric and our field sports were in metres but in cooking it was pounds and ounces. I know all the metric but still to this day if I'm cooking I use pounds and ounces and if I'm measuring something (in terms of length) I use metres. We are a strange lot. It's like milk. You can buy a pint or you can buy a litre. For liquids we still have the old measurements and Europe has not stopped us using them yet. Petrol still has gallons. There are so many old measurements we use it's quite surprising.