We’ve had a very hot couple of weeks but sometimes the grass has been too wet to go out till quite late as the sun is behind the trees for a lot of the day.  The last two days though, Mummy has been able to put us out soon after midday.

Mummy was doing lots of funny things this morning.  First we heard a strange noise outside, sort of rhythmic, and when she came in she looked very hot as if she’d been doing some hard work.  Then she picked up the threads that she keeps from our Megazorb bags, and from the bird feed bags, and tied them to the door handle and sort of twiddled them although I couldn’t see it properly.  Then she sort of did something clever with it and it went into one short length of string!  Then she put us out onto the big part of the grass, in the middle, which was quite dry – we’ve been between the veg patches for the past few days, and near the wall the grass is getting very long so I thought she’d put us there to finish it off, but it does get quite wet so I expect she wanted us to do this patch early today.

Anyway we set to work, eating hard, and Mummy came over with her table and chair and a drink and a few bags and some more string.  And she spent a lot of time making bundles of twigs and tying them with the thread she had left over from her string making earlier.  I gave her a Fredlook and she told me she was making faggots for the fire.  Frankly, that doesnt mean much to me, but I expect its a good idea and its very clever that she uses up old string and old twigs that she cut earlier in the year and turns them into something useful.

So the two bags of twigs turned into one and a half bags of faggots and then it was time for her to mow the rest of the grass.  We could hear her doing the oustide and then she did the inside, round where we had been the day before (she didnt spend any time at all mowing that) and then she went to the long grass we hadnt done by the wall and it sounded and smelled pretty wet still, I can tell you.  Then she brought the mowing thing round to the path round where we were and even got a bit close to our runs when she did under the raspberry bushes, and Hec and Humph ran and hid, but I just carried on eating and Vic just carried on sleeping.  He does do some grass mowing sometimes, he just likes to sleep it off a little at a time.  I do all my sleeping when we come in.

Then Mummy went inside for a short rest and came and asked me if I was ready to come in, and I just carried on mowing, and she said “That’s a ‘no’ then, is it?” and I was glad she had understood me all right.  But she came out a while later and told me it was time to come in, which it was really, everyone else was in their warm places and I was just trying to get a last mouthful of grass before summer finished.  Mummy says we might have a chance for an hour or two from time to time still, but that’s almost certainly the last afternoon of grass time for this year.

And I thought how funny it was that when we started grass time this year there were three runs, me and George, Hugo and Victor, and Hector and Humphrey.  And now I’m with Vic, and Hec and Hum are just as they were.  And I was feeling quite sad about that but then I looked at George’s lavender bush and remembered that he is all around us now, one with the earth, and so is Hugo.  And I’m lucky because I can look forward to next summer now.