Life is never straightforward is it? I have jumped headlong from Uni stress to other stresses in a single jump. I still have Uni stress in as much as I am checking my online statement of results each day for the provisional marks from my exams (two in so far, not quite good enough). Now though, building stress. That’s what Mundic does for you.

Well, for me anyway. It’s pretty depressing to discover that the house that you love has effectively been rendered worthless on account of our own carelessness and Mundic. However, it’s just about sorted now and we should be able to apply for the post remedial Mundic test soon (well, as soon as we can afford to pay for it that is). In many relationships, it’s the man that does all of the building stuff and the woman that does the domestic stuff but in our world, it’s all a bit different because of DMs asthma. He can’t spend time in a room full of brick dust so it’s fallen to me to “manage” the building process and be the labourer for the skilled builder who has done the job. I’ve been up a ladder knocking out the ceiling, shovelled the weight of several builders’ worth of rubble into sacks and transported it all to the dump, carted the new blocks, mortar, plasterboard and plaster to the house, not to mention trying to keep the work area clean, running back and forth to the builders’ yard for forgotten supplies and dealing with a recalcitrant puppy. DM helps with the less dusty stuff – so he’s shared the lugging of stuff that’s wrapped and (relatively) non-dusty to the house and he’s helped with some of the lugging of rubble to the dump when it’s stuff that’s ready wrapped in rubble sacks but it’d be true to say I’ve done the lion’s share of the labouring. I come back into the “real world” grey from the combined effects of dust, sweat and tiredness with clothes so dirty that they can stand up on their own.

The purpose of explaining why I’m not spending my days doing housework to remedy the months of grot that have built up here while I’ve been studying is because DM has been the one cleaning the kitchen today while I’ve been filling my labourer duties. One of the things that he’s done was cleaning my balance scale’s weights. I use them every day (almost) and they get covered in flour and recently they’ve also had a liberal sprinkling of greenfly debris that’s fallen from the chilli plant on the side onto the pan. I came in to gleaming work-surfaces and my scales and weights looking pristine. I thought “that’d make a good pic” so took this and then discovered that for the second day in a row our pics had coincided.

You’ll note the imperial weights – none of this metric nonsense for me. “A friend’s a friend but a pound’s a pound” (not 454 grams)in my view (as well as the view of Dave Wakeling and Rankin’ Roger). I loathe cooking with metric – although since several of my newer recipe books are metricised there is a set of metric weights alongside these - they’re not as pretty though. Oohhh now I’ve gone all nostalgic quoting from “Where’s the Line”. I LOVE that song and the album from which it came is in my top 5 of all time. Not only that but because I noticed that Stoker had produced “Right on Time” by Hepcat, I bought it and that too is a treasured album that we play regularly to this day despite it now being 15 years old.