I am the first to say how dreadful Liz Truss is at almost every level, not least the way she portrays herself as the new Thatcher when she so obviously is not in every way. But some attacks on her are just hugely unfair and plain bonkers. Yes I refer to the dreadful, offshore owned, tax avoiding, Guardian, the paper that supported the slavers in the South in the US Civil War and which spouts a non stop diet of left wing bilge. Is this peak Guardian madness?

Gettig folks to eat apples here at the Welsh Hovel is something of an ask. Which is an issue as we now have two apple orchards and also a highly productive cooking apple tree. I just hate things going to waste. We are now past the blackberry season so there can be no more blackberry and apple crumbles. Rhubarb and apple? Maybe that will work.

I do not want you thinking that all my tomatoes are green. We have been enjoying tomatoes that are ripe and red and orange (depending on the plant) for five weeks and as you can see in the top photo below have enough to be storing some in Greek Hovel olive oil for use later this autumn. But I would be lying if I did not fess that the 20 or so plants I have grown this year – some from seed others donated as small plants by friends – are not now bursting with green tomatoes. Not more chutney, surely, is there another way?

Some folks said that I did not give them enough notice about ShareStock 2022 so they were on holiday, could not find anywhere to stay or had accepted a prior engagement. So for 2023 I am giving you almost a year’s notice of an even more unusual event! We start with some amazing new speakers:

At last the olive trees I smuggled back from Greece in the bottom of the car, have a new home here in Wales. My friend R whizzed his tractor round the edge of the upper field that borders the churechard two weeks ago. The jury is out on the chestnut and mulberry trees I planted at the far end and bottom last year. There are signs of life but not many. That hot summer when I was away in Greece, so could not water them, may have proved fatal. If so I shall try again next year.

The bottle marked vodka contains, of course, apple juice. Producing at 6 litres a day, I am rapidly running out of glass bottles so if anyone locally has any spare I will happily swap eight empties – which you were going to bin anyway – for one full of apple juice. There is a suggestion that the next batch will be apple and damson juice. It is worth one experimental run.

For some reason, I am snowed under with apples from the orchard by the river Dee this year. This week I brought in two 25 litre buckets of apples. I could easily bring in another twenty if I had the time and energy to process them all and enough bottles to store the juice in.

Hell I voted for her, something for which I must again apologise for to everybody else in Wrexham, but surely that merits a personal visit. It seems as if Wrexham Athletic is here in the last village in Wales tonight. At the school gates M, a fellow young mum who is a true libertarian as is her husband D, greets me with the news that flyers are out saying Atherton will be “door knocking” tonight. M says that D has a few words for our MP in this red wall seat and one suspects that Ms Atherton will not enjoy that monologue.

Both harvests have been good this year. I picked all the peppers, both the soft bell shaped ones and the spicier long green ones, earlier this week. The chilli plants are still turning red so what you see below is just the first crop. There will be a stack more to come and, after last year’s bumper crop we are still working through the dried chillies from 2021. Even an Anglo Indian household like this one cannot keep up with what our gardens supply.

As it happens, four week days out of five I look after young Jaya until nursery starts at 1 PM and on the fifth day I prepare her for nusery starting at nine so the answer is likely to be me. Moreover, at the weekend when her mum dresses her she does not wear odd socks. My late dad taught me that it was a bit lower middle class to worry about matching socks and, at this point, Jaya agrees with him and with me on this matter.

I think that I have one last crop of radishes to harvest in a few weeks but the penultimate crop of the year was a big one.

What links the picture on a Scottish beer, Russ Tamblyn (Seven Brides for Seven Brothers), Back to the Future 2, Don Everly ( of the singing Brothers), Axl Rose of Guns n’ Roses, Anthony Perkins (psycho), the Sound of Music and me? The answer is Venetia Strevenson my father’s first cousin who died this week. I was with my father’s sister Aunt L on the day we learned that her cousin had passed away and while she was very sorry to hear the news, she noted that she and Venetia moved in rather different social circles.

In this podcast, I reflect on the Kwasi Kwarteng, Liz Truss mini budget. I am amazed and how badly the right wing commentariat has called it for it was mean and unjust and economically illiterate. It is not what Mrs Thatcher would have done and was a betrayal of her brand of conservatism and of the poor, working and middle classes too. It was just awful at every level and should form the basis of an electoral rout for the Tories in two years which will be fully deserved. 

Record attendance at WSL game scream all the newspaper headlines after the Arsenal Spurs derby yesterday. Arsenal itself tweets out a picture of the crowd and of a big screen boasting of 53,737 tickets sold.  Well all up to a point..

There is just so much to do but my target is to harvest at least one crop a day and put it away for winter storage. Tomorrow is the official start of the apple harvest and, having jumped the gun by a week on the crabapples and edibles from the new top orchard I have created, work will, start on the old orchard by the river which is dripping with reddening apples begging to be scratted and crushed into juice. Meanwhile…