Thing No 1: This photograph could be regarded as perverse. Why? Because I’ve photographed the buildings on the opposite side of the square to where every other tourist’s camera was pointing (the Cathedral).

TN2: I am going to put this out there as a lovely example of what I imagine was, when it was done, on the cheap. The building next door has stone decoration around the windows – pointy caps, flower motifs and other detailing. This building doesn’t have detail made from stone but from paint. The fancy bits above the windows are painted, as are the other decorative features. I imagine when the building was built, this saved considerably on cost because the labour of a painter would have been much less expensive than that of a stone mason (I think anyway). Therefore I surmise that it is more than possible to make things gorgeous without resorting to throwing money at them.

TN3: I have discovered that my once highly regarded creativity (a bit of Linda magic as he once described it) has fallen from grace with my husband. Where once he admired my willingness to paint designs on the internal walls of my house (before we were married) and to create other features with my own hands, he has become very sniffy about it, to put it mildly. For example, he has told me he won’t sanction my application of flowers and bees to my new car unless I draw out the design in my head onto paper for his approval before I go ahead because heaven help us to do so on a Mercedes Benz would be tantamount to sacrilege. The same applies to my paving design and to a whole host of other creative things that are in my head but can no longer come out because he disapproves.

TN4: Strangely, he has been positively raving about exotic and certainly left-field design from our boss, who is in the final throes of designing a new home. Each time he has been there, he comes back telling me how amazing the architecture, the attention to detail and the setting aside of the ordinary in favour of the extraordinary. I am more than a little unclear about why it should be that my own ideas can’t be met with similar enthusiasm.

TN5: I now have the dilemma that I need to grab back my creative freedom or become stifled. I must grasp the nettle to give us back an interesting, exotic home rather than a vanilla one. Suggestions for how to achieve this in light of TN3 on a postcard please!