Dot’s birthday is on the horizon, and for reasons too obvious to mention, she had her present three days early – and wore it to Dipples open day champagne-and-canape-fest at lunchtime. It’s a rather nice bracelet. She will be wearing it again tonight as we dine at the Norfolk Mead with the Robinsons. It’s seemed a long day, partly because much of it has been spent shifting furniture around following the arrival of our new TV unit, which looks very good. It was especially satisfying that I managed all the wire reconnections without anything not working. Yet.

The living room now looks rather nice, as Phil acknowledged when he dropped a package off for Dot earlier. A little more shifting around (though not much) when the skirting board man arrived to look at what needed to be done to fix the base of the walls following the removal of the skirting heating. He turned out to be a former pupil of Dot’s and the son of one of the Tuckswood teaching assistants, Jill Cann.

Yesterday was even longer. The man who installed the radiators arrived just after 8am and was here till very late afternoon. He was extremely conscientious and careful, which is what you want form a central heating engineer. It’s fantastic to have some real heat in the living room, even though we had to get through a cold day to get it. To be honest it could have been a lot worse, and we didn’t even resort to an electric fire. It was very still and not too cold. I went our for a walk in the morning for an hour or so and sat on St James Hill (while composing a poem) without feeling in the least uncomfortable.