Yesterday the boarding came down and the secondary glazing went back up, giving me back my bedroom. The outside is looking so smart that I now have a dreadful urge to revamp the inside. Luckily, the bedroom is the room where all the furniture is already optmally placed, the walls are bare white, etc. So what the room is going to get instead is the kind of spring clean even Victorians may have blanched at. This isn't complex but does require planning: there's no point mopping the floor before cleaning the fireplace, for example.

Like most writers I know, I have a love of A3 sketchpads. Normally, these are used for working out plots, which much scribbling of snippets and arrows connecting them. And arrows to question marks ('but why..?', 'and then what?' or 'damn there's a character missing'). This year, to save me from tears, I'm using it to militarily plan things. There's a page with everything that needs doing and the last date to do it on, the back of which contains today's schedule for cleaning.

There's another page which is just the food shopping list (got the breadcrumbs for the nut loaf today and ordered some bread from the local bakers for next week). I'm going to try to bake several different things, possibly up to wafer thin sweet potato crisps, and not overbuy junk in a blind panic. I'd rather have some very nice things than half a dozen tubes of Pringles. So the list is on the kitchen table and is being added to each time I think of another thing.

I'm mildly worried about my sudden trad leanings this year: I was giving idle thoughts to making some stockings last night which may have just been the result of drinking too much rosé wine to celebrate the builders' finishing. I'm going to blame the chap. Not that he's trad. We're both atheists for starters so technically shouldn't be having any kind of mid-winter celebration. I think it's just I want to make the whole chaotic mess of a holiday - when the UK pretty much shuts down from the 21st to the 3rd of January - sparkly and fun. Fun that requires the kind of military planning Napoleon would consider excessive. Maybe I should buy Risk?

Labels: home