Okay Jen. You win. You should know that we've only had a phone line since 11 am this morning. We've only been home two days, after a week in a 17th century cottage with - guess what - no wifi.

We don't have an oven yet. Or half our worktops. (This is France. Noone answers the telephone let alone supplies long-ago ordered goods in August.) We have no hot water. We have a leak that has soaked all our CDs and DVDs in their fancy red laqueur cabinet in our living room that is moonlighting as a box room for the time being. We have a broken floor board in the downstairs loo. None of the electricity in the living room works. The TV (30cm HCCR - that's Hyper Curved Cathode Ray for all you non-techies with your fancy 140cm flat screen plasma LCD screens) is in our bedroom, which sneakily I like and plan for it never to leave.

BUT we have an amazing garden -



it was dug up and returfed while we were away, a very extravagent decision but based on the idea that a hummocky field filled with nettles and brambles and bits of glass and asbestos and much rusty iron simply wasn't the lifestyle we were going for. The black thing that looks promisingly like a swimming pool is actually a vegetable patch. The poles in front are for espaliered apple and pear trees, and a grapevine. We are planning on chickens.

We have a lovely bathroom



The kids are loving it. Why not, really? It's big, they've got their own rooms for the first time ever.



They are rediscovering their old toys - R and A don't wear ordinary clothes any more, preferring to go for the Halloween ghost/devil/one-legged pirate/cowboy look when dressing for dinner. We have barbecues every night (cf above, no oven). Every time I ask them, in a pathetic pleaser way, if they like the new house, they look at me like I'm barmie. We have an American fridge with an ice dispenser, for goodness sake. What's not to like?