Big day today.

Today the van comes out of the spray shop. Widows welded, seams welded, patched primed and painted. There is at once both excitement and fear. A colour perfect for one vehicle or thing may look utterly shite on another ... by 5pm I’ll know if we have to live with an expensive wrong choice. Garry says the colour is bright and not acid, he also says it’s not too green, and not too cream. Colour, shade and hue ... what a palaver, but better a bright slightly wrong yellow, than a tedious dirty white ... he says like a man whistling in the dark; whatever the outcome the work finishing has come at just the right time.

A quick call to the solicitors this morning or late afternoon should give us an idea of a moving date, and from this weekend forward we will be moving in three directions in preparation for completion: furniture to temporary home, Plants to my mothers, everything else to the lock up ... and a fridge/freezer to our friends in Wiltshire ... so that’s four ways, no three and a bit.

As I looked out the window of the train this morning, scanning the fields for, pheasant, deer, rabbits and birds general ... and looked at the insane profusion of plants all in leaf and blossom at the same time, it occurred to me that I haven’t really spent any quality time in the outdoors for fifteen months. It’s like (and I have to think of it like this), you’re saving it all up, to do lots of it when you finally get away.

Dealing with the damp in the house and motorhome last summer and autumn ate the year in great big chunks. It’s mid May already, my birthday has just past, June is two and a bit weeks away, and that’s nearly half a year gone. Yes it’s been cold and windy, and summer isn’t in the slightest bit interested in showing its full face yet (pessimist says expect a repeat of last summer). But still ... half a year gone? And I can count on two hands the number of times I’ve cycled or walked off the beaten track.

In Cyprus last week we tried to cram in a tonne of activities and nature watching. We didn’t do too bad, and we had some lucky “right place right moment” moments, but I’m still suddenly disappointed that I’ve realised it’s damn near June, and I’m pining for English nature through the window of a train on the way to work.

I think I need to take a step back, and look at my time management, and where maybe half days or hours I could have been grubbing through hedges and undergrowth got wasted on procrastinating or odds and sods that could have either waited ... or didn’t really need doing at all.

 At this late stage of the game, one gets the jitters ... about everything. The risk of chucking in the job, the risk of living in a tin can on wheels for months ... the risk that after all is said and done it doesn’t live up to expectations. The realisation that fifteen months have passed since the idea germinated and we are still stuck on the blocks, and that the life we had before has been put on hold.

I think I like giving myself a rough ride ... I'd get bored otherwise.