This is how our living room looked 8 years ago.

This is how it looked on Thursday morning.

This is how it looked by Thursday evening.

And here it is today. Not quite finished, as the curtain rail isn't up and the paint still needs retouching, but you get the effect. (And yes, the suite cover has faded rather...)

As part of the build up to our Wedding of the Year, I thought I'd do a webpage of Part 1, the Fiji Wedding. The pictures are elsewhere too, but this way I know how to find them easily! I hope.

The Fiji Wedding

I had a drama on Monday when I came home from work to find Sid the cat waiting on the step - not something that has been happening particularly since the summer weather began - and when I opened the door she limped painfully in, not wanting to put any weight on her back legs.

Not knowing what had happened during the day, I took her straight to the vet's for a check up. He examined her carefully - the daft cat purring at him happily throughout - and pronounced nothing broken, but a nastily swollen knee with the patella shifting in and out of place.

He said she may have taken a knock, but as the other knee had a similar but much less obvious condition, it seems more likely that it's a case of a minor wrench or sprain causing a chronic symptom of old age to flare up.

Poor old cat. We're not sure quite how old she is, but she's at least 10, so beginning to feel her years.

Anyway, she had some anti-inflammatory and pain killing injections and I was told to keep her indoors and give her more medication daily.

The leg seems to be getting better. She walks quite normally, then suddenly freezes, with a look of astonishment on her face as though she'd been stung by a bee, immediately scuttles backwards for several paces and stretches her leg out - after which she either hobbles badly again for a while, so the knee has obviously slipped back out - or she rights herself and walks on.

Yesterday she explained that she really needed to go out for a poo, so I reassured her that the litter tray would be OK for now. She waited till I'd gone to work, and looked sheepish when I came home and relieved when I got rid of the evidence.

We went back to the vet's last night, whom she treated like a long lost brother. He said her reversing and stretching behaviour reinforced his original opinion and that she was coming along nicely, keep up the treatment and come back next week.

Today she came upstairs to say hello for the first time since Monday and was more insistent about wanting to go out after breakfast, but accepted it with fair grace when I explained she was still to stay in. So I'm hopeful she will be back to normal next time she sees the vet.

I've just finished reading Joe Simpson's excellent book "The Beckoning Silence" about the North Face of the Eiger and all the tragic failed attempts to climb it, including the classic 1930's pioneers and the ones who died the day Joe made his attempt.

I've always loved being near mountains and admit to being moved to tears by the magnificent view from a minor alpine peak I walked up in the early 1980's, even though I'm no mountaineer, but Simpson's writing evokes all the dreams, hopes and fears of true mountain men, so you can begin to understand what drives them on at the risk of everything.

Today I had a much less epic adventure of my own. We were hashing near Keston and had been going for over an hour when we realised the hare was again turning away from the start point. Mary, Sue and I decided we'd turn the other way and make our way back in a "short cut."

Well, we got lost. We had a lovely walk along footpaths and country lanes all around the area in balmy sunshine, but after a further hour, we were still not back and not quite sure where we were...

Which was when we had our Joe Simpson moment, because as in his recount of his day on the North Face, the mobile phone went!!! It was Peter, asking where we were. We admitted to not really knowing, but noticed a sign a little further along at a junction of two lanes and told him. "Oh, you're about a mile away still! I know exactly where you are though - I'll come and pick you up."

Which was pretty much what happened to Joe too, so we all live to tell the tale!

Only 3 weeks till the lead up to the wedding begins...

Having just had a very busy and for some reason more than usually tiring week, I've thoroughly enjoyed slothing about doing very little today.

Had another early night and finished my book - Bernard Cornwell's "Sword Song" (enjoyable, but not sure I'll bother with the others in the series) - then a lie in this morning.

Whilst eating a leisurely breakfast I had a long chat on the phone with Mum, followed by call to Ed on Skype.

After that a small spot of laundry and catching up on emails, then lunch in front of the TV and an afternoon of watching tennis from Queen's Club.

I'm just contemplating what to have for dinner, and thinking of starting another book. This one will be Joe Simpson's "Beckoning Silence". I read "Touching the Void" by him, and saw the film. It was so gripping - I wasn't sure he was going to survive his ordeal, even though I knew he was the narrator!

So that's about the sum of my day. Were you busier?

This week is "Art Week" at school. Now, in the Nursery we are usually quite creative anyway - we have painting at the easel or flat on a table, plus collage resources, freely available for the children to use whenever they like, not to mention a variety of coloured paper, scissors and tape in the graphics area.
We always have CDs available to be played, musical instruments, and a selection of dressing up clothes for role play and performance.

So, for Art Week we were given a stack of not quite A4 sized paper and asked to produce a self portrait from each of the children, to be framed and sold to the parents as a money raiser. (I'm not even going to start on the discussion of that as a concept..)

Our children are rising 4. Which means that some are still only 3 years old, and many of them are barely beginning to produce representational pictures of any kind, let alone in paint, which generally takes them longer to use in this way than pencil.

We knew it would take a while, so we quietly began last week. The first day's efforts were hopeless. The children looked diligently in the mirror and talked sensibly about themselves and what they look like and then painted themselves large and blue with purple spots or whatever, much bigger than A4 and much too scarey for any mum's wall. They went home unframed.

So we got some small paper and made colour washes in a range of skin tones, from dark brown to light pink and all shades of beige in between and after the mirror session, got the children to select their skin tone. This worked a treat. Most of them were able to approximate their colour, and then we helped them mix a selection of personal eye and hair colours from a limited base set and they made a much better attempt. Some of the results were still a bit scarey - Alfie carefully painted his green eyes, plus white rims, black pupil and brown lashes and ended up very googly, but he had really focussed on the detail.

The end results - cut out by us and glued to an attractive backing paper - aren't too bad. And the children got a lot of talk out of it - and some even learned that faces don't have legs! But is it art?

On the way back from the Hash run today (lovely run with beautiful scenery around Westerham, followed by a pleasant drink in "The Grasshopper") I was listening to Radio 4 and it happened to be a tibute to the late stand up comedian and poet Hovis Presley.

I hadn't heard of him before, but thought some of his poems and epigrams were brilliant. For example, on the difficulties of relationships:

"It's true what they say about women - it's an irregular plural."

I particularly liked a poem entitled "Fistful of Rennies" and tried to google the text. I couldn't find it, but did get a reference to the collection it came from "Poetic Off Licence" and have sent off for it.

So watch this space.