Darren Steele

After quite a long hiatus from cooking I finally got back in the mood after being inspired by Nigel Slater

The arbour is slowly falling apart beneath the weight of several years of plant growth. So it’s all being pulled apart, plants being removed and new beams put in place. These are the beams about to be treated. Thank the good lord and baby Jesus for big sheds.

The latest in a long series of tractor repairs has been completed. In usual style it involves a tie-wrap…and as a new entry into the “crap Darren repairs stuff with” collection, we make use of a brake block from Amelia’s old bike.

Proper engineering that y’know – if you’ve never repaired something with a recycled brake block then you’ve never lived!

Just one more thing goes wrong with this tractor and then I’m off shopping for a new one….unless I can fix it with a rotary washing line and a balloon.

I had to repair the arbour and in doing so it was necessary to chop a funny angle bit onto the end of a bit of wood. I tried doing this with a saw but everything was just all over the place….and it was really really really hot. So I got sick of that and bought the beast above! I used to believe that all men had to own a tape measure. Now I firmly believe that all men have to own a Compound Mitre Saw. It took about 4 minutes to chop 10 err funny angle bits onto the ends of the wood pole things. I only ballsed up one of them by chopping bits out of opposite sides of the beam thing rather than the same side. Still, it wouldn’t be a steeley production if something didn’t go wrong along the way.

We had a night of the whole family camping in the garden. It was a great success and everybody enjoyed themselves and more importantly…slept!

At one point the children and I decided to draw on each others faces with burnt sticks. I opted for the Tom Selleck moustache

I do occasionally wear suits, but since it was Aggy’s wedding a flowery shirt had to be worn underneath

Not sure if this is illegal as such but I’m glad we didn’t bump into any police people on the journey back. The wood is to repair my arbour which is struggling under the weight of our climbing stuff

A weekend of fun in Prague to celebrate Michal’s forthcoming wedding.

The whole chicken coop escapade even made it on to the BBC website…

The cunning plan finally comes to fruition. Yesterday Elaine Dunkley of North West Tonight came to my house and filmed a piece about the hen house hoist chickens in space project. My life is now complete. They broadcast three segments all of which have been stitched together below. My favourite bit is when the bottom bar is on screen showing “Darren Steele, Inventor” or as my buddy Chris Phelan points out it should have said “Darren Steele, Eejit”