Tuesday 7th June 2016

It is with some regret that at times I wish I were doing something else other than put up wind turbines. I mean, I would prefer to travel the globe taking pictures for something like National Geographic, even if it is now owned by Murdoch.

Anyway, start the day with meetings, and things that have been in place for months if not years, are changed totally, and so we deal with the consequences. On a day like this I wish I had just not got up, or bypassed the works laptop and gone straight for the whisky bottle. And did I make a difference? I am way too modest to say with any certainty. What is clear being several hundred miles away didn't help.

The day started out so bright, so summery, and a joy to be up and about. Jools makes coffee, I get up, put bird seed out for mainly my entertainment. Jools leaves for the factory and I start early as there was a meeting scheduled very early. So, I do my managerial thing, which even to my ears makes me sound like I know what I'm talking about. As hard as that is to believe.

Outside the sun shone down, and there was a gentle breeze blowing, but inside, at the dining room table, I was tapping away at a hot keyboard, getting stuff done.

After lunch I mix up a batch of dough for some bread to go with dinner. At which point the doorbell goes and outside is the plumber. You would think that having two toilets in a house which contains just two people, we would have no issues with the WCs. But with the one on the ground floor stopping flushing a few weeks back, and as luck would have it, the one upstairs wouldn't stop filling up. We have to use the one on the ground floor, and I manage to bodge the one in the bathroom so it does flush, but not much.

So, I had a plumber's manager come round the day before, he agreed the toilets didn't work. That's why I'm paid to be a quality manager, to notice things like that! Anyway, it is agreed they needed fixing, and a bloke would come round on Tuesday. Lee did come round, with plenty of worker's arse crack on display, so I let him bending over cutting the water supply off. He fixes one, goes upstairs to fix the other. And we have two working toilets again. Result.

I bake the bread at four, so the loaf would be cool when we had dinner; instalata caprese, it works wonderfully well. I have this bread-making malarkey down to an art now. Which I think is a good thing.

Work has carried on in much the same car crash way, but I deal with the issues and I think by the end of the day I think we're winning. And that is the point of it all I guess.

Jools comes home, but already the skies had darkened and I had watched the storm tracker bleep as the lightning drifted up from central France over the Channel before lighting up our skies. Lightning flashed, thunder rolled. It was all very dramatic.

With one final loud clap of thunder above the house, and the storm then seems to have worn itself out, and the skies cleared once more, with no thunder heard or lightning seen. Another storm would drift over later in the evening, bright enough to penetrate the thich curtains, my closed eyelids and still sear an image in the my retina. Amazing stuff.

I drifted off to the sound of more thunder rolling around St Maggies.