I’ve had Reggie with me all week this week, Victoria went back (with Badger) to Twickenham on Monday and will be back Friday evening for half-term. I’ll be taking the week off as well, three days leave and the two public holidays, I expect many in the UK will be doing the same.

Reggie had a haircut on Monday, and he is about half the size as he was, his hair was quite matted, and it has been cut quite short. I noticed during the week that he has been curling up quite tightly and has adopted Badger’s bed at night, I think he might have been feeling the cold. We turned the aga off a couple of weeks ago when it was warmer, and I have come close to putting it back on again this week.

Bridge this week was better than it has been, sixth from sixteen on Monday and 55.65% followed by 58.33% and fourth of eleven online on Tuesday.

I don’t know why I started to do Wordle, but it is taking hold and a couple of times awakened by the morning chorus I’ve found myself reaching for the phone at four in the morning. On Friday Victoria and I both got to our word after three attempts and at the time we were not living in the same house, so no cheating. Unbelievably, we chose the same three words, I think we both started with GHOST, spooky.

Luke, the TV guy and electrician whose name I got from Woolacotts came to review the work we need to do in the playroom. The TV and Soundbar will go on the wall above the new fireplace and the wires will need to be buried in the wall, coming horizontal through to the toy cupboard where we can put some power and the aerial socket and use the shelf to hide away any of the periphery boxes for the TV. A wall light will need to be taken down and the power isolated as this will be where the TV will be mounted on the wall. Luke is young but sounds knowledgeable and had some good ideas.

I’ve been getting plenty of exercise this week, well more than usual anyway. I’ve been working from the kitchen, keeping Reggie company, and listening out for a couple of deliveries, a microphone stand, and an isolation shield, both for my podcast. Being upstairs doesn’t give you enough time to get to the back door to receive a parcel before the delivery person has posted a card through the cat flap (our letter box) to say it can be collected from the depot in Exeter, a two-hour roundtrip away. Both arrived during the week.

During the week I published some more Maximo Bite Size articles and reached the target of forty I had set myself for the end of the month. The third chapter on Service Management is nearly complete. I have deliberately not been announcing releases of new Maximo Secrets articles on LinkedIn, but on Friday I announced the coming of the Maximo Bite Size podcast, and I used the opportunity to encourage people to follow me on Maximo Secrets. After a week I had only managed five or six additions, but I must try to get more of a following on Maximo Secrets rather than just via LinkedIn where I have more than 2,500 followers. I am committed to producing the podcast now and must launch it in June.

I’ve been working with Danny, the ZNAPZ CEO, on the techniques to producing the teaser videos that we will publish on YouTube. I’ve been experimenting with a piece of software that will provide an Autocue function, and at the first attempt the first podcast of just over five minutes was narrated faultlessly, although I wasn’t recording this.

I’m thinking of using the same Podcast material for the videos using one or two slides per episode. This means that when I record the podcast, I need to capture myself in video form, probably head and shoulders, so that I can appear in the corner of a slide. This will put back launching the podcast by a couple of weeks, but it will mean that we will have a lot of video material that we can publish to YouTube with relatively little additional effort. Danny wants to do a video every two weeks, ideally one a week, so they need to be produced efficiently in order to give other time to creating the core training videos. I think I’ll need to buy some more shirts.

Reggie has not been wanting to do the normal walk up to the arch and favours a charge across our field inspecting every corner for pheasants, not that there are many around in May. We’ve been through the valley once and the stinging nettles are getting tough, and I’ve been stung a few times. Mike will be coming in a couple of weeks to work on the ponds and cut some paths where we’ll be able to put down some grass seed, but until then I don’t think I’ll venture around the top end of the valley where the nettles are highest.

The largest ash tree was slowly beginning to push out some leaves at the extremities, but I had Danny, our tree surgeon, over on Saturday morning and he confirmed that it was dying out, succumbed to Ash Dieback disease. The much smaller tree at the top of the valley, which looks dead apart from some new shoots pushing through from the main trunk and biggest branches also has Ash Dieback, as have some smaller ash saplings which are in the roadside hedge of our garden. I suspect that the other ash trees in our newly cleared wood will also succumbed over the next few years. We will no doubt have firewood for at least the next fifteen, we already have at least five years of wood drying from last year’s copper beech that had to come down.

I’ve arranged for Danny to return on the 13th to clear a tree that crosses the boundary stream, it will need to be winched across, and to cut down the roadside ash trees. I’ll probably get him to cut down the smaller ash at the top of the valley and cut up another fallen tree at the bottom, perhaps also the neighbouring beech which is already at an angle of 45 degrees and which he said is dying at its top. His team will also move, cut up, and split several branches that we have dotted around in various piles, and a large pile of branches that are well seasoned in the stable where we keep the mower. This will create another pile of wood that we will need to stack, and we may be in search of another couple of pallets to lay them on to aid air circulation.

Victoria was back on Friday for half term and at the weekend I weeded the long bed by the front door and driveway and put down some bark. Victoria was similarly weeding the new bed by the greenhouse and putting down bark there, as well as planting out a lot of Dahlias, and Geums which had been grown on from mini plugs. The next bed to be weeded and to receive a layer of bark will be the left-hand side of the back bed where the Azaleas and Rhododendrons are in bloom, the daffodil leaves have nearly died back now.

There was no golf at the weekend, Peter had played in the Pro’s Day on Saturday, and has friends to stay for a few days next week. No golf again next weekend as I will be in Twickenham. Instead, we took Reggie to Crow Point for a walk, it had been raining earlier, but the sun had broken through, and it made for a lovely walk along the water’s edge.

At the weekend it was cold enough for us to christen the new fireplace and we burnt a few logs in the old log burner. The fireplace looks as if it has been in place for many years, not a few weeks. The room without any wallpaper and absent from many furnishings felt a lot more tolerable with a bit of warmth, I’ve been avoiding the room since the wallpaper was stripped.

We decided to join Apple TV and we will probably retire from Netflix where we were beginning to struggle to find anything worth watching. We’ve started watching Slow Horses, which is really good, a spy story based on the first of Mick Herron’s books about a set of dysfunctional spooks banished to Slough House under the occasional observation of its head Jackson Lamb, played by a brilliant Gary Oldman. With elevens books written to date this will give Apple TV plenty of opportunity for other mini-series.