I think I have hit upon the good thing about having an impending visit from a veritable clutch of familiar folks: it makes me clean the house. By this, I mean it wrenches me off the sofa as I look at our house through other people’s eyes, and see only the mould, the dust so thick you could build small artistic sculptures with it, let alone write your name in it, and the assorted rubbish of everyday life the organisation and subsequent chucking of which is, well, normally prevented and usurped by everyday life…

Last night, I had a manic hour or so while Quercus, poor soul, was completing an online planning application (we have submitted it! [By 'we', I mean, of course, The Royal We, also known as, um, Quercus...] In about five weeks or so we should, fingers crossed, have planning permission to demolish our uuuuuugly corrugated iron sheds, to replace them with a nice wooden structure, and to build a woodshed, which we badly need, given that our only heating is the woodburner) – I cleaned – no, I decimated the windowsills (grimy, mouldy, covered in shite – usual ol’ whatsit, in other words). I put things away. I even washed some of the plants in the bath. (They don’t live in the bath, I hasten to add. They are not bathplants. No. I placed them there for washing purposes only. Right. Glad we’ve cleared that up…)

I also bleached the walls in various places. The damp which plagues Earthenhouse is still a real problem in the main house, and the extension remains the only part not to curl pages of any carelessly-placed book overnight. (Hopefully this will be helped by the removal of the cement render which coats the entire house; part of the reason we’re about to be be-familied is that we’ve just acquired a render gun, designed to whack render on to a house so fast it makes doing it by hand look like slow motion. No, wait: doing it by hand is slow-motion.

So now the good thing I get to look around a house which is far cleaner than normal, and because I did it yesterday, it almost feels like someone else did it. Kind of like when I cook dinner early, so that come suppertime, all we have to do is turn the oven on; that too almost feels as if someone else did the hard work.

Quercus’s mother is coming down on Sunday to help us to prepare for this momentous feat; my dad and C are appearing later on today, though not, I fear, to help practically, but more for a visit because they’ve not been to visit for a long time – it’s been nearly a year since I’ve seen C, and I’m looking forward to her seeing the witchling, apart from anything, with whom she was very taken when last they met. I’m still feeling that release that I wrote of earlier this week; long may it last. Also, while we have a lot of work to do on the house still, and particularly this summer (the plans are to render the whole of the outside, to repair the windows [original, wooden framed, single-pane-glazed, buggered), to build both a replacement for the garden sheds and the woodshed, to get shot of the caravan we’ve been housing for over a year now, and to finish off the kitchen. It’s… quite a bit, shall we say. But somehow, since this new peace has settled over me, I feel we’ll get there. For one thing, hardly a day goes by at the moment without it striking me anew that Quercus and I are really very lucky in each other; we haven’t got a large extended family, and neither of us has relatives anywhere under a three-hour drive, so, other than the odd helpful visit from either my brother or his mum, we’re in it together, and only together, and sometimes, it strikes me that, especially bearing the lack of a support network in mind, we do pretty well together. Well, bloody well, really.

Anyway, later on today I shall celebrate our forthcoming busyness with the making of a couple of litres of ginger beer. We now have ten gallons of wine fermenting on the windowsills; the demijohns create the most entertaining round of ‘plolp’ sounds, and I love watching the airlocks popping  – quite mesmerising.

So, that’s our weekend coming; what’s on your books?