Under Pressure

We're back in St Andrews and, after a beautiful Sunday when I was able to get on my bike and complete a long ride in sunshine, today has heralded what feels like the onset of winter; it's as if we've missed autumn out; we've had to put the central heating on in the caravan and Marion is sipping hot chocolate as I write. 

We're not heading back down to Framlingham for another ten days but we got a long email from our architect in Suffolk today pushing us for a lot of decisions to pass on to the builder and we feel under a lot of pressure to get answers to him. But we're using an interior designer and some of the answers depend on her and we don't want to put her under similar pressure and rush our design - after all we're spending a fair sum on these alterations and we don't want to spoil things. Carrying out a project at over four hundred miles distance is not exactly easy although it has run fairly smoothly to date. 

That "to date" is eleven weeks now. That's not far short of three months that we've been of no fixed abode. We've done over ten thousand miles in the car, stayed eleven nights in Premier Inns and five nights in other hotels and B&B's, spent a couple of weeks in Rochester and the rest of the time in the caravan here in St Andrews. Although we love being in St Andrews, life in a caravan and on the road is not exactly a perfect existence and we were talking about our experience the other night and going through what we miss. Here's our top twenty five.

 1 Friends and family - obviously
 2 Going upstairs to bed
 3 Coming downstairs for breakfast
 4 The garden
 5 Sky Plus
 6 FACT and Vue cinemas
 7 Decent broadband speed
 8 Cooking 
 9 Being able to pass each other indoors without breathing in
10 Our clothes
11 The gym - seriously
12 A phone signal
13 Space
14 Washing machine
15 Bath
16 Comfortable sofas
17 A second car
18 The postman - not like that 
19 Routine
20 Holidays
21 Photographs
22 Coal fire
23 Home
24 Shopping (that one's Marion's)
25 Sense of belonging

It's not all negative mind. In a future blog I'll list all the positives.