Unless you have struck a particularly good deal when you bought your new home, the chances are that it didn’t come with any curtains and your back garden consisted of a pile of rocks, broken bricks, cigarette butts and a sprinkling of soil. That leaves two pressing goals in life – get some curtains and get the garden sorted out in time for summer. If you are particularly skilled and motivated, then you can fit curtains yourself and create yourself a wonderful garden. If you are not skilled and have no inclination to get mud under your fingernails, then you need to call in some help. I called in some help.

First, the curtains. We called 3 companies who could visit our home, measure our windows and give us a quote. Within 24 hours of making the calls, all three had visited and provided us with a quote. We then placed our order a few days later and most of the curtains (well, roman blinds actually) have now been fitted.

Now for the garden. We called 10 landscape gardeners. 5 didn’t answer the phone and didn’t have any answer machine, 4 had answer machines on which I left a message, and I actually managed to speak to the other one. A week later only 3 of the messages had resulted in replies (which came several days after the messages were left) and so we had 4 gardeners booked to visit our house. Not a single one of them turned up. Only one even bothered to call beforehand to let us know. Ordinarily I would tell the lot of them that we are not interested in employing their services, but it’s not like we have a queue of gardeners keen to take our money. So instead I’m waiting at home again for one of them to visit. I’m not very hopeful.

In gadget news, I officially no longer own The Greatest Toaster in the Entire Universe. Actually, I do still have my toaster, but I was gutted to find a newer model in the latest Argos catalogue that keeps your toast warm indefinitely in addition to the orgasmic lowering/raising action of my model. I’ve cried myself to sleep every night since.