It's been strange here the past few days. Sophie has been away - for three whole days and two whole nights. A school trip, to this place. The kids spent their time wading in streams and building shelters out of branches and running around like wild things. She loved it. We missed her, though. It's lovely to have her home again; it just didn't feel right with only two of the children here.

Other good things that happened today :

I felt like I really helped a couple of my students today. Sometimes I feel like I'm wasting my time and not achieving anything useful; today made up for that.

The sun actually shone this afternoon, so I was able to walk the whole way home with the sun on my face. A real treat.

The fruit trees are all in blossom. It is almost unnerving seeing the trees come into leaf; the changes happen so quickly that I can see a difference between when I leave home in the morning and when get home in the afternoon. The hedges in this picture (which I took as I walked to work this morning) were completely brown 10 days ago. (The buildings you can see in the distance are the school boarding houses, by the way).

Our broker came round this evening and we nailed down the final details of our mortgage. It seems that we have got a mortgage that will suit us very well.

Not good things :

We haven't been able to find out where the seller is with regard to finding a new house, so we don't know when our moving date is likely to be, or even whether the seller is likely to renege on the deal altogether. The joys of the English home-buying system.

We have no faith in our estate agent. He looks about fourteen, has an extremely furtive, shifty demeanour, and I think that this is the first house he has ever sold.

The school definitely won't let me do the graduate teaching programme through them. The Head of English is just not willing to take on the extra work, apparently. This is a real pity as it would have been so convenient for me. I'm applying for a place through the University of Brighton, but I know there are limited places available, so I may well be unsuccessful.

However, Monday is a public holiday here so I feel very cheerful despite all this. I'm not sure what we're going to do but I do know that it's going to involve sleeping late on at least one of the three days.