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Take one fisherman, in this case Jonny Page, distract him from his flies. Take one 10 ton yellow telehandler, left in the driveway by friendly contractor. Combine to elevate fisherman into otherwise totally inaccessible cherry tree. Flushed with success, try to persuade someone else to make jam.

The gutters on the main house are a lovely profile in cast iron but the ones on the front were looking crooked. On Thursday I finally got round to getting the long ladder out and, wobbling my way to the top, a great can of worms was opened. Plastic filler, impermeable and unprimed paint, seams of silicone holding water in the soffits, rotten woodwork, splits in the lead and an infestation of both wasps and bees. The last decorator now has a price on his head. The yellow pages gave us George the wasp man, who turned up the next day, and Angus from Spey Building and Joinery stepped up to the plate with a huge yellow telehandler and the help of two excellent guys. By yesterday evening Nick and James had all the gutters on the ground and by this evening we had remade most of the soffits, repaired the woodwork, raked huge tongues of dripping honeycomb from between the rafters and started the arduous task of cleaning up each section of gutter, welding up any cracks, priming and painting them, so far 6 sections done, probably 60 to go.

After a fortnight of partying both here (our first party in business, pictured) and at Standon Calling, it is back to being wholesome. We started with a little get together of everyone from the estate. Ewan and Sulekha run their company, Northern Greens, from the vegetable gardens and they brought a delicious salad of lettuce, rocket and nasturtiums (apparently Grace Jones eats a lot of flowers). This set the ball rolling and our neighbours invited us to make sure their splendid veg patch doesn’t waste while they are on holiday so we dived in for sweet peas, beans, lettuces, spinach, more rocket and big juicy redcurrants.

To compliment these amazing flavoursome home grown vegetables there are the wild foods. The place is covered with little sweet raspberries, sorrel, chanterelle mushrooms, cherries and a carpet of blaeberries. After much debate about what a blaeberry scoop really is we have improvised with a bowl and a coarse nit comb. Half an hours sweeping gathered me a mug of berries and a similar volume of spiders, it’s all sitting outside overnight in case it wants to escape.

If anyone has foraging recommendations please let me know, this time next year we will certainly run a found foods course. Hedgerows and roadkill or similar.

We finally stopped eating and Marco has, in the last 2 days, got some amazing photos and stitched them together, ‘Putain quelle discipline!’ We really like the results so we are going to let him loose on the website. Look out for an entertaining update of the ‘House’ section of the site over the next few days.

It’s been a beautiful week, which is a good thing because the oil for the aga just ran out.

With the renovation of the interior pretty much complete the tallest Frenchman has been here this week celebrating his 30th with his tall father. It has been quite a party (of which more later). We were sad to find that the Wee Spey Dram whisky shop is no more, an event I’m sure was reflected by this incredible apolcalyptic cloud which descended today.

The kitchen and the back corridors are finally done, the red lino has come up and gone out through the windows, we have scraped the glue from the floorboards, spent the weekend sanding and waxing and making shelves for the pantry, caulking cracks, polishing pans and touching up the paintwork.

Phew.

The house will be ready to rent in 3 weeks…

Been up the chimneys and cleared the flue for the boiler.

Today we are finally tackling the kitchen, keeping it Edwardian and keeping the chickens out of the paint.