After the last blog saying that we only had one kitten, plenty of brothers and sisters have now shown up and we have five in total, all looking more or less the same. Mowgli herself is getting braver and we are now able to touch her, but still getting a hiss off when we do, although she freely wraps herself around your legs. The kittens scatter back under the shrubs as soon as they see a human.


We had a few uninvited guests/pests this morning as the gypo's moved onto the land looking for snails. It hardly seems worth the effort as most of the snails are no bigger than your little finger nail and they spend the best part of 2 hours getting less than half a bucket full in the blazing hot sunshine and then another 2 hours winkling them out to eat, yuk. Apparently they are very tasty at this time of year as they pick them from the wild tarragon plants where they have been feeding so they then taste of aniseed, I think I'll stick to aniseed balls from the corner shop.

As mentioned in previous blogs about last winters weather and the incessant rain in Portugal, people kept telling me that the weather in the UK was worse and there has been plenty of rain also in the UK. Whilst Portugal does not have a clue how to manage many things they do know how to manage water. A new dam in the Alentejo region of Portugal (just north of the Algarve) was finished last year and was predicted to take 4-5 years to fil at the normal rainfall ratel, it filled in just under 12 months and I have just read that some areas of the UK have a hose pipe ban, told you it was wet.