Scrrrrape scrape scrape scrape scrape (Repeat)

You'd think, wouldn't you, that someone with a blog would WRITE in it now and then. The service around here is terrible, quite frankly. Let's get our coats now and go to McDonald's.

Hello! HERE I AM. I have been here the whole time! Well, not here, in my chair. I have been over there, and just over there, and just up there, out of sight. Antonia what the fuck are you talking about? Well, I'm throwing Esme a party tomorrow (she is two and a half, and she never got a 2nd birthday party because it was cold and dark and I couldn't be arsed). Party! Tomorrow! This means people, actual people, coming to our house, not just peering into it from the Internet, but coming in, with their feet, and looking at it with their eyes, and smelling it with their noses, and falling over unfinished DIY jobs and power tools left lying around; swearing as six-foot lengths of wood, propped against walls, topple sideways onto their heads. And not just people! Their children, too! Small, soft-headed children, just waiting to trip over the hose coiled lethally at the top of the flight of concrete garden steps or lose their tiny fingers in the circular saw that's lived in the corner all winter.

So we've been tidying up.

That's putting it SO mildly. What's actually happened is that one of us has held down our to-do list while the other one has fucked it roughly up the arse with a series of power tools, morning, noon and night. The to-do list is a shadow of its former self, having nothing better to threaten me with than 20 minutes' light tidying-up, and is calling weakly for a proctologist to mend what remains of its ringpiece. NOTHING, to-do list. NOTHING IS LEFT OF YOUR ARSE. I HAVE A BLOWTORCH.

We are exhausted. The bathroom is finally renovated. The grotty wooden kitchen-sink surround is replaced. The banisters are replaced. The lawn is mowed. The grotty low white walls outside the kitchen door have been repainted. The outside of the kitchen door has been stripped of 170 years of paint (white, green, brown and blue). Two years' leaf fall has been burned in a series of outdoor fires whose woodsmoke made me nostalgic for the youthful idealism that allowed me to enjoy three-day middle-class music festivals, once upon a time. The garden railway is finished! The strip of bare plaster in the ceiling, where we knocked down a dividing wall 18 months ago, is finally papered over. The tool shelves are organised. We have shagged our to-do list into the middle of next YEAR.

Ian took Wednesday and Thursday off this week. Esme goes to nursery all day Wednesday and on Thursday afternoon, so Ian and I got to spend incredibly rare time together without her. Better still, we got to spend time together sorting the house out, wielding blowtorches, sanders, drills and chisels. I love it so much when we work on stuff together. That man has worked so hard this week and I am so in love with him for it. Ian, you're my hero.

All Ian stipulated about his time off work was that at some point, he wanted us to go for Proper Tea. Tea in town, tea without two tiny, sticky hands stealing all the butter, tea the way we used to have tea when we were younger and in love.

So at 3pm on Wednesday, when the house looked like it had thrown up

and we only had two hours' real time to get anything done that afternoon,

we downed tools and dashed up to Piccadilly.

At Green Park tube, there are two UP escalators. Ian ran to the middle one, shouting "Race you", and we stood motionless on parallel escalators all the way to the top.

We went to Richoux, which we have walked past many times over the years while saying "We must go in there."

Richoux is 100 years old and frightfully lovely. It has Art Deco furnishings and Oriental carpets.

We ate soft, freshly baked scones with our dusty, plaster-coated, paint-stained, barnacled hands,

and then we went home and upset our to-do list for another hour.

There really ought to be a hundred and one before and after photos to go with this post, but I am very, very, very, very, very tired and I am not going to upload them now. All you need to know is that for the last week, I have mostly been looking at this,

and now everything looks better.

Tomorrow, the weather will be nice and the party should be great, and under all the grot and dirt, behind all those unfinished jobs, it turns out we have a really nice house. I had no idea! You can all come and visit now. Bring biscuits. And hand cream. Lots of hand cream.