Mike the bull is getting a bit fed up with being confined to his pen. when Chris and Sarah let him out into the yard today so they could clean out his pen, he charged around the yard, dashed into the hay shed and nearly caused an avalanche of hay bales. Perhaps he was just celebrating the birth of his first daughter at West Ilkerton.

She was born on 1st February and she's called Ilkerton Pimpernel. Her mum is Ilkerton Lovage.

We name our cows after British flowers, working one letter down the alphabet every year. This year ought to be O, but (apart from endless different types of orchid) there are hardly any wild flowers beginning with O, so we've cheated and gone on to P.

We've been pretty busy during January and February. The holiday cottage has three new windows: the two large end windows which look over the farm and one side window have been replaced with hardwood double-glazed units which open easily! Hurray!

The kitchen, living room, stair wells and master bedroom have all been repainted, AND we have installed satellite TV at West Ilkerton, with all the free channels plus BBC 3 and 4. Double hurray! Chris has found a channel called movies4men (endless westerns and war films) so he's happy. For the first time ever, we can get BBC south west. This means we now know about all the redundancies, rapes and muggings in our immediate vicinity, rather than getting all the same news about Wales. An added bonus is that we get a good picture even when it's high pressure. Before, good weather used to come at a price: a fuzzy TV. All in all, we wonder why we waited so long to get digital TV (NB it's in the self-catering cottage too.)

The weather has been most peculiar. For a couple of weeks it was incredibly dry and pretty hot (up to 14 degrees centigrade) and then it snowed. The snow lasted about a day, and now it's raining hard.

We hope the weather decides to stop in sunny mode during lambing in April.