Finally, I have found the time to get my servers running in our new house in Cambridge. Yes: we have moved! After about a year of fairly serious looking (during which we got to know the M11 fairly well) and a couple of false starts, we completed on our 1930s end-terrace in early November. Immediately, we got the builders in to make the two downstairs rooms into one, and the decorators to remove the ubiqitous blown-vinyl wallpaper in favour of various almost-whites everywhere – inluding the floorboards as we’d had all the carpet removed.
With stunning naivety, we arranged with the (woefully inept, it transpired) removal company to move in three weeks later. Of course, the builders overran and the decorators were backed up behind them. We ended up moving in, with all our stuff and with Isa’s mum and sister staying, to a house full of brick dust and acro-jacks. 
I’d spent the previous week going up to Cambridge almost daily, sometimes with Dedi, trying to move thinga along: stripping wallpaper, clearing rubble, doing some wiring, and desperately trying to make it habitable. And failing. It was bearable for an ex-squatter such as I, but for Isa, with a six-month-old Neve and a demanding three-year-old, it was impossible. For four days, she gamely made a go of it with the help of Nonna and Dedi but, once they’d gone, the situation was impossible and I drove the family to my parents’ in Somerset, returning alone to continue the battle.
It was two weeks before they returned, a few days before christmas, to a house still unfinished. I think the final coat went on the kitchen floor a day before xmas eve.