It has rained all day Friday and most of the day Saturday although it cleared for an hour or two in the afternoon. Time enough to get my hands dirty in the pond pulling out some of the reeds and their roots which are starting to clog it up. I was pleased to come across both a baby newt and a baby frog. Hopefully they survived the clear out. There is also at least one goldfish that somehow has managed to keep going even though the reeds had got so thick there couldn’t have been much room for it to swim.

In the light of the early evening I strained off a jar of rhubarb and vodka. It has been macerating in the cellar for the last few months which was probably too long. It tasted fairly hefty and is a pleasing dirty pink colour. I also had some vodka that had been flavoured with barberries as well and I mixed that into one of the bottles to make it a deeper shade of red.

After the hiatus with the rain it started to come down again but this time with added thunder and lightening. It was around us for about twenty minutes. There wasn’t time to count the seconds between the flashes of lightening and the deep grumble of the thunder as they seemed jumping ahead of themselves and it wasn’t clear which flash of lightening preceded which clap of thunder.

We sat eating with the door open by the table so we could take in the full noise of it and the rain coming down in great dregs heavy enough to soak a man in a few seconds.

I ate a dorade – roasting it in the oven with garlic, cherry tomatoes and lemon.

Sunday will be spent trying to work out what to do with the pineapples that were going cheap in the grocers.