Hermione now has a beautiful, hexagonal house with little, heart-shaped windows; Nick and Kieran finished the roof today and I lasured the walls. She didn’t seem terribly impressed, but maybe she’s not a very architecturally cultured goose!

We’ll have to get on with the arrière cuisine soon, as the temporary shelving in there is now groaning under the weight of produce; we made 13 jars of apricot jam today and 10 jars of apricot pie filling. We also need space to put a decent sized freezer; the one we have is minute. I tried making a white chocolate mousse on Saturday, for our visitors. It’s a fool-proof, stand-by recipe which has never let me down before; but the white chocolate that I bought here simply wouldn’t melt, it just went lumpy, and of course, you can’t buy whipping cream here, so I bought something that I hoped would work. After a lot of effort, it looked as it should, but 24 hours later, still hadn’t set! So I put it in the freezer this morning and have taken it out every so often all day today to whisk; it looks a bit like ice cream; any volunteers to taste it?