Hello, Dylan here.  I thought I’d better tell you what’s been going on this month.  It’s been a bit funny because Mummy has been walking round with her arm wrapped up, and even tied to her neck for a couple of weeks, ever since she suddenly lay down beside us in the garden.  She sat up and felt her left arm all up and down it with her right hand, just like she does with us when she’s checking us for lumps and bumps and things.  Vic reckons she must have found a lump or bump.

Anyway for the next couple of weeks she did everything with one hand and we got used to her picking us up by getting us to climb into the cloth that tied her arm to her neck.  It was pretty much as usual, really, only sitting on the other arm.  The odd thing that happened after she got up from lying down, she asked Uncle Glyn to come and take our cage tops in from the garden, since we’d been out in our standard run arrangement, all of us together separated into pens by linked panels.  Ever since then we’ve been out in relays, in a run that was made up only of the panels.

It’s been fun though, since we’ve had some big runs that went all the way round one of the vegetable patches that didnt have anything we wanted to eat in it.  Mummy is clever like that.  It had big cabbage plants in it, and they were nice and shady too.  She told me off severely on a couple of occasions for climbing over the side of the run – that was before I realised the other boys weren’t there.  She laughed at me one day when she realised I was climbing back in again, she hadn’t seen me get out.  I don’t bother these days, since I know they aren’t there to chat to.

The grass has grown.  We have got the grass round the vegetable patches back under control, although Mummy says we’re not as good as mowing as Fred, George, Victor and Hugo were.  That’s seven of us not as good as four of them were.  Cheek!  The last couple of days we’ve been on really long grass at the end of the garden.  Of course Mummy hasn’t been able to mow it with one hand, so it has got very long.  We are doing our best.  You can see where we’ve been and where we haven’t, although I must say, the bits we’ve done need doing again and we haven’t finished the first cut yet.

Mummy did some gardening today.  She got the first vegetable bed ready for autumn and winter vegetables for us.  She just weeded round the small kale plants and pulled out the old things that had run to seed.  We had those just now when we went back in our cages.  Yummy coriander and things like that.  She’s made sure there aren’t any caterpillars on the kale and put a secure net over them to keep the butterflies off.  She was going to do it the day she hurt her arm, but she just dropped the net over the plants and hoped for the best.  They are a bit holey where caterpillars have been but she says they’ll recover.  She’s planted some winter tares in the rest of that patch, but there are also some carrots nearly ready for us to eat.

I like carrots, but Dougall and I haven’t been getting them recently.  We get tops, but not carrots.  I don’t know why.  We’ve been getting smaller bowls of pellets without any muesli in them too.  Mummy said Dougall is on a diet and I’ll have to keep him company.  He weighs 1.46kg and he got up to 1.48 at the start of this diet thing.  I weigh 1.38 and I’ve lost 0.4 since it started.  Mummy slipped me a carrot today before Dougall came back into the cage so he didn’t know.  He seems well though.  He’s just a bit lazy.  It’s all muscle, though.

Hec’s abscess is nearly better, Humphrey is fine, Victor is fine but sleeps most of the time, so I snuggle him when he doesn’t want to be disturbed, and I look after him.  Colman and Kevin are fine.  We all had baths a couple of weekends ago.  That made us all feel much better!