Well, not great. Unfortunately things got off to a bad start – expectations were raised to an unholy level – when we fell in love with Georgian wreck. Oh, what a wreck! And what a weird location, tucked away as it was at the bottom of your garden-variety London map, down by places we knew (Kew) but also, truthfully, along a bit too much near places like Hounslow and Isleworth that we had never heard of and/or definitely never visited. But it was a proper beauty, an architectural Miss Havisham, all faded and decaying but with beautiful bones. Osteoporosis bones, but beautiful all the same. So we visited and spent way too long poring over printed plans, and researched the history and found out about schools and bus routes and spoke to the mortgage broker and visited again with the kids and Charlotte (wise house-buying-advisor) and mentally moved in. We offered, then offered again, and one more time, and then finally put in a terrifying offer which made us both feel panicky and sick but giddy and excited. As our final gambit on our last visit, Charlotte grabbed the agent’s face in her manicured hands and told him ‘Let these nice people have this house or I shall haunt you in your dreams’ or something close to that, which he apparently took on board.

So it was all going so well, until the mortgage lenders said NO WAY JOSE THAT PROPERTY IS FALLING DOWN and wouldn’t lend on it. And we were like ‘but come on – Mark is a builder! We will do it up! It’ll be worth a whole lot more and we can camp out on the third floor and all pitch in and the kids can help and we will host Tidy Up The Garden With Us parties and there’ll be music and pizza and we could slowly do it up and live in there forever and love it and the kids could return there with their own families and we could have the biggest Christmas tree in there and just imagine the cocktail parties!’ but they said no.

So it’s been massively downhill from there. We’ve put offers on about five houses since (all of them looking mean and small with so many period details ironed out). Why do people take sash windows out and replace with aluminium? Why are floorboards replaced, walls painted in greys, tiles all beige like a hotel room, overhead lights pockmarking smooth, lowered ceilings and making everyone look harsh? If there’s a fireplace still left intact it’ll be no longer in use. Doors are cheap, backyards are astro-turfed. It is so depressing.

So now we are scrapping over the Plan B (or C, D, or E, depending on whether you count all of the other offers we have had rejected over the last month – all of the new bus routes planned, schools researched, tube options dissected, floorpans squinted over, calls to the broker to ask for new mortgage plans, budgets revised, stamp duty calculated, real estate agents called and met, site visits to new postcodes, hours and hours on Rightmove, etc etc).

It seems we all want something a little different. The kids want to be near their friends and school, Mark wants something big and roomy and easy, I want an interesting house in a jazzy location close to the tube. My heart belongs to the Georgian wreck though and everything looks like a spotty ugly weakling cousin compared to it. My first love, Miss Havisham. She’s been sold to a developer. She’s been stolen from me and it still hurts. I check every day to see if the listing is there and it still is, with the painful words “SOLD STC” cruelly stamped at the top as if that isn’t the most upsetting tiny phrase in the whole world. And Mark tells me to move on. Move. Moving. Moving somewhere, but where?

Apparently we have until the summer before we will be kicked out of here, and I KNOW the sensible thing to do is to stop looking and wait until the new year but that’s like telling an alcoholic not to drink all of the free champagne. I can’t stop looking and nor can Mark, and we send each other ridiculous houses (I really believed we could make a go of the glorious rickety 10-bedroomed rectory in Shepperton but Mark said an hour and a half commute every morning would probably break us all) and so we snarl and mutter under our breath as we dismiss the other’s choices and go cross-eyed trying to find something that doesn’t make us both cry.

So how’s the house-hunting going?

Not very well.

In other news, my meme game remains strong. When I am not on Rightmove, I send a lot of HILARIOUS memes to my children, and to their credit, they usually send an emoji back so as not to seem like they are ignoring me. They say the memes I send are a bit Karen-like and already quite old, but they are kind and gentle to me about it, so it’s a win.

Photographs to shift the mood:

Pizza-gate. I have started being brilliant on Fridays by roasting a yoghurt and garlic-marinated whole lamb shoulder in the afternoon, or by tray baking chicken thighs, chorizo, red cabbage and Bold Bean Co chickpeas so that by Friday at 5, when everyone is hungry and I am half a bottle of cremant down, there is food ready for the hungry hordes and I don’t have to get horribly expensive takeaways. But this Friday, on the back of an impossibly busy December, I relented and got pizza delivered. But the bastards only delivered four, not five, and they refused to give me a refund. So I got all het up about it and posted about it on Instagram (such a fighter) and called them and left messages and generally spent way too much of my emotional energy on it, and then yesterday I got an email from Deliveroo asking for photographic evidence of the problem. Which, translated, means a photograph demonstrating the LACK OF A PIZZA. The absence of a pizza. The pizza-shaped hole where a pizza should have been. So I photographed the four boxes and pointed out in a very pass-ag fashion that photographing the absence of a thing was difficult to do and so my recycling pile would have to suffice.

No response yet. Note the hungry and sad-looking Casper in the background, wasting away from the lack of paid-for pizza slices:

Handsome sons. Not much to say except these are fine specimens and they would like the world to know they are not only single, but also ready to mingle:

My school photograph dug out for a work thing. Hand knitted mum jumper (thanks Jude) and really quite impressively ratty and mullety hair:

Remi decorating the tree very well indeed:

My handmade wreath (which only looks good because of the double bow and lots of help from the teacher):

Bookclub shot from last night. Amazing book by Percival Everett (My name is Not Sidney Poitier), wonderful food, too much fizzy wine, beautiful clever friends and me in a wedding dress because WHY NOT? I have nowhere to live quite soon so let’s party like it’s 1988 and I’m Madonna!