With the growing debate about an independent Scotland, I am starting to feel seriously left out. It seems you can only take part in this discussion if you live North of the Border or are a genuine Scot. My mother was one quarter Scots (which I suppose makes me 1/8th) but that is not really enough to qualify me as a genuine Scottish person. I also had a Welsh Godmother (now alas departed) and she lived in Edinburgh for a couple of years, but I don’t think this will help me either. Anyway, I digress…

We need a larger letterbox at home. November is the merry month of mail order mayhem—the time of year when every supermarket, weekend newspaper, toy retailer and garden store produces its list of special Christmas offers.

So, I’m sitting here at my computer with a cup of coffee and a bag of sweeties by my side. My hands are raised over the keyboard and I’m about to start typing but… I’ve now completely forgotten what I’m supposed to be doing.

Only a few short weeks to go now… the agony of expectation, the excitement, the joy and the disappointment… I can’t wait… No, I’m not talking about Father Christmas and what he might put in my stocking. I’m talking about who will be Strictly Dancing Queen and King for Christmas and who’ll be crowned as Exalted X Factor winner? Yes, we might have global starvation, riots, civil strife and catastrophic floods and England might even win the Ashes, but it seems more likely that people would rather watch Matt singing on Saturdays dressed in his new skimpy vest. So, let’s forget about important things like the Prime Minister’s speech or Afghanistan, and concentrate instead upon Ann Widdedombe’s Latin Mambo. Is your company going bust or are you losing your job? Don’t worry because Strictly will lighten the gloom. Hurry, hurry – only another 10 X Factor days till Christmas.

The South West really is the nation’s top class cuisine region – a fact celebrated by the horde of regional food fairs and festivals springing up like wild mushrooms all over the place. You’ve only got to turn your back on a nice little field and within a month it’s loaded with rows of cars stuck in the mud, several marquees selling local bacon, hand made chocolates and nettle chutney, plus a chef on a stage with a microphone stuck on his neck telling jokes while basting a chicken with sorrel and saffron sauce. Either that, or he/she disappears in a sheet of flame while stir-frying champignons in rather too much Somerset brandy. Fun for all the family – provided you stay back at least twenty feet from the chef’s raised podium.

I’ve been wanting to write about this for a number of years and it’s now time since I read last month about yet another local big cat sighting. This one’s apparently been spotted sniffing around a Somerset pig farm but he (or she) is certainly not alone. Other panther-like creatures are regularly sighted in Devon, Kent, Sussex, Scotland, Ireland and Wales but the majority appear to roam around parts of Dorset. In fact, West Dorset is now known as ‘Kitty Kounty’ by feline spotting fans. There’s even a website at www.dorsetbigcats.org. (True – type it in and check it out).

We live in unsettled and uncertain times. Forecasting the future has never been particularly easy, but it appears to be even more difficult in 2010. Will the UK Economy grow or shrink next month? Will house prices rise or fall? What about VAT and school milk? What about them indeed! These are questions that bring forth scores of experts and owlish wizards from their caves to perch on our TV sets and give us the questionable benefit of their advice. And the result is that nobody really knows... The more pundits gathered in a room, the more the number of opinions and the wider the spread of answers that nobody can question.

For some of us, yes. For others, it’s a long slow process of returning to normal. I personally even had time to mow the lawn last week (the first occasion for over a month) instead of being glued to the Telly at 7.30 watching Japan versus Paraguay or whoever...

Last month I mentioned the vast volume of veg grown in the garden and in particular the super abundance of this year’s crop of courgettes. I even offered you some vaguely helpful ideas as to what to do with them. This seems to have touched a raw veggie nerve out there as many of you appear to suffer from the same problem.

I swear I’ll go mad if anyone offers me any more of them. I can’t go to supper with friends or meet up with family without someone trying to offload them onto me. I’m taking about courgettes. And also rain-soaked beans (French, broad or runner) and soggy spinach – in fact all homegrown green things – but it’s mostly courgettes. I have had complete strangers knock on my door and try to throw them at me for free.

Despite me writing in last month’s magazine of how much better it is to stay at home this summer, our recent appalling UK weather throughout July has persuaded me otherwise. So, it’s time for the whole family to jet off on a cheapo late holiday deal to a probably polluted part of the Mediterranean with at least (hopefully) a sunnier beach than Chesil. I say ‘whole family’ because this includes my son and his IPod, Uncle Norman’s medical kit (with pill factory and 12 different types of suntan lotion) and Aunt Sarah with her three sets of false teeth.

Because of all the financial gloom and in a bold effort to save money, I have been debating whether to stop going on my traditional summer holiday. Being a keen fisherman in my spare time, this normally involves me on the bank of a lake or river being drenched in drizzle and eaten alive by midges. So, in terms of the pleasure factor let alone the financial savings, it could be argued there might be some benefit in staying at home.

It may be a beautiful time of year, but these longer hours of daylight herald the arrival of the dreaded annual chore of sorting out old stuff and recycling or rejecting it. This includes going through crates of junk in the garage or unpacking my old nameless sweaters and shirts (all now rather too small) in various drawers. Like many other weekend things I do not wish to do, I try to put it off. I will hurriedly invent other projects around the house that need doing – really essential tasks like designing a solar powered lighting system for the garden, adjusting the carburettor on the lawn mower or building a new radio controlled bird table.

You’ve already been warned about the digital TV switchover and how it will affect us all. The amount of publicity has grown along with sometimes contrasting advice as to what to do. We have also witnessed increasingly desperate appearances on and off screen of the annoying tin can robot Digit Al as it alerts us to the impending doom of switchover (see picture). It has even been seen in metal fleshed person stumbling down various high streets. But now, thank goodness, it will vanish from our screens (probably along with any TV pictures) as the whole switchover thing is all happening in this merry month of May – May 6th and May 20th to be precise.