The village carnival rears its ugly head again this weekend. Suze's always accusing me of knowing nothing about the local area except the garden centre, so I put my best foot forward and decide to go along.

As soon as I've set foot in the place, I get a terrible shock: Suze and her hippy friends are performing some kind of belly-dancing routine outside an old green caravan. I try to beat a speedy retreat, but a crowd's formed and I get hemmed in. Suze's belly is moving completely independently of the rest of her body, which she later claims is a difficult-to-master skill, but frankly I've seen it doing the same thing out in the garden in one of those ridiculous cut-off t-shirts she insists on wearing.

Anyway, I have a look around and discover there's a plant stall; Suze never mentioned this, it's only 50p a plant and surprisingly, there's some good stuff. I'm thrilled to find a couple of unusual-looking astrantia seedlings, and by the time I've finished, I'm pretty weighed down.

Stash everything under Suze's friends' caravan, and set off to find the refreshments tent, but it's only tea and custard flippin' creams, so I decide to enter that moth-eaten dog of Suze's in the dog show: she's so slack with it, but I'm convinced it's just down to firm control and a stern voice…

There's much amusement this weekend when Annie of all people turns up at the carnival. I try to interest her in belly dancing; it's everso good for the heart and lungs, and goodness knows Annie's internal organs need a jolt of some kind, but she's very scathing and wanders off.

Next thing, there's some kind of a fracas breaking out at the plant stall, with Annie in the middle; people seem a bit cross about something. Later I find out she got obsessive about some silly old seedlings, insisting on having one of each and offering them a tenner for the whole stall-full.

She stomps back, anyway, and announces there's a dog show and she's going to enter Muffin. I point out that Muffin doesn't do anything you tell her, except occasionally for Cadbury's Dairy Milk (a bit like Annie really), but she won't hear any of it, marching off all purposefully with the dog looking startled.

Not surprisingly, it doesn't go as well as she expects: Annie's very thorough and tries hard, bless her, but ends up attempting to bribe her with cold chips just to stay in the arena. Heroically, Muffin manages to bite through her lead, and to much cheering, does two laps of the arena, grinning wildly and looking dead cute. She ends up winning third prize in the most popular mongrel section; Muffin, that is, not Annie.