It's beginning to look a lot like...rubbish

Today's good news: the breakfast room is finished. The hundred and five year old cupboard doors have been dipped, stripped, undercoated and glossed. The rotten old skirting boards have been chucked out and replaced with shiny new ones. And the walls have been plastered, sized and papered to within an inch of their lives. Needless to say, Mrs H (chief paster of wallpaper) is quite pleased with Mr H (paper-hanger-in-chief). Tomorrow the pictures go back up, then that's the lot for this year. We wind down (or possibly up) towards Christmas.

Those of you who have (sort of) followed this blog for a while will have noticed the less than subtle changes that have overcome it as time has rolled on. The first Director General of the BBC, Lord Reith, famously stated that the purpose of the organization was to educate, inform and entertain. Whilst not seeking to make any kind of comparison between a part time council employee cum morris dancer and the First Baron Reith, I started blogging around four years ago in the (I now realise) mistaken belief that I could, perhaps, aspire to some of those lofty Reithian precepts. How dare I presume attempt to educate you, my dear, but admittedly very small, audience! You, who, I am sure, already knew the recipe for recreating Roman fish sauce. You, who have probably written more poems in emulation of Sir John Betjeman than I have had hot dinners. You, who have been made far sicker than I by far worse repasts than a tub of jellied eels.

But at least, at the outset, the blog had a sense of purpose. Over the intervening months and years, I have to say, sadly, that this sense of purpose has fallen away, to be replaced by what I can only describe as stream of consciousness drivel. It is the equivalent of an inebriated tramp, weighed down by supermarket shopping bags filled with old newspapers, muttering softly to himself as he shuffles along a poorly lit alleyway in a corner of a sink estate in south east London. In the rain. And I'm not going to do it any more. Well, not much.

 Perhaps, now I have some extra time on my hands, I should find something useful to do. Like learning Anglo Saxon. Or drinking wine. Or perhaps doing both together. Perhaps I could finish my partially completed sitcom, 'Pardon my Jaguar', or even 'Postman Pat's Bloody Day', a post-apocalyptic (geddit?) view of a Royal Mail employee in Cumbria...