We sat together, my beloved and me, in our warm upstairs room, looking up over the hills behind the House, as the cat, bemused, looked back at us from its perch on the windowsill. The setting sun fired the sky through the dark clouds, and we thought, this is our life here, here in our back garden, here with our ageing toys and our geriatric familiar. Downstairs the friendly builder was making banging and drilling and grinding noises, muffled and removed.

We had arrived at a resolution of a renovation issue that had bedevilled us since we embarked on the odyssey some 10 months ago. It was looking very much likely that precisely one year from the St Patrick’s Day when we took possession of this house, we shall be experiencing a Kitchen fit for our own purpose, our own lifestyle. So, as the fading light from the sunset turned Kali cat into even more of a cipher than she usually is, a darkened silhouette around which life resonates, we smiled at each other. It had been a climactic day.

About a week hence, when all the new kitchen components have arrived on site, we shall pack ourselves up in Harry Hymer and hie us away to a campsite by a long beach, where we’ll hope to amble along in quiet peace. The builder can get on with the stripping out of the old kitchen to embark on the new installation, and we will expect to enjoy a relaxing interlude filled with contemplative joy, after the long wait when our hopes, many times, had been dashed.

We’re creating the nerve centre of the house, and though it’s mundane, it’s a pre-occupation that has filled our minds with worry for many months. Will there be space for the grandsons to enjoy their breakfast, and will the new space convey the opportunity for instructive chats with family members, while the bustle of food preparation goes on around us? Will we each be able to access utensils, cookware, plates and bowls, bread tins, in this kitchen consciously designed for the convenience of older, less flexible folks? Will, in other words, things work in the way we want them to? That’s the ambition, and we’ve finally been able to expedite toward a fruition. We just have to get through the next few weeks of installation.

Meanwhile, the friendly gardener has been working like a dervish whirlwind on the back garden, and our own exterior job, as the days warm, will be to tidy the outside patio with all of its assorted plant pots and accumulated detritus. It feels, at this time of life, even through the various health issues that do accompany older age, that we are blessed. When all the interior jobs are finished, we’ll get the builder to complete his sojourn with us by constructing a solid barbecue out of some of the granite building stones retrieved from the internal supporting wall we’ve just had taken out. Our family space will spill out from the living room, under a new veranda roof, to engage with the garden.

With these prosaic matters filling our minds, it was a wonderful, quiet interlude, a vignette in time, to watch the sun set over the hills beyond, and to remind the cat, and ourselves, that she and we too are loved.