April 27th
Too much to do! The writing, obviously, which I try to do first every day, because otherwise where would we be? But now I’m getting that booking the summer holiday anxiety. Where will we go? What will we do? How can we avoid paying everything we’ve earned for an entire year?!
People are beginning to ask: ‘where are you going this summer?’ Soon will come the sympathetic: ‘Oh, you’ve not booked yet?!’ I’ve been on the websites and it is completely obvious that all the good places, everywhere in the entire world, are already gone!! It’s not even May! Not quite.
And I already know I’m going to look up Greece, California, New England and Italy – all the places I’d really like to visit – and then my family are 
going to wear me down about holidaying in Britain because they want to take the dog!!
I enclose this pic of my desk. You can tell I’m stressing because this is just not how I like my desk to be at all. I like an oasis of minimal tidiness and order. But if anyone can spot my mobile phone charger, please let me know. It’s in there somewhere, I’m sure of it!
April 21st
Most of April has been very noisy… at least inside the house. Here is a picture of the living room floor. For many days there were piles of earth in my living room. There were men digging and shaking their heads quietly, you know, the way men do when something is bad… very bad.
Many, many noisy days later, after much banging and sawing and drilling, much coming in and out of the front door - piles of rotten wood going out and piles of nice clean new wood coming in - many, many days later and we finally have a lovely, glossy, dark, varnished floor. And now that we’ve recovered from the coughing fits induced by the stain and varnish fumes, we can of course smile and say ‘oh, it was so worth it’!
I’m trying not to care too much that over the winter, while we shivered away in our Glasgow ‘project’, our plumber went to Las Vegas and Goa, our painter made a few trips to his house in Spain and I’m sure the flooring guy is thumbing through the holiday brochures right now after the cheque we’ve written him! Oh yes, it’s all so worth it!!