Tralee Bay, on Loch Creran

I toiled away all day today, clearing the house. No one has died, but some work has been done recently on the inside of my mother's house that has made it very dusty, and further redecoration is necessary. So to get rid of the junk of decades, my elder sister TML hired a skip. We filled it within 24 hours. Perhaps we should have ordered a bigger one.

I also filled five boxes of books and a few other boxes for the charity shops. It was a gorgeous day, and Steve took the girls to Oban and did the supermarket shopping and snuck in a blip. However I did not get out till about seven, when Steve and I went down to the holiday park on Loch Creran to buy fish and chips for the family. They said it would take about half an hour, so I went to the beach to feel the warm sand on my bare soles, and dip my toes in the water. Families were playing, though the tide was high, and I shot this image straight into the sun, so it's overexposed, but I really couldn't face blipping the skip again!

I am now very dirty, still in the filthy clothes I was cleaning in, but the living room is ready for the outside wall to be painted, which Steve will start on Friday. Next year I think it might be easier to stay on the holiday park!

I found one of my younger sister's French exercise books from the 1980s. She was told to write to a pen pal to describe her family. She said, "there are seven of us. My two brothers, B and R, are tall with blonde hair and blue eyes. My sister Tanya (TML) is thin, my sister Helena (woodpeckers on blip) is fat (grosse) and my sister Kate is very thin. My mother has been ill".

As Tanya says, the females don't even get to have hair and eyes! I threw it in the skip.

Tomorrow we may go out and about. I hope so. Can't start decorating till Friday, and the skip is full, so why on earth not? I hadn't really imagined I would spend my holiday this way, but my mother is in severe need of Stavros, that bloke from the telly who helps people clear their clutter. My technique, which lacks his counselling skills, is to put on some very loud music and chuck things into bags. Today we had the Bee Gees, Bruce Springsteen, and a teuchter band from Arisaig called Daimh.

CleanSteve, TMLhereandthere and BarkandSmile are here too, so check out their views too