Life in an open house for birds and elements requires a tower of strength

IT’S all very well for you, so it is. You can sleep in on a bank holiday.

You can slug it in the bed on a Saturday or Sunday. You have the life of Reilly, so you do. You don’t have to get up at dawn to sweep up the dead mice off your sitting room floor and wipe the pigeon blood off the fridge before visitors arrive.

Not that I’m complaining. Having your home open to the public at weekends can serve as a great corrective to being a natural slob, which I am. One of the completely new phrases my husband bought into my life, a few decades back, was “dressing the bed.” Now, admittedly, I had heard the more citified version of it — “making the bed” — frequently articulated by my mother in a high-pitched nagging tone, but it never really took.