Quercus has acute laryingitis, and has been holed up in the caravan for the last few days. (Have I mentioned the caravan before? I’m not sure. Well, it’s a bit like the house, in some ways – thinner walls, but similar issues with the need for redecoration, and an interesting tendency to develop soil in one corner. How? Who knows.) The total arse about this, apart from my being denied the pleasure of his company, is that we had a DIY bonanza on the cards for this weekend, it being a bank holiday here in the sunny (ho) UK.

Hang on. ‘DIY bonanza’? When exactly did life come to encompass such harbingers of doom? And, what is more, to include them as things to regard with a degree of zealous enthusiasm once reserved for genuine fun?

Moving on…

So, yes, the plan was to finish sanding the plasterwork in the kitchen and the bathroom, and to stuff a goodly quantity of going-off-so-quite-stodgy plaster into the gap between the ceiling and the lime wall, and then, to paint. TO PAINT. I mean – that’s the sort of thing that makes those rooms sound dangerously like finished habitation, isn’t it? Don’t get me wrong – we are still living with the entire contents of a do-it-yourself store in the kitchen (we have no dining table, but we do have a table saw, a mitre saw and an SDS drill; points for anyone who knows what SDS stands for), and the ‘kitchen’, as in the work-space, is, well, scout-hut-like: we have a long worktop cannibalised from the last kitchen and held up by an unholy marriage of boarding, gaffer tape and good will. On top of that, there is the very unlovely Baby Belling cooker (the one I normally berate in recipes), and the things which won’t fit in our one cupboard (the driftwood larder which lived in our old extension lives on, by god!). It’s not exactly slick, shall we say (unless you are talking about chemical spillages, in which case, yes). 

And we had even got Quercus’s mother to come and help us with either baby entertainment or DIY stuff. It was all fixed. We were going to limp one step closer to finishing. Oh, and I was going to catch up on some sleep; after that night of sleeping from 7.30 until 6.30, the witchling reverted to a few nights of utter bedlam, which means I’m sort of like the last man on the Titanic at the moment: still standing, but utterly fucked. Hey-ho. There’s always next weekend. 

Bastard laryngitis.