Over the last few days I have been fixing stuff at home - glued a wooden bird bought during our St Lucia holiday and beheaded on the third day by our cleaning lady's broom, rewired my bedsight light, and untangled and glued back together a wooden elephant puppet rendered completely unusable by an adventurous one-year-old Lauren.

There is something very satisfying about mending stuff. It makes my life feel all tranquil and organised.

As a child I always thought it was weird the way my mum would lament the fact that there were only 24 hours in a day. Sounded daft to me. Now I get it. It's impossible to keep up with everything. If I catch up slightly in one area, mending things, for instance, I fall behind in a dozen others. There's a constant and overwhelming backlog of junk to get rid of, chaotic cupboards to clear, unmanaged family photos and vidoes to sort out, unwritten stories and letters to write, weekends away to organise - the list is endless.

Last night we were double-checking our house extension plans - the draughtsperson is preparing the plans for submission at last, and an engineer-type-person is coming this week to do what is called a Percolation Test on the land to check that our septic tank can support a larger house(hold). The terms 'percolation' and 'septic tank' do not go comfortably together in a sentence when one is a coffee lover. It's nice to finally have this thing heading towards the point where we might actually be talking to builders. But good grief! We started thinking about this two years ago!