Chateau Gee, as regular readers will recall, is a small and somewhat neglected 1930s ex-Council semi in the seaside town of Cromer. For the past year we’ve been striving to turn it into a haven for graceful living, but we reached the antapotheosis of our nadir a couple of weeks ago when

a) it was clear that bare floorboards, painted white, do not mix with a heavy-duty lifestyle involving small children and dogs;

b) the walls, after the many visits of the electrician, who had channeled cheap’n’nasty surface-mounted conduits into them, looked like a bad day in Gaza City, and

c) to facilitate decoration and the installation of new laminate floors (ongoing), we’d given our dilapidated sofas away on Freecycle, so had nothing comfy to sit on.

To cut a long story short, the many researches of the North Norfolk Sofa Research Institute (co-PI’s, Mr and Mrs Gee) got us a nice and suitably robust sofa and accompanying chair from John Lewis which, after some delivery snafu’s I needn’t go into, were all installed yesterday.

Oh, the bliss. I hadn’t realized quite how much of our lives we spend on sofas, so I arrived home with a bottle of wine, whereupon Mrs Gee and I, with our dog Heidi, took up residence on said sofa and watched Kirstie’n’Phil followed by Grand Designs. Truly, this is Property Porn for the Middle-Aged and Middle-Class, but to be honest, I’ll watch anything with Kirstie Allsopp in it.

But I digress.

The re-writes of The Sigil (discussed below) have got to such a pitch that I routinely blast out 3,000 words per day on my commute, and that any time I spend that isn’t writing seems somewhat monochrome, time spent between fixes.

Mrs Gee, who has seen these signs before, counselled me to go away and write the wretched thing and not come home until I’ve got it out of my system. So the week after next I am going to a Secret Location [not so secret any more, is it?—Ed] and return home, flushed and happy, with another 50,000 words. By then I’ll have all the words I need for the whole book, though not necessarily in the right order, but much should have been achieved, and I’ll have attained, I hope, the satisfaction of the protagonists in the following joke which, for reasons of topic (and taste) isn’t really suitable for Brian Clegg’s Science Jokes thread.

A buff Mars and a voluptuous Venus have been gazing longingly at each other for a century. They are statues, placed facing each other, on each side of a path in a municipal park. Being statues, they cannot move and so are unable to consummate their desires.

Jupiter, King of the Gods, takes pity on them, and sends Mercury, fleet-footed messenger, with a message. Mercury lands on the path between them, and, taking an outsize stopwatch from the interstices of his flying-toga, announces:

“Jupiter, King of the Gods, in his infinite mercy and wisdom, and so on, and so forth, has decreed that you can have one hour in human form, starting … wait for it, wait for it … NOW!”

Mars and Venus are instantly struck with the mother of all pins-and-needles, but, rubbing themselves down, they climb gingerly down from their plinths, hold hands, and – blushing – retreat behind a nearby laurel hedge, whence emanate much excited laughter and screams of joy and delight.

They emerge, flushed, and still holding hands, some forty minutes later. Mercury is still standing there, with his outsize stopwatch. “You still have twenty minutes in human form,” he says. “Use them wisely – use them well.”

On hearing this, Venus turns to Mars and says, coyly -

“All right: this time, you hold the pigeon, and I’ll s**t on its head”.