The debonair Basil Marigold's

I drive through a snowstorm to get home tonight. It’s odd, but I assume geographical that there can be greenfields from the M69 to Junction 22 of the M1, but whenever you go from 22 to 23 (what I think of as the Coalville/shepshed area) it had already become a winter wonderland of white snow. And of course, once past Junction 23 the green fields returned! It’s like a band running across northwest Leicestershire that gets the bad weather.  This always gets me every time. How it can be so localised.

It turned out to be a rather eventual last 6 months of 2018. We moved house in November, but the initial process began wat back in July, at the height of what was a lovely, hot summer. When we moved in, finally, it was dark and cold.  The most immediate benefit of this was having a substantially larger property to live in. With more bedrooms, a garage and a larger garden you could say we have space to burn and by any stretch of the imagination I have begun to utilise this space. To my hearts delight I have been able to move my books, my precious books, from the loft and now, into a place of prominence: where books deserve to be.  In this case, to hide some especially unappealing wallpaper the decision was taken to cover this with bookshelves.  So, after a trip to ikea and much lugging about with heavy packages and then, the obligatory, faffing about with flat packs the shelves were ready to be secured to the wall. The wallpaper began to disappear as they went up. It took quite some tim