The weather has changed back to the usual wet, wet, wet so it's going to be a housekeeping day. The list of jobs is as follows:

Organise travel to London for a conference and tell the family what time I shall be arriving on November 3rd

• Fill in a pile of questionnaires that have been thrown on the sofa for the last couple of days
• Run the vacuum cleaner which is getting to be an urgent job
• Sort out the kitchen cupboards
• Take an item that has not attracted any interest on freecycle to the charity shop down the road - picture me wheeling a child's chair down the road if you will as I go to the post box ......
• Make beetroot soup
• Do the dusting and as I go put things away
• Consider the contents of one shelf of a bookcase - I spy junk
• Fill the bucket that has come back from the allotment again with produce in it with things that need to return to the shed
• If the mood takes, I might just sort out the filing drawer at some later point today and do the ironing

Well that's the urgent stuff to get done. Tomorrow will be a free day if I actually get to the bottom of the list. Oh and then I can complete the list of things to do on the allotment. It starts as follows:

• Clear the compost heap of courgette, pumpkin and squash plants unless they suddenly start to produce again
• Move said compost heap barrow by barrow to the vegetable patch and spread as soil improver
• Move compost heap from behind shed barrow by barrow to the cleared area and cover again
• Move the other sundry compost heaps barrow by barrow to the space behind the shed and cover

See you all again in January if that takes as long as I think it will. One can hope for enough fine days between now and Christmas to get that lot done.

There I sat in the sun on the seat at the allotment taking leaves of the last of the beetroot when there was this clucking.

I own no chickens I thought. But there was this black lady strutting around squawking that she was lost. Would ishe go back through the hole in the hedge where she must have entered? Of course not - she spotted a lovely allotment to wreck.  A gentleman walking passed said "Well just pick it up".  "Feel free" I replied. He crept up on it - at which point Madam Chucky shot off squawking most loudly through the elderberry bush at the top of the tall privet hedge to we know not where and did not return. There was total silence and it's a long drop on the other side of the hedge. His red setter just looked on as if she was totally used to her owner doing such strange things.

Whatever.  I went back and turned the soil where the beetroot had been very roughly as the allotment is typical clay at the moment - dry on top and pudding just below the surface. A few showers and some frost will allow the soil to be broken down decently. The person who instructs you to rake a seed bed to a fine tilth on all these seed beds has never worked solid clay which has not had years of compost and manure added to it.

Meanwhile three small butternut squashes are ripening upon the kitchen window ledge - there will be a small amount of soup from them. I would suspect that we shall get more than the cost of the packet of seeds in butternut squash. The pumpkins are a waste of time and doing nothing. The marrows have definitely finished and the courgettes probably so. It will soon be time to clear the compost heap and start to move it onto various parts of the beds as soil improver. It will help to break up the clay and proper compost from elsewhere can be added later. Then another compost heap will have to be worked up for next summer's marrows, courgettes and squashes. The winter is definitely nothing but really heavy work.

The final question is what to do with the last of the beetroot. Hmm - soup perhaps as a change.

Having pickled and stored 30 bottles of beetroot, I went on to pickle red cabbage and then to make beetroot chutney and marrow chutney with the last marrows of the season. I've cleaned up the kitchen and put away the pots and pans. The last of the washing is in the washing machine and will soon be out on the line to dry. However there was a small disaster that quite spoilt the day just as I finished cleaning up the kitchen.

If it isn't one thing it's another wouldn't you say. With the plaster that has come away, I shall definitely be talking to the landlord. Oh yes and there is another loose tile being propped up further along so that can be added to the problems when make the telephone call.  I wonder if this will be such a big problem that they'll sort out the kitchen units at the same time. I'll bet that I shan't be so lucky.

But for all that I am very pleased with all the pickles and chutneys I have made. Now I can go and get the allotment sorted for the autumn without too many other distractions.

The last hedge trim of the year hopefully. It's the last Friday of September and yet the allotment has a marvellous display of summer flowers. Here is the son-in-law in full swing of doing the necessary.

It was a warm day to say the least. Stevie really did work up a sweat as he tidied up all the hedges around the allotment. There was not a great amount to move but it was a warm job.

The lupin is confused and thinks that spring is here with the sudden warm week after all the rain whilst the nasturtiums are still a riot of colour.  A frost will cure all.

Stevie did the hard work of hedge trimming and then went home to cook tea for the family whilst I did the clearing up.  We are a good team as he will climb ladders to do tops of hedges whilst I will sweep up and clean up quite happily. I don't do ladders and he is not keen on sweeping up.  Meantime the year must be rolling on as the pigeon racing season rolls to a close and Friday night is no longer a great hurry to get the pigeons from the local lofts to the right place and logged in for the race. Ah so we can have bonfires on Saturdays without causing the pigeons to keep flying rather than land on the local lofts. Hurrah.             

The pickling of beetroot has begun and will continue for some days. The bottles are some of those which were filled with beetroot last night. As I type there are more beetroot boiling in the big pot on the stove whilst more will follow from the bucketful that came off the allotment this morning.

At the moment there is an interesting storage problem as all my one food cupboard is full of staples. However a little clearing within the one other cupboard in the bathroom may help to provide space for the stock of pickled beetroot to come.

  The jars are here so I'm going to get down to pickling beetroot later on. The pickling vinegar is due sometime this evening but it's going to take some time to get the beetroot boiled and skinned ready to go into the jars.

There's half of the red cabbage left and this could be pickled too!  The daughter took some home for a recipe of her own and some of the rest could go in jars pickled. If you get pickles for Christmas from me well you will know where they have been made! Perhaps you should worry now!

I was peacefully checking news, weather, bills and forums this morning when one of the usual firewall updates came through - thought nothing of it as I have a firewall and antivirus package all in one so it just passed my notice as some more updates TILL the internet connection died for no good reason. So you do all the usual, check the wires into the computer, turn the router on and off again, clear your cookies, ring your ISP and ask if they have problems .... Nope it was the new firewall. Same as it was last time but with a different company. At least support is in the UK even if is 0845. It's taken a couple of hours to sort things out all told and to get everything back on line. Remote access is great fun too - watching your computer doing it's own thing with the mouse of someone you can't see.

I did decide that this picture sums up my feelings entirely on firewalls. I think that they have had one heck of a morning with the phones ringing off the hook at the technical support of my firewall supplier. But all's well that ends well and sometimes it shows that the price that you pay has it's benefits - you can't ring tech support for the free downloaded firewalls.

Any old how - it seems to have taken till now to get whatever it was in the background sorted. If I can upload this blog which is in Windows Live Writer then I shall know that all is well with the world again.

Yesterday was the annual resident's meeting organised by the local social housing group. There was a talk by a community allotment group amongst other interesting goings on. They bought along some produce to show what they grow.

Well it was just too good to miss was this cabbage so I gave them a donation of £1 and came home with a cabbage that must way at least 5 pounds. The head behind the cabbage is the 16 year old grandson who had come round to collect his birthday present in exchange for a piece of his vegan chocolate cake which is the most yummy and scrumptious cake in all the world.

But it does give you some idea of the size of the cabbage - remember that this is a very tall teenager here that we are talking about.

Tomorrow morning I have to be on the 6.32am train out of Prudhoe to go to London for a one day meeting on "Older People and the Environment". It's all to do with a project by the Green Alliance to see if older people can become more involved in being environmentally friendly. So far it seems not to be defined in depth as we the 10 are supposed to provide input and direction to the group.

The group organiser rang us all up and asked if we had basic concerns that we could put forward to get the discussion going. It seems that everyone she had spoken before me had also put forward attitude as a discussion point. This has to be the start - do we care enough to do anything if we are told what we could do.

Ah now, if we can only get down to discussing simple things like understanding and improving recycling schemes, getting down to the cost of insulation of homes and the cost of decent central heating systems, getting some more of the antiques who shouldn't still be driving out of their cars and onto public transport, getting people to think about buying local, campaigning for less packaging that can't be disposed of by recycling and the cost of using green electricity (too much), green cleaning products (too expensive for many or the cheaper ones like soda bicarbonate, distilled vinegar and borax not being available), then perhaps we shall be doing something useful.

I wonder what I have missed out that I can diplomatically raise in these times of rising prices.