No roof

You know when you realise you’ve reached the end of your tether? The feeling when you wake up without having caught up on enough sleep? When you walk down to the tube in the morning, dreading getting on a train because you know you’ll have to stand for an hour when you could be sitting down, having a little sleep? The absolute inability to be anything other than deeply ratty and irritable in the face of the tiniest problem? The feeling when your bones creak, your eyes are bloodshot and your mouth is full of ulcers? That!

This year has suddenly caught up on me. My body is screaming for a break. My brain just wants to shut down. I realised there was a problem last night when we went to Julie and Sam’s after rehearsals. Nathan wanted to give them both copies of his book on account of them being the people who got him into knitting. We’d apparently last met up on my birthday, just before Nathan went off on his round-the-world odyssey. I wracked my brain and realised I couldn’t actually remember what we’d done on my birthday this year! It took me a long time to bring the memory back into my head. That is surely the sign of a brain which is over-full!

I guess it never serves one well to complain, because the universe has a habit of really getting stuck in when you whinge! This afternoon, as I left rehearsals, feeling tired and sorry for myself, I had a call from Nathan to say they’d ripped the roof off our house and that our loft was now open to the elements! In a way it’s a good thing because it means the house is finally being fixed, but the photos Nathan sent are surreal - made even stranger by the deep blue sky which was showing through the giant gaps between wooden slats.

They’ve simultaneously also re-plastered the sitting room roof, which is great news, but for half a tonne of dust which has apparently appeared in the process. So when I get home, we better start digging!

I just hope we haven’t got more cowboys coming in.