Well it’s been an eventful couple of days. I’m working from home in the mornings, which when you start at 7h30 means you still get in six and a half hours before lunch. The afternoons, though, have been my own.

Why?

I’ve just bought a house.

It was all going so smoothly until I tried to pick up the keys. I completed at nineish yesterday morning – the 28th – so went to the agent at lunchtime to collect them, only to be told they’d not been handed over. Despite having my money, the vendor still hadn’t moved out. He suggested I might like to go around there and collect them myself.

Well, I did, and there she was standing around among her furniture and refusing to tell me the code for the alarm.

I came home and called my solicitor, who said that she was legally obliged to have vacated the property before getting her hands on my money. Various solicitor-to-solicitor calls were made, and eventually she was out of there. I was in the right – in the eyes of the law – but that didn’t stop me feeling like I’d evicted some poor (actually now quite rich) old woman from the house in which she’d lived for the last 44 years.

Anyhow, here’s my lounge:

So I went around about 16h to finally take possession, tried to ignore the freezer she’d left on my lawn where it’s still killing off the grass, and the banana and half eaten biscuits she’d left on the kitchen counter, and walked around the first property I’ve ever owned with its own staircase, patios and heating you can switch on and off on a whim, rather than planning for a cold snap at least 24 hours ahead.

Here’s my dining room. The grubby carpet and orange ‘feature fireplace’ will be going. I’ll be fixing the wallpaper, too:

I’m not moving in right away. Instead I want to get some work done, like a new wall in the garden, new felt on the outhouse roof, moving a fireplace, installing a new bathroom, adding a radiator, changing the kitchen light which currently sings a particularly irritating tune the whole time it’s switched on…

So, I wandered around the empty three bedder that I’ll one day live in, noting which floorboards creaked and what jobs needed doing, ready for the builder to come around today. He was very thorough. I expect his quote is going to be slightly frightening.

Here’s my kitchen. Notice the cat flap. I think that’s telling me something:

While the rooms are all good sizes and will be great after a lick of paint, my favourite bit has to be the outhouse. It’s three rooms in an annexe, one of which used to be the outside toilet. There are still two hooks on the back of the door that would once have been where the loo roll hung.

One room will become my laundry room, another will be used for storage, and the room at the end will be a big pantry. If it was inside the house itself you could easily fit in some furniture and use it as a bedroom, but instead I’ll use it for food storage, and as a place in which to make jam and cheese and sloe gin, and pickle things in jars.

Look – here it is:

I really like the old barn doors. I’m less keen on the mice running around outside, but they shouldn’t be a problem, as it’s all sealed so they can’t get in.

Anyhow, I’ll get some humane traps so I can scoop them up and free them down by the river, which I’m sure they’d find much more conducive to the modern rodent lifestyle.

All of which leaves only one question: who chose those curtains, that carpet, and that particular shade of pink paint? And, more to the point, who ever thought they’d work well together?

It’s 05h20, and I’ve already been up and working half an hour. It’s a strange time of day, which I haven’t worked since doing the breakfast show shifts at Gfm 15 years ago. I’d forgotten how secret and conspiratorial it feels listening to Radio 4 at this time of day.

A tired-sounding man is plodding through the shipping forecast while Charlotte Green makes her first coffee of the day and reads through her scripts for Farming Today, the daily non-fiction version of The Archers. We’ve just had a little hello from Evan Davis imploring us to listen to his programme about the housing market, and in a minute it’ll be the news, although at this time of day it’s not a bulletin: they call it the businessy spy-like News Briefing.

Most of all, though, you get the impression at this time of days there’s just yourself, the presenters and half a dozen insomniac nomads tuned in in the kingdom’s furthest-flug reaches. I kind of like that.

It’s cold here. Everest came this morning and replaced all but one of the upstairs windows. It was shocking both how quickly they managed to lever out what we had previously thought of as fairly secure frames, and how quickly the cold rushed in to fill the void.

Last week, you see, was all hot and summery. I even dug out my thin coat on Thursday or Friday – I forget which, now – and looked forward to a weekend of pretending winter was over. Today, though, at the start of a full week of periodical windowlessness, it’s all turned sour. Rain, thunder, snow. Yes, snow. Actual proper snow that falls as little white lumps and then slides down the slope of your roof.

That’s not the worst of it, though: every room they’ve been in sports not only a nice new window, but also a thick covering of gritty dust. I expected a light scattering, sure, but not the beach-like dunes that have piled up on my desk, got into my keyboard, and all but obscured the screen on my radio. I’ve not yet dared to peel back my duvet, but I suspect that the terrain under there would be ripe for Saharan endurance training.

It didn’t make for a particularly conducive working environment this morning, so I was glad to be heading for the office come half ten.

Anyhow, they’re now gone for the day and won’t be back until morning, and for the time being the heating is throbbing away all around us.

It’ll be nice when it’s all finished.

The weekend was fun. To the far reaches of Suffolk to see Rich’s family on Saturday, and walk along the water’s edge, photographing the ducks at Oulton Broad, which was just as pleasant as its name makes it sound (and indeed all the names around there, my particular favourite being Beccles, which narrowly beats Kessingland and Bungay).

It was sunny, but even then the wind was getting up and coats were more a necessity than a luxury. It eventually forced us to retreat inside, where we played Scrabble. I won for a change.

Yesterday – Sunday – we came back to Essex, for games and chatter and far too much food at home (particularly nice home-made Bakewells – above – although I didn’t discover that until I finally had one tonight, 24 hours late). Sal and Dan were over, and she’s looking larger than ever, now that it’s less than a month until she becomes a mum (and I become an uncle). Between us, the next four weeks are shaping up to be very busy, so it was nice to have one last weekend all together, before everything changes for good (and for the good, really). I’m still trying to convince her that Oscar won’t get on with the baby, and so should come and live with me.

Anyhow, we played more games. Cards, this time, and I think I came about second, although to be honest I really can’t remember. All I do remember is how much fun we all had, as we do when we play games.

We stayed in, wrapped up warm, and only ventured out briefly to feed carrots to the horses and say goodbye to Freddie, who’s so old, blind and injured that he’ll be recycled in the glue factory before the end of the week.

Here he is, saying farewell (on the right), blissfully unaware that by Friday he could be part of an envelope.

Two weeks today, I become a home owner again. Very exciting, although to be honest I think I’m more seat-edgey about getting space for deckchairs, and an old wooden-framed greenhouse than I am a two-storey home with central heating that I can actually turn on and off whenever I want, a fire and space for a separate washing machine and drier.

So today I took to the Grow Your Own Veg book in earnest, and am pleasantly surprised to see how much of the early planting season is left. Tomatoes, cucumbers, potatoes and sprouts are all still in reach, even if I don’t get planting for another six weeks. Lettuce, clearly some kind of Olympic veg, can be sown, germinate, sprout and be ready for eating in less than two weeks.

I was particularly interested to read that if you plant them in the right conditions and take care of them you can even grow new potatoes in the middle of winter – particularly if you put them in a barrel in the greenhouse, rather than out in the earth.

It’s an excellent book, all in all, as it’s very practical, and full of little hints, like growing geraniums or basil underneath your tomato plants to save them from whitefly. Nobody knows whether it’s because they can’t stand the smell of the basil and geraniums, or because they actually prefer them to the tomatoes themselves, but it apparently keeps your fruits safe without using chemicals.

Grow-bags coming through. Home-grown salads on the horizon.

I had my first Mars bar in four years today. The sun was shining, and it was surprisingly hot, so we went out Alton Water, just south of Ipswich. It didn’t look so big on the map, but when we set out to walk around the rim, we discovered that maps can be deceiving.

It took almost five hours to get around, as we stopped so often to take pictures of the trees and the wildlife, and as the day went on the weather got better and better. It was so hot by the time we got to the bridge half way around that we had to take off our coats and jumpers and tie them around our camera bags to keep us cool.

Spring was certainly well underway. The gauze was in bloom, flowers were poking their way through the grass, and sticky buds were growing on the end of the chestnut branches.

We sat down for a while on the grass around a small lake, where the frogs were busy spawning just below the water. The surface was laced by strings of tiny black pearls, which would one day become tadpoles and eventually new frogs. They were nothing like the gloopy sago-like spawn I remember from childhood.

At times, when we had trees on one side and the glare of the sun on the water to the other, it felt like civilisation was miles away. There was no sound of traffic or chatter, and once we got to the far side of the water we only occasionally came across the odd walker with a dog. For some that we passed the hills were too much, and they turned back, but while steep they were not particularly long, and they were soon behind us as we marched on for eight and a half miles, detouring slightly to find a pub that turned out to be a long, long way off the track.

We never did find it, and so pushed on around the last third of the lake, over the dam and back to the point from which we’d set out, so we could sit down with a bright mug of tea, and the Mars bars we’d promised ourselves from the half way point.

Never had chocolate tasted so good.

There’s a leak in Nandos on the South Bank, somewhere above table 23. That’s where Rich and I sat on Monday night, after a trip to the Design Museum to look at organic cars, boats and planes fashioned after manta rays, flames and enormous boomerang-style mono-wings.

It was only when the drips started working their way through the railway arch in which the restaurant is built that we noticed the intricate system of copper gullies, ducts and channels built around the upper reaches of the place, which presumably move an almost constant flow of water around and around and down to the drain. It’s really quite impressive.

So was the exhibition we’d been to see. Translating Nature profiles designer Luigi Colani, one of the most influential designers of the last 60 years. His work spans the whole gamut between vehicles and binoculars; furniture and cameras; concepts and reality.

Much of his work is way ahead of its time, and very little of it would look out of place in the cinema, where designs for enormous high-security oil transporters would be the perfect complement to a typically exuberant Bond plot.

A small, but worthy exhibition, it runs until 17 June.

Went to look at the house again at the weekend. It’s only the second time I’ve been and already, with contracts exchanged a couple of weeks ago, I’m committed to buying it.

So, I was a bit apprehensive about going there, in case I should suddenly realise I’ve made a terrible mistake (but then I bought my flat after seeing it only once and I was very happy there for a long time).

Fortunately, it was even better than I remembered, and now that I know it’ll be mine by the end of the month I can start making plans, like where I’ll grow my vegetables, what I’ll do with the out-building, how I want to re-arrange the bathroom, what I need in the kitchen and so on.

It was also a first opportunity to talk to the woman selling it in a social context. She’s been there almost 60 years and is moving away to Cornwall, which will be a big change, particularly as everyone there seems to be so friendly. Just walking down the street we got three hellos from people in their driveways and gardens.

It’s all getting very real now; I need to start looking at bathrooms, bedrooms and three piece suites. I think I’m on the verge of becoming a house bore.

County Hall

I’d suggested we head out to Canary Wharf to take pictures of London’s tallest buildings before winter is gone and the darkness comes later. I wanted to catch the steam coming off the top of One Canada Square before winter is behind us and it turns too warm.

So, we met in front of Bush House and walked along the river as far as the Millennium Bridge, where we crossed over and took pictures on the South Bank. It was a perfect night for photos. Enough movement on the water for long exposures to freeze the motion and give the surface a glassy, reflective quality. Sufficient people passing by on the banks for them to soften the hard edges of the architecture as they swept by as blurs on each frame.

But it was so very cold. We spent a couple of hours taking pictures as the skies darkened and the temperature continued to drop, and I wished I’d brought my gloves.

By the time we got to Bermondsey, our fingers were stiff, and we jumped on the tube, to cut off the corner to Canary Wharf, the station whose design was apparently inspired by Stromberg’s Liparus. You can certainly see its influence in the shapes of the support columns, which look like submarine conning towers.

We never did get those pictures, though. We had some food and drink, and sat looking up at the buildings, but it was still too cold to stay still for long, and so we drifted off to warmer spots and eventually, as the cafes and restaurants were turning out, towards the station and home.

So they stay on the photo to-do list, but I’m still quite happy with what I got. The South Bank – even on a cold winter’s night – can put on a good show when it must.

HMS Belfast