You know he loves you when....

Now the rain has stopped, we are busy 'faireing le bois'. To the uninitiated, i.e. those of you who live in houses with central heating, this means frantic chopping and stacking of wood in an attempt to keep warm over the winter months.

Just doing the wood works well enough. After a couple of sweaty hours lugging logs around the garden, there's no need to light the fire; we are quite warm enough. And, there's no way that I'm going to develop bingo wings anytime soon. As the eldest pointed out yesterday whilst pushing a laden wheel barrow through deep mud, 'Jesus Mum, you could open this place as a fat farm. There's no way people would fail to lose weight here'. She has a point.

Never having had our own bit of woodland before, we are rapidly learning about wood. What will burn, what won't, what needs felling...and just how much time it takes.

Still at least it is a cheap form of heating and given our current financial situation, cheap is good in my book. With Christmas approaching, I am desperately racking my brains for present ideas that won't cost a fortune. Last year we (the royal we obviously) spent hours making the most fantastic art deco dolls house for the girls and an enormous Action Man camp for the boy. Action man's camp came complete with watch tower, anti-tank defenses, a sentry post and (hand sewn with love by yours truly) sand-bags. The husband and his ex-SAS buddy got very into the design and creation of this work of art, painting everything in arctic cammo colours and adding Action Man sized bullet holes to the sentry post. I banned them from building an interrogation suite though and convinced them to make a hospital tent instead. The theory being that then the son could develop his nurturing, caring side as well as his small boy blood lust. Ha! What actually happened was that he stole his sisters Bratz doll and left her in the tent to 'do sex' with the Action Men. I can only hope it was consensual.

There is no chance of such home made delights this year. The husband is too busy trying to rebuild the real house. Last night we spent a quality hour together in the dark. I was holding the torch whilst he wielded a pair of snips and cut off the latest piece of dodgy live wiring before the kids could be electrocuted. Who says romance is dead?
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Nice weather for Ducks

We've spent the last few days tying to solve the flooding in the barn issue. I am obviously, using the royal we. Husband has been out there 24 / 7 digging and trenching whilst I lurk by the fire and try to look supportive. And obviously, the digger has chosen precisely this moment, our hour of need, to decide that actually it is A Very Old Digger That Needs To Go To The Sunnydays Retirement Home For Used Plant. So the poor sod has been digging by hand.

After days of torrential rain, the clay soil surrounding the barn has to seen to be believed. You could easily film a WW1 epic there. Odd hot spells during the day have made life even worse. By the end of yesterday, the husband appeared at the door looking like an extra from a film about the building of the Burma railway - gaunt, unshaven, dripping in sweat, wearing shorts and mud-caked boots.

It hasn't helped that he hasn't been sleeping properly either - he has been going out to check on flooding during the nights. Having finally got somewhere with the trenches, I did think we might manage an undisturbed night. Oh no. I woke at 2am to find him clutching a torch and off to check the barn as the rain was coming down harder than ever. When he didn't reappear, I went down to investigate and found him monitoring the second wood burner which was dribbling tar and dispensing smoke throughout the building. He stayed up to monitor the situation and check the children for carbon monoxide poisoning. Although instructed to go back to bed, funnily enough I didn't go back to sleep.....

He finally put the fire out and came back to bed at 4. Just before 5, I woke to terrible screeching. A neighbouring cat had come through the cat flap and our three were launching a counter offensive. This involved much yowling and running round the kitchen worktops knocking things to the floor. Somehow I got back to sleep and was then woken up by my alarm which I had accidentally set, an hour early.

No doubt as we only have one working wood burner for heating now, it will stop raining later today. But it will probably start snowing. Still, the rain has meant that the small stream in the garden has turned into a swamp and at least the ducks are happy.....
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Not very politically correct

Since I stupidly crashed the Land Rover, I have been driving around in a car loaned by our very lovely Swedish friends. This has been a real double whammy. Not only am I mobile again but I get to drive a car on Swedish plates. I smile and wave at speed cameras as I fly past and have accrued a small mountain of parking tickets. I have even been looking forward to getting stopped by the police, so that I can do my world famous impression of a Swedish tourist speaking French. A childhood spent watching the Muppet Show means that I have been forever convinced that all Scandinavian’s speak like the Swedish Chef -’eeergh de birdy cheecken’.

Last week I had to take daughter number two to the orthodontist, again and I was late, again. I am always late and the fearsome orthodontist is always cross with me. So as I screeched into the car park, I was really narked to see that it was completely full. I was even more narked to see that the only places left, were disabled ones. And of course, there were lots of them.

Why is it, that every car park these days, is designed around the principle that all the disabled badge holders within a 200 mile radius, will choose to do their shopping at the same time? The planners also seem to think that they will bring all their disabled cousins, neighbours and friends with them too. In separate vehicles of course. There are always far more disabled places than needed. Its almost as annoying as the fact that there are always more mens toilets than required and never enough for us women. Who, lets face it, cannot easily go in an alleyway and need to go rather more often.

Now I am normally very respectful of disabled parking bays. I remember only too well, when the children were small, how annoyed I used to get with fat salesmen parking their Vauxhall’s in mother and baby spots. However on this day, I was so late that I decided to cast my morals aside and hope for the best. And I realised smugly, with my Swedish number plates, I was hardly likely to get a ticket.

Unfortunately, I parked next to a very grim looking woman. She looked at my car thoroughly before pointedly sticking her disabled badge into place. She then started walking purposefully towards me.

I took the only possible course of action. I leapt out of the car and set off for the dentist at a cracking pace. I did however drag my left leg behind me in a sort of ‘Life of Brian - I’ve had Leprosy’ kind of stage limp.

I also hissed instructions at the daughter to only speak in Swedish. Funnily enough she opted to say nothing at all. It was probably for the best.
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