The Best Things About...

... coming home.

1. No mouse family waiting to greet us as we opened the front door. Not sure if it / they have gone for good, but there has been no sign since we got back. Which is, I must say, a great relief. I had imagined them installing new locks, moving the furniture around, and hanging pictures of great aunt Maude whilst we were away.

2. An almost empty fridge. We're normally stocked-up to the max in this department, catering for almost every eventuality, be it beans on toast for the boys and their friends, or a visit from the Archbishop of Canterbury for high tea, but it's actually quite liberating to open the door and see acres of gleaming empty space. And it's a cast-iron excuse to get a take-away.

3. The Great British Summer has finally turned up. Kensington's garden squares are lush, green, and bursting with buds and bird song. I almost didn't mind getting dew on my Campers when I took the boys out for a kick-about first thing this morning... Almost.

4. Coming back to a car that had been broken into. No, hear me out here. Every cloud has a silver lining - and the consequent one in this case was that we needed to call the AA out to charge the battery, as the vandals who tried to rip out the radio managed to disconnect some cable so that when I turned the engine on this morning, it had less life in it than my hair after a 16 hour flight. Why was this a good thing? Well, Husband decided to challenge my assumption that pouring water directly over a car engine (follow this link for more info if you want to know what on earth I'm talking about) is a Bad Thing. He took the opportunity to ask the AA man - in my presence - to verify his claim that the subsequent problems with the spark plugs had nothing to do with the Water in the Engine Incident (as it will now be known). Guess who was right?

I hate to gloat, but... RESULT.

I'm off now to try and get some sleep before the Boys wake up at 3am demanding cereal with menaces. Needless to say, jet lag is not one of the best things about coming home...