We’ve got a lovely chap here this week doing stuff with wood. He’s putting on skirting boards and architraves, along with new windowsills and doors. It’s all very exciting if stressful and tiring.

Each day, he turns the house upside down with a cheery grin, then proceeds to knock hell out of everything until he goes home and we perch amid planks of wood and an array of tools.

He thinks he’s being rotten to us by leaving his stuff here, but the truth is I think we both get a bit of a thrill out of it. Straight up – it’s true. Each evening, we go round looking at the progress, rubbing our hands along smooth, sanded, oiled wood and loving it. And that’s just the start of our evening weirdness.

We’re both fascinated by good tools – I have always loved a good power tool rather more than I should and this chap’s hand tools are also incredibly sexy.

So, he goes home and DM and I spend our evening fondling bits of metal and going ‘ooohhhhh aaaaaahhhhh’ at the smoothness of action of his tools. I’m not sure if this is the right environment to ‘fess up’ that we were playing with his cordless drill (a Hitachi for anyone interested) and proclaiming it ‘perfectly balanced’ and ‘ooohh doesn’t that feel good in your hand’.

I am SO glad I’ve not had to spend a night away this week – I have been able to share in this fondling and exploring like the tool fetishist I truly am.

So, now you know it – we are both certifiable and I am a very unusual woman – but then again, you know that the next pressie I’m hankering after is a cement mixer don’t you? Hint Hint………

Last year, I was starting a new journey of photographic skills that I certainly didn't have before. I must say, it makes me very happy to think I've come a long way since then - take yesterday's shot for example - it may have looked stupid simple, but getting that lighting exactly how I wanted it took me 30 shots. I wanted my tortoiseshell to be really the point of the pic and getting the light shining through the shot in exactly the right spot to make that happen without light dripping into other parts of the pic was very tricky. These days I take so much notice of how things are lit and work really hard to 'get it right'.