I had a traumatic morning this morning, mind you – even I realise that an appointment at the dole office where I was ticked off about not having secured a job yet and an instruction to take any job offered to me within an hour and a half’s drive (each way) was better than a morning of being snowed in in London. The job thing is a bit depressing given that I’m applying for jobs at the minimum wage and being expected to drive 50 miles each way to do the job. Hopefully it won’t come to that if I can secure one of the ones I’m already being interviewed for closer to home. (Still at or around minimum wage.)

So, I decided that despite it being –2º here today, I’d go an knock down a structure in the garden that’s as rotten as hell and has, hitherto been the entrance to our flat. It’s not a great impression for visitors and we’re getting a new entrance way soon (the last part of the refurbishment needed before we can let it out) so I needed to get down the old structure in time for the builder to come in and make the new staircase and landing.

To be honest, it wasn’t much effort – a few well-aimed blows with a hammer, some careful removal of glass and slate and the whole lot came away quite easily. It took no more than an hour and then I spent another hour breaking up the timbers into pieces of a suitable size to go into our stove. (Nothing goes to waste here.)

I was outside for a couple of hours, culminating in a trip to the secret garden to take out the composting waste and I noticed the wheelbarrow, where I’d left it after cleaning out and burning the waste from the henhouse last week, full of rainwater that had frozen. Sitting in the middle, frozen into a layer of ice several inches thick were my rubber gloves, abandoned on the day of the burning and now prisoners in the ice, only the fingertips above the surface.

Strangely or otherwise, I thought they’d make a great metaphor for how my own fingers were feeling after a couple of hours of hard labour outside.