After a gruelling day of moving furniture around to reconfigure our bedrooms so that we can rehouse DM’s office into my old office, we decided to get out in the fresh air to blow out the dust and cobwebs. (Even though I am relinquishing my office space, I don’t mind because I can’t bear the thought of needing a workplace in my home again.) We’ve worked hard all day so our reward is an hour leading up to sunset on the moor with the dogs.

Now that the nights are drawing in so rapidly, we have to go out of the house by 5.30pm to be able to get round the standard loop in light that’s good enough to be safe walking the last 300 yards or so on the road, hence the shadows are long and deep. This beautiful creature was chomping away as we passed her and although I tried to get a shot of her, my photo was pants because the important bit (her face) was in darkness. She lifted her head and the evening sun caught her “just right”. It’s pretty cool that a single moment changed my photographic fortune so comprehensively…that’s much the same as the single moments during the week when our lives changed in similar manner.

Because DM’s world is changing, we’re going to have to focus all of our work to try to restore the house to some kind of decent state into the weekends. We’ve been living in a bear pit since I started work on my degree. We have a list of jobs as long as the combined length of our arms and the twin start-points are getting our “studio” out of the dining room to give us the space to restore the door we bought in a scrap yard so we can get it hung. The other element is to move DM’s office into a different room so that his man-cave can be turned into a properly functioning office. By re-jigging the furniture this weekend, we can achieve both aims so that next week these two projects can start for real.

Tonight we’re three-quarters of the way to moving the furniture and about one third of the way to finding homes for all of the stuff we’ve displaced while shifting bookcases and wardrobes. Although the weekend has been characterised by herculean effort and the transformation much more than instantaneous, ir’s going to be worth the effort.