I was walking along Fore Street this morning and a man smiled at me and asked me when I was going to be digging again. I recognised him to be one of my allotment neighbours and confessed to not having visited my allotment for some time partly because I had assumed the ground was frozen. He told me that rabbits have eaten most of what is growing there. Our brief conversation reminded me that I had worked through wintery weather in Derbyshire and therefore went up this afternoon equipped with my recharged cordless screwdriver.

I discovered the feathery remains of a fox or cat's Christmas dinner and, as I'd been warned, that rabbits had indeed made a feast of all my cabbage seedlings. I finished constructing a simple 2-bay compost bin from the 5 pallets I'd salvaged some months ago. I then investigated my box of equipment and realised that a kind neighbour (possibly the man I met this morning) had anchored the roofing felt that keeps my tool box dry as well as moving my weeding bucket to support the side of my part-made compost bin.