This is a beautiful sight to me but it could be a lot more beautiful…..it’s the temperature gauge on our new (old) Rayburn and it’s showing cold. Stone cold in fact. I so wish it was working. It’d give me so much comfort and not just because of the warmth it is going to radiate around the cottage.

Even its Fahrenheit temperature gauge is a joy to see for a girl(!) who still cooks in imperial measures, rather than metric…..I’ve been forced into using Celsius oven temperatures in the last twenty or so years because that’s how all my cookers have been made since I first owned my own place but my 200 degrees C is just 400 degrees F in my heart. (BTW – I still can’t get into my thick skull the way to get my degree sign!!!!)

It’s a lovely bit of kit and I can’t wait for it to fill a bigger function in our lives than somewhere to hang the oven gloves and towels. All who have seen it say we got a bargain but a bargain is only a bargain when it fulfils a function and as we have no oil supply yet, it can’t be lit so therefore it fills no real function.

We’ve got the tank in place after a lot of work from DM, with help from the neighbours – both Pete and Iain played a big part in the process of getting as far as we have done. Pete mixed concrete while DM lugged it up the path to the garden by the bucket load. Iain went to Mole Valley Farmers with his trailer and brought back the tank, then humped it up the garden with DM and me hanging on to the other end. Now we need a plumber to connect it all up and fit the chimney up to the newly lined house chimney and we’re away – I so hope that happens before Christmas.

I’m feeling a bit gloomy tonight, despite the prospect of four nights at home then only one more trip to London before Christmas, I am now as certain as I can be that we won’t make any more progress on the grand plan before the holiday season and that’s such a blow. Really tomorrow is now our only hope for progress and I suspect that this time tomorrow evening I will be sat here as blue as a blue thing.

Maybe the exhaustion of a long hard day – long drive to office from Liz’s house, Board Meeting all morning and then dismantling my office this afternoon (last day there as a resident), carting all the stuff to my car then a four-and-a-half hour drive home - has jaded me and I’ll find myself reinvigorated tomorrow but like everything in my world at the moment, my emotions seem to see-saw between complete gloom and intense joy with nothing much in between and if we fail tomorrow to push through the plan, I can’t see that it will be anything other than devastating.

Watch this space….

Last year, we were with Alan and Dee (friends) and toasting friendship and the year before, I was working hard and photographed the tools of my trade!