Well, I've had my wellness MOT and I'm pleased to report that I am still breathing. My lung function test was, in fact, excellent. Alas, however, my weight is too high and my waist is too girthful (although my waist to hip ratio is good). My blood pressure is too high, as is my cholesterol level. Although she was very pleased with my HDL reading. It seems I am to reduce my total cholesterol levels and retain my HDL. Not absolutely sure how I'm supposed to do that. I don't suppose having quiche for dinner that night helped, either! It looks like it's lettuce and rice cakes for me from now on!

Actually, she seemed quite disappointed that she hadn't seen me pre-Lent. She quite fancied having tracked my progress from whatever the pre-Lent levels were. She'll just have to make to with the Easter level!!!

The Builder's plumber pals (who look remarkably like cheery hobbits) have been and pretty much destroyed the bathroom. The toilet remains. As does the sink. The bath however, is now in the driveway. In order to turn off the water to the bathroom, we had to turn it off at the mains in the road. This meant we also turned off the water to the whole of the even side of Bridge Street. With no warning! Fortunately, it wasn't for long. They're coming back tomorrow night to start putting the new stuff in. They're going to turn the water off again. This time I've put notes through people's letter boxes to warn them. And they're going to put isolators on the taps so we can turn the water off in future without bringing drought to our neighbours!

The Builder has been plastering the bathroom walls, so far with the preparatory stuff. I shall be very interested to see how this all works. I, left to plan it all for myself, would have done the plastering, painting, tiling and flooring before putting the bath and stuff in. The Builder assures me that this would have been a very foolish thing to do. I just can't quite visualise how you tile under a bath once it's in place (it's a free standing bath with feet, not one that's boxed in) or how you plaster and paint behind a "laddered" radiator. However, it has to be assumed he knows what he's doing. He and his plumber hobbits fit bathrooms and kitchens for a living!

But all this means that our on the waggonness only lasted two days. You can't possibly plaster bathrooms without liberal applications of Real Ale. We shall resume waggonning next week, after the May Day bank holiday on Monday.

If everyone I know who has had flu-type symptoms of varying degrees of severity this week had followed government guidelines and rung NHS Direct - the service would have been brought to its knees! I've had mild flu-type symptoms all week. Taffa has been proper poorly. Lots of people at work have been off with similar symptoms. I'm off today because I got fed up with it - the prolonged burst of coughing at half six this morning suggested that me and my slight fever would be better off at home drinking tea and eating toast. But at what point do you stop thinking "I have an irritating virus which will go away in time" and start wondering "Might these symptoms mean I have contracted a notifiable disease?"

It crosses my mind that it was three years ago this week that we picked up the keys to The Sidings. Three years! Gosh - but that went fast