Hoping.

This is the longest I've been away from here. Almost 2 months. Shocking. However, normality looms ahead with the alterations to our house nearing completion so my attention is turning back towards what I should be getting on with. Nearly a year has passed since I vowed to actually enter some writing competitions and this has yet to happen. It's not that I haven't been writing at all, more like just skimming the surface of creativity to keep the waters running clear underneath. The novel I wrote in November (on the bed, underneath the chimney being demolished) is somewhere underneath the rubble of chaos and I have written some pieces of flash fiction to share with my writing group.

Meanwhile, since the building work began last year, the children are still sleeping in bunk beds in the living room. That's the same living room occupied by our smelly old dog. The fireplace is filled with dusty boxes of toys, all jumbled up. The carpet is disgusting and I can't wait to throw it out, just as soon as we can get to it.

Our bedroom, soon to be Peter's, is something else. The bed emerges - when it can - from underneath a pile of paperwork and ironing. This morning, a heap of Where's Wally? books, the TV remote and old cheque books separate us. Luckily it's quite a big bed and even offers the illusion of space from floor to ceiling. Elsewhere in the room, every inch is taken up with boxes of bed linen, bags of clothes and the most recent addition is the top half of our large dresser from the kitchen. Handy if you need a saucepan in the middle of the night but not so much if you get lost on the way to the bathroom in the darkness. On second thoughts .... I'm guessing that not many people are woken up by their wife croaking, from the far corner of the bedroom, 'I'm lost'. I thought I was squeezing past the dresser top on my way out of the door. I was actually trying to get through a 6 inch space at the other end of the dresser and heading for the window. Only the diamond shapes of the leaded lights illuminated by the moon alerted me to the unreliability of my night time compass.

As a lifestyle, though, maybe it will catch on. Yesterday, in our small pond, there were 5 frogs crammed into one corner. For us, cramming things in will soon be a thing of the past. Hopefully, my writing will be pulled out of the creases in the bedclothes and instead, laid out to bask in the sun streaming through dust-free air in the conservatory. Hopefully.