Am feeling a bit wobbly about the next step. I have to make real decisions about what I want it to look like and I am finding myself incredibly reticent to do this. What happens if it looks horrible? I'm kind of on my own with this because C, whilst competent on many fronts, is hilariously rubbish at anything visual. I discovered when we were painting our house in London that his answer to the question 'What colour shall we paint this?' - where 'this' could be anything at all, from the front door to my eyelids - was always 'yellow'. It was sort of funny and cute and anyway I always disregarded it but now I find myself wishing that he could engage at least vaguely with the question. Actually to be fair he has been - I've got my ridiculous swatch of Farrow and Ball nearly-colours on large pieces of sugar paper that I dutifully shift around rooms to catch rays of sunlight or dusky shadow to see how they change, just like they tell you to do in decorating magazines and boy have I read a few of those, and having chosen two not-whites for the living room (to go with the hastily-purchased orange and red saris that we bought in Madurai to make curtains - I know, they sound horrible, but actually they're gorgeous and anyway I have a thing for orange silk curtains) he suddenly objected to one of them on the grounds that it was 'too yellow'. Uh? You like yellow, don't you? The off white he objects to isn't yellow at all, which makes me wonder about all the other semantic misunderstandings that may pepper the history of our relationship.

But back to my wobbles. I went to the house today and began to wonder if everything was wrong, from the hole in the kitchen wall to the larder to the way we've divided up our bed and bathroom, to where the children are going to sleep. Everything. It's worth admitting that the house is a bit of a mad hotchpotch of different bits that have been added on every so often over the last 150 years and we made the decision to leave it that way, which maybe was not the right decision. I feel completely paralysed now. We can't go back on the things we've done but I suddenly can't bear to commit to anything further. I'm almost going off the whole project, which is a bit like being six months pregnant and changing your mind, in that at this point it's not realistic to think that I can run away to live in an igloo in Greenland. Really tempting though.