Mrs Down's Diary- July 9 2008

After laying her perfect little eggs, she failed to return one day and we can only presume she has been taken by a sparrowhawk we have seen in the vicinity. Nature is cruel.

John has taken the eggs out of the nest and we hope another bird will take up residence but another blue tit has not yet turned up to claim the vacated nestbox. which has a camera.

This is especially galling as a friend who was very taken by our bird installed a nestbox with a camera at her house and now has a flycatcher nesting. I am not sure whether we should clean our nest box out to persuade another bird to nest or leave it with the old nesting materials in. We are going to try leaving it 'fully furnished' at first, and see how we go from there.

What has been successful this week has been the silage-making. John cut two fields of grass over the weekend and hoped that no rain would fall before the contractors came in.

His luck was in. We now have a full clamp of silage; very reassuring to know that it is there for the cows this winter.

No liquor has run off either. Normally, if the grass gets rained on and the forage harvester brings it to the clamp still damp, the silage produces quite a lot of liquor which we need to collect in our waste water tank. This is a huge tank that we installed alongside the milking parlour when we had a dairy herd.

All the dirty water from washing out the milking parlour was collected in there and then pumped out to the fields to be spread over the grass. Now only the silage liquor is collected in there '“ but not this year.

But even more successful was our venture, with two friends, on an evening's treasure hunt.

The wording of this particular hunt was very skilfully formulated, in rhyme, by two of our greatest friends. Despite pressure they refused to give away any details of the direction the hunt would take so that we could swot up on the route.

The teams set off at five-minute intervals but very soon clumps of two, three, even four cars could be seen alongside potential clues.

At one stage you probably did not even need to read the question sheet, just follow the car in front then stop and see what the puzzle was when at the appropriate place.

We resorted to trickery at one place and tried to inveigle a native as to the solution to a particularly obtuse clue. No joy. Perhaps he had been bribed by an earlier group.

Then we got cocky. "I know what that answer is," I said. "Just drive on and don't stop then we won't give the game away." Plus we did not, as I have often heard myself exhorting others to do, read the question. That's the problem when you think you know it all. You don't.

Back at the hall the invigilators marked the answers. We chatted lightheartedly as we knew we didn't have a chance of winning, which was deemed to be a good job as then you had to set the next year's outing.

But disaster. Well nearly. We tied for first place and only lost because of our time penalty for stopping for a fish-and-chip supper. So it was a bottle of champagne and second place. Doesn't get much better.

This first appeared in the West Sussex Gazette on July 9 2008. To read it first, buy the WSG every Wednesday.