Beautiful sunny day today, so we visited Chepstow Castle. It is so strange to look out from the castle and realise that people looking out from the castle 700 years ago would have seen the same view we were looking at - the same curve of the river, the same hills ... I am enjoying learning a bit more about English history; at the moment I'm still pretty ignorant about what happened when, but I'm hoping to remedy that over the next few years.

We enjoyed our day today, but I am very tense about the house we want to rent. I'm nervous that it won't work out. Or at least, won't work out in time. The person we asked to be our referee said that he'd received a hugely long and complicated form to fill out; since he hasn't got that back to them yet I can't see how they'll be able to let us know tomorrow whether we can have the house ... Ugh. We were feeling optimistic on Friday, so we went ahead and organised movers for this coming Thursday - hope we don't have to cancel them ...

I just cannot wait to move into more comfortable accomodation. It's been an awfully long time that we've been living out of suitcases. And while we are very, very, very grateful to be able to have used this house for this transition period, it's really not very comfortable. A lot more comfortable than camping would have been, and a lot more comfortable than being stuck in a tiny hotel room would have been, but still - not that comfortable. It's a pain that the hot water in the kitchen doesn't work, for instance, so that we have to boil water in the kettle when we do the washing up. And that the water pressure in the shower is so pathetic that getting clean is a rather shivery, chilly affair. And that big swathes of the house are still under construction, so there are tools and bags of plaster and buckets of paint and bits of sandpaper lying around, all of which makes for a rather dusty, building-site-like atmosphere. Oh, and that the oven doesn't work, and the ancient, cavernous microwave scares us, so we've been eating things that cook easily on one little gas burner. Let's just say we're sick of pasta and salad. I want an oven, and I want my own pans, and I want - desperately - my coffee press. There is a coffee maker in the kitchen here, but the inside was so hideously, sick-makingly, horrendously nasty (and it takes a lot for me to get queasy) that we hid it at the back of a cupboard so that we didn't have to look at it. Stronger people might have attacked it with bleach or something but we are cowards.

So. I'm going to be on tenterhooks till we hear if we've got the house.