We went geocaching today for the first time in ages. It’s been a hot weekend, filled with breakfasts and lunches on the patio, bike rides across town and lazy mornings spent soaking up the sun.

So it seemed only natural to head out this afternoon without any coats to look for hidden treasure. We’d picked a spot in the middle of nowhere – a village of about three houses, a phone box and a small farm that obviously does school trips. The farmer had piled up 30 tiny pink wellies on a shelf and there were four soap dispensers screwed onto an outside wall.

The clues took us to a graveyard where we hunted among the nettles and grass for the dates on the stones that would give us the final coordinates. The stash, it turned out, was half a kilometre away, and we headed out to find it across a field of peas, whose pods were gently creaking and popping in the humid air.

But as the GPS tracked our progress the sky turned black, the clouds rolled in and the rain finally broke. We ran back through the peas to the small church in the middle of the graveyard and pushed the door, running inside for shelter. It clearly hadn’t been used in years.

The floor was broken, with the wooden boards that would once have supported the long-gone pews splintered and cracked. One of the windows had been smashed, and apart from the pulpit, the only recognisable furniture was a single stool, caught in the dying rays of sunlight seeping through the window.

We spent an hour there and in the porch waiting for the rain to pass, listening to the colony of bees hanging from the tree outside the broken window, now buzzing angrily at the rain and the heat.

I wouldn’t doubt that as we sat there we were doing what others before us had done for the last three or four hundred years, and with that thought in mind it was a rather beautiful way to spend the afternoon.

I don’t think actually finding the treasure could have made it any better.

The Orchard in 1910

I don’t know when I last went to Starbucks. Ages ago. A couple of years, perhaps. Our most commonly-used coffee haunt is Coffee Link on the dockside in Ipswich. It’s independent and friendly, and it does good cakes.

As we found ourselves not entirely coincidentally in Cambridge this weekend, Coffee Link was obviously out of the question, so instead we headed for The Orchard in the neighbouring village of Grantchester.

It’s really quite idyllic. You sit in deck chairs under the centuries-old trees doing stereotypically English things like drinking tea and eating scones. You can get there by car, as we did, but the more traditional option is to punt there down the Cam or walk across the fields, blowing raspberries as you pass Jeffrey Archer’s house next door.

(Raspberries optional.)

It’s a place of great history, having served tea to students and dignitaries since 1897, and over that time it’s clocked up an impressive guest list: EM Forster, Stephen Hawking, Alan Turing, AA Milne, King George VI, Prince Charles, David Attenborough… you can pick up a little book in the tea queue that lists them all. The list has been copied on The Orchard’s Wikipedia page.

It’s not extortionate, it’s a great place to take tea, and the scones really are good. A definite to add to the ‘do again’ list; particularly if the dark clouds aren’t gathering overhead next time.

The home-made elderflower champagne is still proving explosive. We’ve steam-sealed some caps onto the bottles, but even they don’t seem to be up to the job of keeping the volatile liquid contained. So for the time being we’ve put them inside a steel dustbin half-filled with cold water to regulate the temperature and put on the lid.

Of course, this means that the bottles are firing their corks into the underside of its lid, which creates an ear-splitting bang every time one goes off. The cat, rather surprisingly, seems completely unfazed by it – even if he’s sitting right beside it eating as one goes off. Neither did he seem to care when he and I were standing in the kitchen together and one exploded in my hand, showering the floor and me (although fortunately not him) in a sticky yellow liquid.

It smells really sickly sweet.

Anyhow, yesterday we put the champagne to one side and spent some time building an Omlet Eglu Cube. It’s a chunky green home for chickens, which will sit at the bottom of the garden and be home to three feathery ladies that we’ve already Christened Margot, Gerry and Barbara. There won’t be a cockerel – the council forbids it and it would be antisocial anyhow as they’re so noisy – so we can’t have a Tom to complete the set. Gerry, we’re reasoning, could be short for Geraldine.

It was a big job, but an easy one. This is the range of pieces you get through the post (seven VERY large boxes that took over the whole of the outhouse):

They took a couple of hours to put together, and required only a screwdriver and a trip to B&Q to buy a couple of bolts as we found ourselves two short by the time we got to the end.

By then, though, all those pieces looked like this:

We don’t have the chickens yet, unfortunately, and won’t be getting them until after we’ve been on holiday, so for the moment it’s sitting in the corner of the garden looking a little redundant.

Nonetheless, it’s quite exciting.

So at the weekend we made elderflower champagne for no better reason than the fact that the hedgerows are absolutely dripping elder flowers at the moment.

Plus I’d always fancied it.

It turns out it’s actually quite easy. We cleaned out the fermenter that we’d used to brew our beer and dropped in 20 elder heads that we’d gathered from the alley down by the allotments. To this we added the squeezed juice and chipped skins of six lemons, 4.5lb of sugar (whatever that is in kilos), a tablespoon of yeast and 12 litres of water, most of which was cold, but some of which was hot. You can read about how we did it here.

They say the results taste about as close to a good bottle of sparkling white wine as you can ever hope to achieve at home (unless you live in the middle of a vineyard and have plenty of willing feet for grape pressing, of course), but the smell last night as I bottled the fizzy results was like a light, feint hot cross bun. Yummy.

We got 15 bottles-worth, plus all the sticky mess that caked itself to the kitchen floor, the drawer fronts, the worktops and my hands and arms. I mopped it all down before bed but even this morning it needed a second going over.

That could in part be to do with the fact that the last bottle to be filled, which must have got the lion’s share of the undistributed yeast and is cloudier than the rest, is proving to be highly volatile. It had blown its cork in the middle of the night and spurted out some of its contents.

I put in a fresh cork and thought nothing of it until I got back from work tonight to find it had done the very same thing, this time spitting a quarter of its contents along the outhouse corridor. Thankfully I’d had the foresight to put them out there rather than storing them beside the cat’s bowls where we’d brewed the beer.

So now I have an outhouse that smells of easter, too.

But at least the cat still smells of cat.