Step we gaily ...

Today was dry. Today the builders returned. We're almost there ... 

I was sitting drinking tea in bed and doing my early Italian practice (you get extra points for doing it at strange times) when I heard the unmistakable sound of someone gently tapping on the top step, and sure enough it was the chap finishing off the top step which had had to be redesigned when his original idea landed us with a puddle in the porch. Another man was surveying the conundrum presented by the area at the front gate, where all the water from the garden leaves the policies, sometimes in the form of a small burn ...

I made a couple of forays through the morning, to inspect and make demands; we still have the handrails to go in at top and bottom but that seems to be the cementing finished with. They did begin in August, so it's high time. Meanwhile, I was doing a black wash (we have a lot of black garments between us - it always amazes me when I look in the linen basket) and hung it out in the quiet, chilly mistiness. I then embarked on a positively penitential session of washing the kitchen floor the old-fashioned way, with a brush and undiluted cleaner (safe for wooden floors) followed by a thorough wipe with a wet cloth. We have a varnished wooden floor in our kitchen and the dining room, and through both are regularly swept the mysterious gunk that deposits itself in the vicinity of the cooker and the espresso machine has defied all efforts - until this morning. My back may never recover.

Despite this exertion, I demanded a walk by the sea before the storm arrives, so we popped down the road for a brisk mile and a half before pasta at afternoon tea time (it's choir night). There was a short, fat, hairy caterpillar crossing the road; I can't help feeling it's not an auspicious time to be born, for a caterpillar. 

Choir was three down on our usual complement, two being on holiday and the third involved in the Mod, but we worked hard and felt we'd achieved something, which makes it really worth while. We were actually late arriving at the hall, because Himself, heading out to open the hall before I was quite ready, turned up back at the front door just as I opened it to go out. He had a distraught look on his face and black fingers.

The last lot of work at the foot of the path had made such a lot of dust that the newly-refurbished gate was all white marks. We had asked for it to be repainted. And that's what they had done. In the afternoon. It was still wet ...