Summer is in full swing, off the back of a glorious heatwave with many days at 30C and higher with no rain it has decided today to cool and rain all day. Trees and plants will be very happy with that.

Our new kitchen is finished and in place and looks wonderful, what an improvement! So nice to have everything brand new and pretty much how YOU want it. No gaps, no tiles on tiles, no holes in the wall, no scummy looking surfaces and no unusable spaces.

The garden is also in a state of transformation. Got rid of the rotting wendy house , so rotten when we walked in you could put your foot through the floor! So we demolished that, got a jackhammer and dug up all the concrete, remaining paving and bricks, refitted the fence post that was attached to the wendy house and painted the fences. Then there was a lot of donkey work to get rid of all the gravel , stones, broken up concrete and all the other rubbish. We laid a crazy paving path so that generated a large mound of stony earth which we spent ages getting rid of at £2.50 a pop each bag. Anyway laid the path and used some old paving stones to make a space for the bins. Then had fun rotavating the ground as it was pretty dry and compacted.

So next step is to tidy up the path and make it smooth as possible, add some manure/organic material into the soil, remove as many stones and general crap as possible and level the surface. Then once it's rained enough get turf in and lay the lawn. Then we can start making things pretty etc.

Great thing with all this landscaping, combined with not drinking in the week and generally being much more active is I have lost nearly a stone without trying! If I can keep that up I will be in better shape for the Velo South in September.

Also the Premiership starts at the weekend which I am looking forward to, mainly because West Ham have a top manager in place, Manuel Pellegrini and have gone bonkers in the transfer market buying pretty much a whole new team! Great players and actually spending the cash which is most unusual for us. Shame we have not had the chance to offload all the dead wood yet. Andy Carroll and Winston Reid in particular.