The quarry opens at 13:30 after the lunch break ...

... and at 13:40 the lorry turned up and promptly deposited 15 tonnes of gravel. It went away and half an hour later it came back with another 15 tonnes. The downside of all of this was that he left with a cheque for €628 which has torn a huge hole in my budget.

And if that wasn't enough, at 16:30 Sebastien and Bernard turned up despite their bereavement and within the hour they had left, leaving behind about 80 square metres of hardstanding. And you have to admit that this looks pretty good too.

Mind you, it's cost me another €200. But when you think about it, they were here all Saturday afternoon digging out and moving about 30 trailers worth of rubbish and  so on, depositing it in the waste land up the lane, and they then did an hour of spreading and tamping down with the digger. And at a minimum wage of €8:50 per hour, €200 represents about 24 or 25 man hours of labour alone. And would this ever have been done by a man working 25 hours with just a shovel?

But we've hit a problem in that we might have uncovered a hidden spring. Water is bubbling up and of you look closely in the middle of the image there's a large damp patch. After they went I spent about an hour sinking rocks into it to bind together the sand and gravel and also to allow the water to bubble to the surface if that's what is happening. It's best to get it to come out in one place rather than undermining the hardstanding, and then I can simply lay a trench and pipe it away.

However I reckon that the weather might have something to do with it. You know about all the rain we've had recently and we had another 24mm today. There's water everywhere.

Jean and Elizabeth and their friends popped round today as well to see how I'm getting on. Elizabeth is impressed with the garden and Jean is impressed with the work inside. It's been a long time since they came here.

Tomorrow I'm going to take it easy. It was hard work shovelling that stuff today.