We have got clean sheets again.

It’s all happening here, I expect you turned to these pages before you even looked at the newspaper to see if the Iranians have done anything else to upset Donald Trump whilst we were all sleeping. Clean sheets in Windermere, it’s as captivating an opening as that old thing about best of times worst of times.

When we were studying they told us that the murder should really happen in the first line, because modern readers don’t have an attention span any longer than that, and if you wait until halfway down Page Two you will have lost them. I think you ought to be proud of yourselves, readers, clearly your attention span is magnificent, ten years of diaries and I still haven’t got to the interesting bit.

There weren’t any astonishingly interesting bits today, actually, just a collection of fairly dull bits, walking dogs, laundry and catering. It all took rather longer than I had hoped it would, and finished up in a frantic rush just before Mark came home, the sort of activity that your grandmother used to call More Haste Less Speed which inevitably finishes up with you tripping over the dogs and swearing a lot.

Mark had been at the camper van where he has been building the steps to get in and out of it. He thought that these were probably the most important bit because then we will just be able to get in and out like normal people instead of clambering up to a waist-height floor with an undignified hop, step and a jump, and then having get out again to hurl the dogs in every time we get sick of them crying with left-behind grief on the ground outside.

We are not being dog sympathisers at the moment anyway, because Rosie has been eating something in the Library Gardens which has made her sick. We finally caught her at it last night, it was an abandoned bag full of gone-off fish and chips, and she has been scarfing it down at every possible opportunity whenever we have taken them for a quick emptying.

Mark put it in the litter bin, to her great distress, but we are fed up of getting up to discover horrid puddles of gone-off fish flavoured dog vomit, so she is out of luck.

We are trying to get on with the camper van at the moment, because we have set ourselves the imaginary and impossible target of getting it finished by Christmas. This is just about as close to impossible as an impossible thing can be, not least because work in the North Sea has just about dried up at the moment, due to a combination of vile weather and Ed Miliband’s policies, and we are not going to be very flush with van-repairing cash until things pick up. This is all right, because there are lots and lots of things that Mark can do in the meantime, and it is nice to have him at home, but it is not going to improve our finances very much, not least because the taxi rank is very quiet as well.

I am actually enjoying this very much indeed. I have got lots of time for drinking tea and thinking about things at work, and am sitting around in bed drinking coffee and contemplating the universe every morning.

Mostly what I am thinking about is upholstery. I have been learning from the mighty Internet how I can make a padded headboard with buttons, and am now absolutely dying to have a go.

I am quite sure that it will be lots more interesting to put clean sheets on the sort of bed that has got a padded headboard with buttons.

I will let you know when I get to it.