There are few things more satisfying (in my view) than dressing up in someone else’s finery! This is Kirsty and James – two of my fellow trainees, dressed up in Indian garb. I kid you not, this was such fun, as I think can be seen by Kirsty’s grin. BTW – Kirsty does have a whole hand and not a blurry thing with no fingers, that’s a slow shutter speed combined with a fast hand movement and a bright light behind her.

How can anyone complain at spending the day dressing up, painting, getting to grips with preposition and adverbs? I’m not sure it’s possible. I’m pretty sure that next week, it’ll all feel a lot more serious as we go into our first placements where we will be really learning the job, until then, I’ll carry on having fun! I even did a bit of shopping on my way home still with my bindi on.

Considering that last night, when I was writing on this forum, I was worrying about whether we’d survive the great storm, today has seemed pretty exotic although potentially a little bit tame. The only difficulty in an otherwise jolly day was sitting for a couple of hours in soggy clothes as I got royally rained on this morning. So, for anyone needing an update – maximum wind speed of 52.5 mph and the only damage was a small tree that was on our boundary and path into the field was blown down and is now blocking the path. We didn’t lose any greenhouse glass or any fence panels or any roof tiles I’m relieved to report. Our chickens are all still in our garden and didn’t get blown onto Dartmoor. The dogs didn’t even get unduly spooked. In fact, DM reported that he realised the worst of the storm was over when he couldn’t hear the wind over the dolby stereo sound of me and JD snoring. I told him he must have been dreaming by that point because I DON’T SNORE! Anyway, the upshot of this is that the great beast of a lion of a storm that was threatened turned out to be little more than a pussy cat although we are now in storm season so best not to prod the lion or we may live to regret it (a bit like Albert).