Birth of baby Luke

Good news from Kate. Her daughter gave birth to baby Luke at an unreasonable hour this morning whilst she dozed away in our spare room. Never mind - all are doing well.

I turn now to the vexed (and increasingly vexing) subject of Mars and Venus - or why men and women think so differently. This week our long-awaited maintenance work began - and immediately ran into the buffers. Our lovely, skilled workman goes randomly from room to room, filling and painting as he sees a problem. But each time he visits a room, he leaves a lovely trail of paint and filler dust, which then gets trampled into mats.

Why can't he see that he is wasting my time and money by randomly dirtying already-clean rooms? Why can't he work systematically on one or two rooms at a time, then finish them and let us clean and prepare them for the guests? He is treating the whole house as if it were a building site, whilst I am trying to run a business from the place. I shall have to speak to his boss before I lose my housekeeper over it.