I’m lying full length on the kitchen floor scraping up some very old and incredibly well stuck linoleum tiles. I was on my knees until my feet went numb. Our new collie pup thinks the scraper is for catching and I am for climbing on and biting. Those sort of playful puppy bites that leave punctures in your skin and tears in your eyes. Tom Waits croons at me from the CD player.  I take regular swigs from a glass (well, a Bonne Maman jam jar actually – stemmed glasses fall over too easily) of wine by my side. It’s a regular Saturday night in for this single Mum.

The weather has turned wild and wet so I have abandoned my garden for the time being, in favour of some “housework”. At the moment this does not involve duster and polish but ladder, hammer, screwdriver, scraper and paintbrush.  The walls are in good condition so I can get straight to the fun of painting on some bright colours. Capsicum red, Wedgwood blue, emerald green and Saharan gold. Shocking taste, I know, but you need some hot colours inside when it’s fridgey-cold out. 

Miles wants an entirely underwater scene in his bedroom, with the water’s surface up at his loft-bed level (so that he can breathe). I’m not sure that my artistic skills are quite up to bottlenose dolphins, basking sharks and giant turtles (no, we are not going to be geographically correct with our choice of species). Luckily my nieces painted on a fabulously pink giant octopus and a fearsomely toothed shark during their visit, so we’re off to a good start. The bed must of course become a boat. A ferryboat or a fishing boat – we haven’t decided yet.

True to form, Dale and Fenning cannot agree between pillarbox red and lime green for their shared bedroom (I made the mistake of allowing them free choice from the colour charts). At five and four years old respectively, arguing is a favourite sport for these two brothers. Their eloquence astounds me at times as they home in on the opposite extremes of a subject with all the wit and alacrity of debating society leaders. At other times of course they rapidly resort to whacking each other over the head like true Vikings (as I suspect debating society members would do if it were allowed). To put a stop to this particular argument I am doing two walls of each colour and I’ll just have to wear sunglasses whenever I go in there.

As soon as the weather clears I am back outside. There is just so much to do and I would rather be out than in. So inside we have half-painted walls and rooms without doors, but outside we have a thoroughly dug veggie plot, pruned gooseberry bushes and mown grass. On Sunday morning I shift a tonne of coal, from the yard where it was delivered, into the byre next to the house. The boys help for about three minutes then decide a game of hide and seek with the puppy would be much more fun. Thanks guys. On a Sunday morning in Edinburgh I would have been munching croissant, sipping café latte and delving into the papers while the boys watched a video. Some changes, then.