Had no problems whatsoever coping with today. At about 6.15am it started raining quite heavily, so tomato picking was delayed until the rather more sensible time of eight o'clock. It was very pleasant setting off to work on the trailer in broad daylight without shivering wildly as I usually do.

There were no less tomatoes to pick than normal, but the weather was very pleasant pretty much the whole time. Also, we were lucky with the music on the tractor's radio―plenty of western music old and new. The best songs were Losing My Religion by REM and Somebody To Love by Queen.

After lunch we sorted the tomatoes, which took only 1½ hours; MUCH quicker than normal. It went pretty fast for me because most of the time I was getting baskets of tomatoes off the trailer and loading them onto the conveyor system. It may not sound particularly stimulating but it is a lot more fun than sorting the bastards! It is a good job because one needs to get the balance right―if you put too much onto the belt then the sorting team (Sumbad, Olly and Godwin) will not be able to cope and tomatoes will spill over the edge; but on the other hand you have to keep up a reasonable amount of pressure on the system so the workers don't slack off, seeing only a few tomatoes in front of them.

The whole day was only six hours, so naturally we claimed for eight! 40 shekels will go down quite nicely, thank you.