All this week we, the collective being Rachel, Rachel’s parents and myself, have put litres of blood, buckets of sweat and a whole barrel of tears into preparation for the arrival of the plasterer.

We have spent hours building and re-building walls, ripping out our mock country kitchen, (pity the previous owners, money rarely buys taste) and wearing our knuckles to the bone attempting to remove the old tile adhesive from the walls. No small feat in itself as I’m am sure they used super-mother-fucking nuke-proof concrete to stick up a few dozen tiles.

When we brought the house the previous owners had left us a small note titled ‘The Idiosyncrasies Of Our Home’. At the time we thought of this as a sweet and kind gesture, it immediately gave the place a sense of identity, like some kind of grumpy old man who needs a gentle bit of tlc every now and then, meals on wheels, that kind of thing.

Or so we thought.

Warp speed to the present day and those ‘idiosyncrasies’, as we have subsequently found out, are actually Grade’A’ pain in the arse, cowboy jobs that were so clearly and utterly neglected.

I will, one day, in an attempt to free my spirit and rest my demons, post all the crap I am having to fix. If anything it will give me a check list.

One such job planned for the weekend is to re-plaster the kitchen walls. Essential as it currently looks as if someone hired the flying monkeys from The Wizard of Oz, to throw plaster on the walls and attempt to flatten it with their bollocks.

“Fly my pretties, fly and while you’re at it go plaster a few walls with your bollies”.

So today I get home, pick up the phone and play the answering machine message.

“Hi Rob, it’s errr XXXX. Not gonna be able to errr, do yer job tommorow, the errr, boss has asked us to work over the errr, weekend as we’re about errr, a week behind…”

Fucking great, not only do we not have a kitchen, we not gonna have one soon either and the words ‘all that effort’ and ‘waste’ have already broken the Guinness book of records for the ‘Amount of times in one hour the same phrase can be said’.

A life in a straight jacket and feeding times consisting of pureed lamb roast through a straw sounds appealing right now!