Cleaning

Not my favourite task. I know some who live for sparkling floors, gleaming kitchens and furniture beeswaxed to within an inch of its life. To be honest, I would love a home that looks like that; I'm just not prepared to spend half of my week making the dream come true. So far we all seem healthy enough sharing our home with a little dust, the odd cobweb and evidence of busy people scattered all over the place!

I did, however, spend yesterday afternoon sweeping dirt, mud, nails, offcuts of wood, unidentifiable pieces of metals, snots (that's dried bits of mortar for those of you not yet au fait with the fabulously descriptive lexicon of builders) and sawdust out of the frame and off the floor of our new house. No doubt by the end of today, when Greg and Dave (our lovely builder friend who's come over to the frozen north from sunny Naples to help us out and who is worth his weight in diamond-encrusted lutetium) have finished installing the mechanical ventilation and heat recovery system there will be a huge mess to clear but for now, at least, the inside is clean, which seems to make all the impending work all the easier to manage.

Work on site isn't terribly easy at the moment. (For my non-UK readers: the mornings start at around -4 and max temps are 4 or 5 in the sun, probably zero or less inside the house.) A mere three hours there yesterday left me with hands so cold it took a full five minutes in the shower to be able to feel them. The menfolk are clearly much hardier than I, the proverbial summer child. It's been a long time since I felt truly warm. In November I escaped the breaking winter for a week when I popped over (as one does) to South Africa to enjoy the wedding of my little brother, Julian, to his love Theresa. I spent the weeks before I left looking forward not only to meeting my new sister in law, her daughter Willow and her family, but also to a week of sunshine and strappy tops.What I got was a week of the most unseasonable chilliness ever felt on the south coast of KwaZulu-Natal (the week before it was 25, the weeks that followed have been in the 30s; harumph) and borrowed cardies. It is, however, entirely possible that the sun was overshadowed that week by the radiance of the bride and the brilliance of the whole occasion. I enjoyed three days of relaxed, happy, getting-to-know-you time and now the Farrows are part of the delightful Dennis/Herd clan, complete with three new cousins for my brood.

But I still haven't had my warmth quotient, which is why I'm counting the days till 1 March, when winter is officially over. Also, I'm determined to move us all into our new house that month, so the hard graft really starts now. Tick tock. Meanwhile, check out the awesome roof and oak feature frame: