WHAT a busy weekend, and so much to do in and out of the house. Weeding, drain cleaning (yuk), pruning, mending bits which fell off in the last storm, ditto picking up rubbish which has flown round the garden and cleaning up a lot of bits and pieces clawed out of dustbin bags by someone's cats. Surely not mine? And that was just Friday. By the end of the second day of sunshine I had aches in muscles in places I didn't know I had muscles. Sunday dawned disappointingly wet but this wasn't going to put off the Easter egg hunt which has by now become a tradition. I often think we bought a house with a large garden in order to carry out this tradition, which is a hell a lot of money to pay for a once-a-year gallop round the bushes. But what the hell. My daughter organises this, taking a secret trip around the garden in the morning (we have to pin my grandson in a room without windows overlooking the garden during this operation) and then sits down to write a series of clues which would have baffled Einstein, let alone a small child and his teenaged sister. They are, I have to say, ingenious, and when explained carefully in words of small syllables, do make sense – eventually. But without adult help it is unlikely that anyone would find even one egg, and in previous years this has been the case with the eggs turning up looking rather sad and green months later when the leaves fell off the trees. This year they were, by some miracle, all found and peace reigned. By the end of the day my grandson proudly announced that he had had chocolate for every meal, which he had. I expect there will be tut tutting among some of you, but as long as it's only once or twice a year nobody really suffers and he makes up the vitamins the next day. In the evening, after a nice meal, we all sat down and read our favourite poems from a new book my daughter had just bought. This isn't quite so pompous as it may sound. It was mainly to avoid playing Trivial Pursuit, which my daughter always wins because she knows all the answers in advance and which usually produces a certain amount of sulking. And, boy, can I sulk when I want to. It always amuses me when people are asked to choose their favourite poem or piece of literature. It's a bit like anyone who, when asked what they watch on television, never admit to the soaps, Stars in Their Eyes or 100 Most Embarrassing Moments on the tele. They always say Panorama, BBC Question Time and worthy programmes about the history of the world or something with David Attenborough. So nobody would admit to liking The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck or rather racey limericks and choose something from Keats, Tennyson or Elizabeth Barrett Browning. It got slightly raucous towards the end, and we all enjoyed reciting Macavity, my favourite cat poem and oh so true, and Alfred Noyes' The Highwayman and my daughter read the poem When I am Old I Shall Wear Purple, while looking purposefully at me. A nice evening, we only needed a pianola and we could has passed for a Victorian family. But without the swear words.

And so to this week when the bathroom is due to be tiled, which means we'll all be crowding into one tiny shower room. I've never attempted tiling and never will. Tiling a floor is bad enough, and I've done that and, as I've written before, ended up with tiles stuck just about everywhere, including my feet so I looked like an Eskimo on a snow shoe shuffle. And why is it that while the things don't stick to the floor at all it takes brute force to get them off your shoes? The thing about any kind of tiling is that it looks so simple, only having to deal with square tiles, until you find that the walls are never quite straight and one line of tiles never quite reaches to the end so you have to cut slivers off them, and your fingers. Choosing the tiles meant the adults conferring and coming to some agreement. Simple, you may think, but negotiations really needed Kofi Annan in the end because we all had different ideals. Mine originally was to leave the old tiles alone and patch them up, but that was firmly vetoed with cries of horror. Not able to face a trip round any sort of tile store or department, I let them go and get samples. After a considerable amount of time, long enough for them to have tiled the Albert Hall, they returned and I was dragged up to the bathroom to compare the two samples they had brought back. I was going to get a lot of choice, obviously. The conversation went like this. 'Come and look at the tiles. We'll hold them up and you can choose the one you like best.' Pause while I dredge up some interest and look at the two tiles and two mouldings which are apparently to go around the top. Sample one is white with grey marks all over it. I think it looks like bathrooms look after small children have been let loose in them, or alternatively would look like if the cats could walk up walls (they do try), the moulding is greyish and would look more at home in a Russian public lavatory. I don't say any of this. Sample two is white with a whitish pattern and its accompanying moulding is a nice line of dolphins. Very suitable for a bathroom, easy to clean and I like it. I say so. There is a bit of a deafening silence. 'You don't like the other one?' I say I prefer the white and the dolphins. 'What's wrong with the other one? I try to be diplomatic because I can see what's coming. 'The other one's quite nice but I think the dolphins are very bathroomy (Oh God I'm starting to sound like Laurence Llewelynn whatsit). 'Can't you just imagine the grey when they're up with the top in place, won't it look smart?' Through gritted teeth I say no, I didn't think it would look smart because it will look like a Russian loo with cat paw prints all over it and I like the nice dolphins and if they didn't want my opinion they shouldn't have asked me in the first place. And so on. Suffice to say the grey cat prints went back in the box and so did the white tiles. Later they appeared back with a new set of tiles. No choice this time, although I did like the mosaic effect and the top bit was still the little dolphins. So all was well. Once the tiling is up the bath is in need of enamelling. We have a nice big old fashioned white enamel bath. A bath you can get into and lie down in without lots of bits of you exposed and wide enough to feel comfortable and not like a plug in a plughole. The only trouble with enamel is that it does suffer over the years from dropped bottles and things and gets chipped so does need occasional re-enamelling. This doesn't come cheap but, in my opinion, is worth it. We've had a couple of quotes, one from a firm which was 'by royal appointment' which may account for the size of the quote. I don't think 'by royal appointment' is really so important these days. I dare say that at one time people liked to boast that their new loo was made by the same firm that provided comfort for royal bottoms, but I doubt it today. We've had a few discussions on cutting the cost and doing the enamelling ourselves. This sounds a good idea, and I dare say that things have improved over the years but I do remember that my late mother-in-law was inspired to paint her bath a fetching shade of duck-egg blue after seeing an ad for enamel paint for baths. Duck-egg blue turned into something slightly more garish when applied and although it looked fairly good when finished, the first time anyone had a bath the enamel detached itself and became stuck to their bottom and other bits floated menacingly around like small blue sharks.Within a week the bath was piebald and no amount of touching up would help. I don't fancy a blue, or any other colour, bottom so it'll have to be by royal blue appointment after all.