I know you’re not supposed to say you like your own work but I do like this a lot. I’ve had it in mind for several days as we’ve battled the nettles (among other things) in our field.

We’ve made some progress in our studio today, getting ceiling suspension for our backdrops so we don’t have to have the stands up because the space is quite small and all those stands just get in each others’ way by the time there are two light stands, two backdrop stands and a tripod, not to mention the workmate that now serves as a table!

So, this has been shot with the benefit of that!

Anyway, I digress, I have been feeling a little blue today and, to make a change from normal, when I do have a tendency to be ostrich-like in my thinking most of the time, I have been grasping a personal nettle.

I’ve been slaving away at the grand plan all year. Working on it for every hour I have outside of my day job. I’m starting to show some fruits of my labour but on current calculations, it’ll take me until after I retire to achieve my ambitions. That’s a helluva wait and a helluva lot of slaving, considering I’m literally pushing myself into the ground to do what I’ve been doing.

Now the nettle I grasp is the one that says ‘keep on and hope that it’ll come good sooner’ or do I admit defeat and remind myself that I’m an optimistic fool whose grand plan was never going to work out as I’d hoped.

If I do the latter, we may find ourselves from time to time with a clean house, which is a state of affairs that has been conspicuous by its absence since Christmas, when I started work on this leg of the plan. I’ve become a complete sloven since starting this bit – something had to give and to be frank, when it’s a direct choice between spending my energy doing stuff on the plan or whether it’s doing housework, the choice has been an easy one to make. Now we can’t remember the colour of the carpet because there is so much dog hair on it and the kitchen is under half a tonne of grime. I’ve not done any sorting of washing for a month so we nip into the front bedroom where all of the clean washing is piled onto the bed and grab something that’s not too crumpled or looks like it might match what’s in the other hand.

What do I do – keep holding my nettle no matter how painful or let go?

last year I was having a go at the 'tits out brigade'.