I’m suffering from blogging apathy at the moment. It seems to happen every summer. It’s not that there isn’t anything happening. We’ve got all the usual animal and land husbandry tasks as well my editing business, guests in the gîte, anglers on the lakes and three kids at home. We, well mainly just me and Rors since we’re the tough ones, are swimming as often as we can (it’s been a chilly swimming season so far this year), and we’re going on bike rides whenever we can fit them in.

Maybe I temporarily lack motivation? Then I should learn from Ruadhri. He’s very motivated. I’ve mentioned his love on Beyblades in the past, these little metal spinning tops with cool names like Twisted Tempo, Cyber Pegasus and Hyper Aquario. Well, we’ve finally found out how to make him help round the place a bit more. He’s not been a great one for helping recently, not even keen to do jobs for which he’s paid. We don’t shell out for every little chore he does, just selected ones so that he can earn some pocket money in the process.

Anyway, Rors reluctantly came food shopping with us yesterday but had a wonderful surprise when he came across a Beyblade he’d been coveting for a while, and at the lowest price we’d ever seen for these toys. So of course a lot of pleading began. Did we love him enough to get it for him as a present? No. Would we buy it for him now and he’d pay us back for it by doing jobs? Yes – but we put in the proviso that the jobs must be done before he gets his hands on the Beyblades. Previous experiences of letting him have something before he’d earned it or paid us back for it have not been encouraging.

So for the rest of the day Rors was a boy on a mission. He made 8 briquettes for winter fuel at 60 cents each. (I’ve been way too generous with that fee – market forces, i.e. me, will have to be allowed to bring that down to a more sustainable level.) He minded the turkeys for a whole hour while they roamed around the field (30 cents per quarter of an hour), planted out lettuces at 10 cents each, rooted out a euro’s worth of one cent pieces but couldn’t be tempted to tidy his room for the princely sum of two euros. He only has €1.65 to earn now before Ultimate Meteo L Drago Assault 85XF (attack) becomes his legitimately.

With this example of single-minded determination to achieve a goal before me, how can I fail to be equally enthused? And look, I’ve got a blog post!