Grey.

Still mild with a light sea mist in the air. At first we could see the low clouds forming below the hilltops then eventually everything turned grey and the rain beagn to fall in ernest.

Last night we had a text telling us the builders would be here in the morning to start putting in the ventillation for the loft. 'Morning' means any time from 8.00 so I was woken by the alarm at 7.30 which I'm not used to. In the end the lads didn't arrive until 10.00 but maybe my early start will help me fall asleep earlier which wouldn't be a bad thing. I've spent the day making cups of tea for the lads who got very wet working outside fitting the vents to the underside of the roof overhang. We still need some sort of fittings to go inside the loft to keep the insulation from the vents but apparently they 'haven't arrived yet'. (The lads' boss is well intentioned but he takes on too much and rushes his work.) The lads are the same ones we paid to put all our stuff up in the loft and they were most apologetic about the way things are up there but it's not their fault. They are being supervised, or not by the boss and he's the one who should have checked the work or at least got on with sorting things out once we found a problem. 

Over breakfast we watched this chap catching waves on his SUP. There were also some surfers but he had the advantage of being able to paddle out to where the waves started and standing up he had a much better view than the surfers who were down at sea level.

Today my Christmas schedule said - bake biscuits. By the end of the day I remembered why I only do this once a year, it's very much a labour of love to do this for my boys. The biscuits below are only half of today's total the other half being my own invention where I added dried cranberries to the mixture. That made the dough more difficult to roll and cut out so I went for smaller, thicker biscuits. When I took them out of the oven they simply looked like thin fruit scones not fancy Christmas biscuits. Or even my version of Christmas biscuits. I thought some red or pink icing with a swirl of white would smarten them up but when I added some red food colouring to my bowl of icing it turned an odd shade of orange (I should have remembered from the last time I used it). I carried on but that did nothing to improve the look of the biscuits. I ended up scraping the icing off and instead will dip them in dark chocolate when I melt some to cover the truffles I'll be making later in the week.

Once the lads had fitted the vents they went up into the loft to clean off the mould and wipe down all the rafters with mildew killer. Hopefully that will be enough. We shall be keeping an eye on the loft to check that nothing else appears. At the same time we'll keep the dehudifier running and badger the builder until he turns up with the inner vent fittings.