We're busy cooking up

We're busy cooking up or preserving all the autumn produce. Tomato sauce, green beans, pesto, quince cheese, grape jelly . . . We have lots of squash (jack-be-little, sunburst and a large self-seeded unidentified one that grew among the beans), walnuts from our own trees and almonds from a couple of trees left to go wild that we found by a nearby abandoned farmhouse. And it's a great year for sloes - we have 2 litres of sloe gin on the go, gradually turning electric pink.

It's been a whole month

It's been a whole month since I wrote in here, very busy over the summer but things have calmed down a bit now. Alessio is back at school and we're eating the last of the stuff from the veg patch – tomatoes and peppers mainly, and a few green beans. No indian summer this year – autumn hit us suddenly and brutally a couple of weeks ago with cold and rain and storms. It's warm again now but not with that intense heat that would enable us to go to the beach, say. Mornings are misty and very pretty and evenings are cool. Cassie is wearing her winter coat of mud. Herbie the kitten is growing up physically but not mentally and is still in full-on naughty mode. We tragically lost Blackie last week, somehow he ate some poison and the vet couldn't save him; it was a horrible death and a horrible experience. Mourning a pet is a strange process and I keep thinking I see him just darting round a corner.