I’m actually not too disappointed to be back at work today, given the crummy state of our weather. There has been someone chucking buckets of water over us every time we’ve set foot outside to come and go from our office. It’s not been nice when you’ve added in the wind factor in our exposed location. What I will say, though, is much the same as yesterday – I’d rather be working here than anywhere else.

I’ve also had a nice, meaty proposal to write today – that’s the sort of thing I love doing – y’know, thinking about a nitty gritty problem, solving it and writing how we can do that. In fact, much of the puzzle was slotted into place by Ginny while I was away, but I now pick up her investigative and ground work to make it sing. (Hopefully.)

In the middle of this afternoon, I got up from my desk to go and make a coffee and have a ‘comfort break’ (you know – spend a penny) and as I looked down into the garden, I spotted this sight. Three silly old birds trying to shelter from the rain by standing under their nest boxes on the side of their house. I don’t know why they had not thought to go round to the other side of the coop and step inside into the draught-free and dry coop but they hadn’t.

Of course, with brains the size of peas, you might expect they hadn’t got enough nouse to get themselves what they want but they certainly do. In fact, the reason they’re not comfortably sat in our back lobby by the boiler in the warm is because DM (cruel, cruel man that he is) decided that they’re chickens and therefore should be outside rather than living it up in the warmth and dry of our back lobby so he’d shut the door on them!

However, it proves that they’re not as clever as they think because, front to back, they are longer than the depth of the shelter so their tails were still getting wet.

I was curious to see how long they would stay in this strange little line – in fact, none of them moved much all afternoon until I went and herded them off to bed so the fox couldn’t get them as darkness fell!

Left to right, Milly, Sherri and Terri all show us their bottoms and their tail feathers!

Last year, I was thrilled to be reporting 981 consecutive days on my photo diary....today is day 1347!