My friend A, who knows everyone round here, looked knowingly at me the other day when I delightedly told her that every time I go round to the house, whether it's Easter Monday or a snowy Saturday afternoon (there was an inch of snow on the car this morning, like an unseasonal harbinger of discontent for the Olympic flame that barely made it through Paris today for all the protestors), the painters are in there diligently stripping away, or plastering, laying glass fibre paper (a new one on me, which a little scarily hides any superficial cracks in the walls, but I am assured that if anything serious is going on it will split, which I suppose is a good thing) or layering on lashings of undercoat. They are so far ahead of schedule that they are ready to polish and varnish the floors.

The first floor and downstairs are looking coolly beautiful in their underclothes:





According to A, the reason they are steaming ahead with my house is every other project these guys are supposed to be working on (including a grim tragedy when a very beautiful old house that always makes me think it would sit well in Charleston, north Carolina, in its lacy prettiness, burned down a few months ago almost to a shell (noone was injured, it caught fire during the school run, which may or may not contain a moral for us all, if you can find it)) is languishing, whilst my builder's entire team is doing overtime on my place. Do I care? I most certainly do and I jolly well hope they will continue to focus all their attention on us and ignore everyone else.

They are so bizarrely ahead of schedule that they have started on the third floor, which they weren't meant to get to until October:













That is going to be my bath one of these days. I asked them to reinforce the bathroom floor; the bath apparently weighs 200 kilos when empty and obviously a good deal more filled with water and me.

The plumber is hard at work like a mole in the cellar. Every so often he pops up for air. He really does look like a mole, he's small and a little squat with whiskers and chubby cheeks, and as you would expect from a mole, holes are appearing all over the house (ready to receive the 20 odd renovated old cast iron radiators that I ordered last week).

Tomorrow I'm going to bite the bullet and order taps and baths and things. I'm bored of thinking about all that so I suppose the only thing to do is to do it and then forget about it. We still haven't ordered the kitchen either. I can't stand all this decision making.