I’m depressed and resentful about where I am in the world at the moment. I have worked so hard for the last four years to get my degree yet it has turned out to be worthless in my life. All I wanted from it was a job and despite my best efforts to find one, now I find myself back in Uni doing more learning in order to keep the wolf from our door instead of stepping out into a new career. Not only am I doing more learning but it’s extraordinarily intense, with long, closely timetabled learning days and a mountain of work to do outside of the lecture theatre.I'm told I will have to work 12 hours a day, 7 days a week to keep up with the workload.

So today I was a rebel. Instead of spending the day doing the reading I was supposed to do, I spent the day cleaning the teak garden furniture and re-potting hostas to finish off the new/old patio before the winter. You may think that’s pretty crap on the scale of rebellion but it’s as rebellious as it’s possible to get in my world at the moment.

Here then, is the fruit of my labour. The table, cleaned up enough that we could actually eat a meal from it without contracting a disease as well as sit on one of its matching chairs without getting a load of vegetation up the bottom!