iT

Pain, pain, pain.

Such was my morning. All self-inflicted though so no sympathy needed. Somehow I managed to get myself dressed and drove to Katherine's lesson. There was even some polite conversation with her french teacher, though I kept my distance as I suspected my tooth-brushing had been less than thorough. The next hour - I couldn't face the 15 minute drive home only to do it again half an hour later - was spent in a car park outside a convent, hoping that all the folk coming and going from church could see that what I was drinking from a brown bottle was GINGER beer.

The ginger beer and a packet of sweeties had me on a more even keel for the journey home though it was a little discouraging to find that Mr B had only just got up, and the washing up therefore remained glowering at me from every surface in the house. Ignoring it for later, we had breakfast and settled down to watch the rugby with our friends. I'm not sure if the match just appeared to be being played (Australia vs New Zealand) at a million miles an hour because we were all feeling a bit slow, but the standard doesn't bode well for France in the final.

At half time the doorbell rang and I remembered with a wrench of despair that our landlord had said he would bring his brother in law (electrican) around to sort out the oven. I think my explanations of the debris everywhere were unnecessary given the obviously hungover people strewn on sofas, and the number of empty bottles standing next to the bin.

Anyway, he seemed to not care at all, and we chatted about the rugby while his brother in law confirmed that the oven didn't work, and pulled it out to take it away. After a quick coffee, they were gone and we could return to lying on the sofa and moaning gently in pain.

Once the rugby was over, we headed off to show our friends the progress on the MBH. Our fears that they wouldn't actually see much change proved false and they made all the right noises about how hard we'd obviously been working. And happily Mrs K did not follow her foot through a new hole in the floor in the attic....

Once they were on the road we headed home and had very relaxing afternoons: Mr B in bed, me on the sofa catching up on Downton Abbey. Katherine decided to watch it with me, having never seen it before, so there was much use of the pause button while I tried to explain all that had happened in the previous series and the first half of this series, along with what life was like in the first part of the last century and who we were related to who was alive then. Later, dinner and homework and a wonderfully early night.

Not working at the weekend is relaxing for sure, but quite tiring all the same.

The picture is a tree and post just up the road. It reminds me of a book cover, but I can't think which one.