Well, once again Himself is tickling the dominoes here, while Jo sits on tne floor shearing the fern and the cats try to eat bits off it.

This was the year of the Rebuilding of the Kitchen, a period memorable for Cheese and Nail Omelette and other treats. First you choose, with great care, exactly what the new kitchen should be like. Measure the plates, the pots, the pails, the cats. Count the children. Then, having obtained the parts, you take out everything from the kitchen - pots and pans, brushes and pails, cats and pictures, glasses and cats - and try to put it under the dining-room table: neatly at first, then hurriedly, and at last desperately. Then you start building the new kitchen, or rather the builders start: and then the whole process has to stop, because the wrong bits have been supplied, and we remain stationary for more time than seems credible.

"Have you seen the butter?"
"Isn't it in the fridge?"
"Very likely, but where's the fridge?"
"Oh, I think you turn left at the piano and go on down three. Near the cat." Fragment from Green talk during this period. At last the new kitchen is ready: good heavens, where on earth are we going to put everything? For weeks afterwards boxes emerge from the dining-room. Surely their contents must have a home. After all, everything fitted into the old one ... (The cats, of course, already have a space to themselves The last to leave the old, the ffrst to eat in the new. Swing out the old cat, swing in the new.. ?) We believe this is Jo's chef d'oeuvre, at least until such time as we move into the Ally Pally¹ and she really gets going.

A progressive year, indeed. Not only the kitchen has been rebuiIt. From the Rock Road Street Party Ad Hoc Country Dance Band to the Ring of Brodgar: from proud owners of two spider plants to the terrified trimmers of lascata abundiflora mimiscens: from Magdelene to Peterhouse: and, strictly for the Beasts, from 2 stone to 2.1 stone (each).

Perhaps we should start with the The Rock Road Street Party Ad Hoc Country Dance Band, also known as Pop and the Weasel, i.e. Thos and Martin: the sound of electric flute and accordion, belted out over the local roads while all around us hopped manfully in the cold of an English July evening. At once haunting and authentic, redolent of pastoral sheep rocking round the sundial, indeed so ethnic that we were rather hoping English Heritage would nationalise us. First time T's played electric flute. Bottom notes as big as buses, top notes knocking the larks sideways. But before he could count his laurels Martin had metamorphosed into Tenpenny Bit, a ceilidh band led by Fingers Fiona the Furious Fiddler. Tenpenny Bit is an Irish jig which luckily sounds quite good played at a speed to rival Concorde. And then, after a single gig, half that band left Cambridge - and our hero leapt to found the Ring of Brodgar with the stayers. (as all our readers will know, the Ring of Bridgar is in the Orkneys, carved with Viking runes and merry messages in Ogham script. Anyone know what they though? Our source books don't reveal.) R of B has notched up two gigs to date (paid!) and has an enthusiastic following of one groupie. It's a start. How many albums needed before we can buy Jo the Ally Pally for Christmas?

And the spider plants? Ah there's a transformation. They used to be all the greenery we had to be proud of (except ourselves, of course). True, there was a garden, but the score there was Nature 5, Nurture 1. Now we have remodelled the garden, too. I fear it wasn't as successful as the kitchen, but still, it has a fine water course and some promising shrubs and plants, and everyone says that in a year or two it will took much more like a garden and less like a lot of woodchips studded with occasional plants. The cats, of course, love it, and leap to help us when we garden. (It's pulling out grass they specially like: we pull, they nibble.) The problem, of course, is that the garden designer we employed chose far more plants than we ever knew existed, so that we have had to be equipped with a map and come autumn we were picking our gingerly way among the shrubs-"Isn't this frascati potabilis? Shouldn't we be pruning it?" "No, I think it's scipio africanus, better not annoy it," and so on. Interesting note (to some): photographs of building the additional chunk of house, last year, worked well enough, with unexpectedly dramatic views of scaffolding, men heaving, etc., but photographs of half-made gardens look just terrible.

Owen has been occupying his evenings very responsibly and profitably by waiting. Many an old joke about being paid to wait around comes home to roost in the Cambridge colleges, stingy employers of teenage labour in their halls. After a spell at Magdelene, he's moved onto Peterhouse: much more modern - why. they even have electric light in the dining hall! One can't help wondering, looking at the dingy college kitchens, whether this employment has created his latest interest, Dungeons and Dragons, a fantasy game for those with energetic fancies. Looking over recent years (Judge Dredd, Oink, etc) it seems only natural, maybe inevitable, that he should find his fantasy self charging through wastes in pursuit of orcs and trolls. I suspect those hideous wastes look much like our garden when half-rebuilt. (Maybe it's orcs we've got, not cats7)

I'll tell you what's more peaceful: a weekend on a canal. Highly recommended. Even in the April snow, even with two families totalling four teenagers (and an accordion), even having my camera stolen the first night in the pub. Stern grey herons policing the fish, back views of villages, shapely brick warehouses studded with windows, and a wonderful glide over an aqueduct, queening it over the countryside below. Just the right note to end on.

Happy New Year and may your Christmas ring through the rafters. Or in Owen-speak, "May thine honour be fulfactuated to its valorious utmost with the strangely, yet uncompromisingly inevitable mirth-making of the winter solstice jubilations!"

¹The Alexandra Palace to you.