Success on The Tweed. Piscatorial joy. Whilst I am still hobbling round holding the job together this week with Geoff my brother-in-law's help on the farm, John is having some success fishing in Scotland.

The river has taken some time to settle after heavy rain, but now the fish are swimming upstream. Hopefully to fall prey to exciting feathery, sparkly temptation dangled in front of their noses ( do fish have noses, I think not) on their way to a dalliance on/in ( the mechanics elude me) a gravelly river bed. If they do they can still continue on their way to romance and furthering the salmon population, but a picture is always required, before they resume their passionate dash. The fish that is. Not John.

He is fishing and staying with friends who have a flat in Selkirk. He is well catered for. Spoilt indeed. And that is not by me, but by friend Julia whose flat it is. I have sent up some provisions to help with the catering but this year I have clearly labelled all the pies, not only with pastry letters on the top of the pies, but also on their wrappings. This is to avoid a previous minor fiasco when the pastry letters fell of a meat pie and it was very nearly served up with custard after the presumption that the contents were plum.

Heavy rain here at home has triggered the alarm on our dirty water system into action at most inappropriate times. Like the middle of the night. Our village must have woken up thinking that banshees were attacking their homes. Many years ago when there was the perceived, real or unreal, threat of a nuclear attack on England, our village had been chosen to have a warning siren based in it to alert the area to The Bomb falling. Phone lines would have remained miraculously intact so that the farmhouse would have a call to sound the siren, and tell villagers and surrounding farms to take cover. Under the table I presumed as there is no cellar in this farmhouse.

I do not know when the alarm warnings were discontinued as it was only when a mysterious wind up siren in a wooden box was found in an outbuilding in the early 80s that we realised such a warning system was in place. An official turned up from the police force, plain clothes, to take the siren away. All very covert.

So now the warning that sounds, and it is very like the nuclear warning screech ( after all who could resist a trial run of the siren) signifies that unless the pump is turned on, the underground waste water tank for the fold yard is dangerously close to overflowing. I do not think any of the villagers now living here or close by would have been aware that such a nuclear warning system was ever in place. If they are, there would have been a lot of them crouching under tables when the "siren" sounded last night.