… afternoon out today.

Terry had rung me up. He had a brushcutter that was misbehaving and wanted me to look at it.
“You’ll have to say the magic words” I answered.
“Liz will be baking”.

Despite something of a latish night, I was awake with the alarm and although I wasn’t up with the lark, it was a reasonably early start.

I’d been on my travels too during the night. Somewhere in Eastern Europe and might even have been Poland, building blocks of flats for the undesirables. Cheap breeze blocks and no windows or anything. And in this case, the undesirables weren’t the Jewish population of Eastern Europe but the black population. And that makes sense too, doesn’t it?

After breakfast, I had a look in my mail box, and it was full of disappointment. There’s a message from the British Government telling me (and everyone else who had one) that we will no longer be able to work in the EU, no longer able for our kids to work, no longer any automatic right of residence – all kinds of things. Read it for yourself.

Basically, 17.4 million stupid xenophobic racists had totally mucked up my life and my future and that of several million others too. And I wasn’t even allowed to vote on my own future either. We are going to witness what could potentially be the biggest mass forced displacement of people since the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans in 1945-48.

Having digested the unpalatable news, I spent the rest of the morning downloading all (well, all but three or four) of the files off the big desktop computer. They are now on an external hard drive ready for uploading onto my new computer which, according to the delivery company, will be here on Monday.

After lunch, still in a foul mood, I headed out to Roncey.

We dismantled the carburettor on Terry’s brushcutter to clean it out because it seemed that the accelerator jet was blocked. It would tick over fine but opening the throttle caused it to cut out. The draught of air was weakening the mixture dramatically as there wasn’t enough fuel getting through.

But the jets are sealed in and we can’t remove them. Blasting air through the carb in the reverse direction made a slight improvement but not enough to have it running correctly. So that was that. We also had a look at the wiring on Terry’s new van. The towbar wiring wasn’t connected so we had to hunt down the wiring channel to thread some cable through. I managed to see it and pass a drawing wire through so we could pull the new cable back up the channel from the outside.

In exchange, Terry gave me a battery that he had had for his old van. Now that that’s gone off to be turned into baked bean cans it’s surplus to requirements and Caliburn has been a little sluggish these cold winter mornings.

Liz had cooked some vegan beanburgers which were delicious with chips and peas, followed by home-made apple upside-down cake. And there was even a doggy-bag to take home.

But I couldn’t stay too long because from about 17:30 onwards I was fighting off an attack of sleep and in the end I was close to conceding. So I decided that I would be ebtter off coming home before I fell asleeo definitively.

So back here now and I’ll try for an early night if I can. It’s Saturday tomorrow – shopping day.