The Pig Yard

September - So what's new this month? Jane has taken to playing Table Tennis with the local club and is already playing team games. With her squash league games and her Table Tennis she is going to have a busy sporting schedule through the Winter months.

We've managed to get a couple of balloon flights at the weekends. At this time of year with farmers under sowing the fields and the animals still out, it is very difficult to find anywhere to land. One morning flight took us south of Milton Keynes and another just outside Walgrave.

Jane has been unwell with her annual cold which goes to her chest and develops into a hacking cough. She hasn't allowed this to stop her doing her usual activities - always far more active than Steve.

The beginning of the month was still warm enough to set the table on the patio and eat out in the evenings. We probably don't eat out in the garden often enough but now we have direct access from the summer room onto the patio we may do it more often next year.

Our problem is that when we're in the garden we're always looking at what needs to be done next and therefore we tend to get on with it.

On a bright evening in the early part of the month Whitehall Farm dig had an open evening. Steve is not a great fan of "old stuff" but even he asked a question of the experts and sounded interested.

The event was rounded off with a view of the finds, drinks and biscuits. Some of Jane's reconstructed pots were on show and were admired by many.

The star of the evening was Martin's reconstructed head. He took the pieces of an excavated skull, made a plaster mould and then taught himself how to build up the face so that it showed how someone who died nearly 2,000 years ago may have looked.

The annual Harpole scarecrow event took place on a very cloudy weekend. We decided to get the bikes out and cycle over there. We observed a number of car drivers entering the village and refusing to make a charitable contribution. The meanness of some people knows no bounds.

There is a great deal of ingenuity that goes into the scarecrow characters and this crow really caught our eye. We thought the idea was to scare the crows away... This model was made from black plastic bags torn into feather shapes and was sitting outside someone's front door. It won our vote.

Martin has pulled it off again and the weight distribution has made very little difference to the height of the boat out of the water.

We walked back down the hill from Gayton in bright sunshine and just enjoyed the wisps of clouds scudding across the sky.

Moans of the month: No moans to report on this month from our readership.