Today has been a much more cheerful day. R spent it in his favourite way - underneath the van with a hammer in his hand and a few tacks in his mouth, installing insulation. With the added attraction of having to wear a face mask because of the glass fibre (very eco!). Extra layers were put under our bedroom to keep us cosy.

We have our own robin! I will try to get a photo tomorrow. We are spending the whole weekend fitting out our van, and I had the very nice job of finding all the stuff we need in the garage. All sorts of old friends came to light. Plus trying to rescue some of my houseplants, which have suffered a bit from the cold. Fingers crossed.

Anyway, a bloke (I have realised that there are a lot of blokes in this blog) came yesterday to auger the ground - dig out soil down to a few metres with a thing like a cross between a corkscrew and a very long apple corer. He took two cores - the first one was very exciting - 2 metres of sand with clay underneath it, but the second was much poorer, lots of clay and a high water table. So he recommended putting in deep concrete or steel posts called piles into each corner. More elegant solution. Much less earth to cart off site (and pay to have disposed). Probably cheaper and quicker. But the piles will be 10m deep and this may have implications for Sthapatya Veda. So we await advice on that. Otherwise we dig 1.5 - 2.5m deep trenches.

A second bloke connected up our twin gas bottles (in a tasteful red) to the caravan yesterday afternoon and checked our gas cooker, fire and water heater.

Another bloke, bloke number three, came today to quote for giving us a hardstanding for our cars and the builders' vans - the basis of our future car park - and we tried to persuade him to take away the tree stumps. These tree stumps are starting to haunt my dreams - they lie in a very slodgy heavy way right in front of our new shed. One is diseased and it would of course be the biggest one, weighing in at over 5 tons. We are having trouble persuading anyone to get rid of them for us - talk about the elephant in the room.

A picture of the tree stumps seen across the car park and definitely in the way of the shed, not to mention the hardstanding. The tree surgeon can't even cut them up because the stones and soil mess up his chain saw, we can't bury them because of the diseased one and a bonfire to burn them would probably bring out the Fire Brigade.

Now all we need to move into our caravan is the Electricity Board. Pray for no storms or floods or lightning strikes or rat infestations in power stations or sudden cases of metal fatigue in pylons, or anything that would count as an emergency as far as the EB is concerned, and delay the connection. How hard can it be? As far as I can see they just come along and put two wires together.

We move along. Tomorrow the fitting out of the kitchen. Mustn't get too excited about the caravan and get distracted from the main plot, but at last we are living in our own property which has to be a cause for celebration.