HAD a week off last week. It was spent mostly catching up, sorting out.

Read a lot, wrote a bit and got out taking photographs.

I also caught the multi-millionaire Chancellor on telly, telling us we’ve all got to be more careful with money (thanks for that, Gideon).

Ignored Wimbledon after totally losing interest when McEnroe hung up his tantrums.

Our Mam rang us constantly. ‘I don’t like That Andy Murray?’ she snarled. As usual – no context, no rationale.

Until recently I didn’t like ‘That Andy Murray’. Then I found out he was at Dunblane which seemed to explain a lot in my mind.

‘...I still don’t want him to win,’ said mam before hanging up.

Last week I tried to catch up on sleep (that never works). I’m not sure how many hours I’m ‘owed’ in that imaginary ‘sleep spreadsheet’ but it’s not as many as the Mother Superior.

The other Saturday, for the first time in two-and-half years, both kids slept in until 8.50am.

She had tears in her eyes.

“Maybe they’ve finally turned a corner!” she enthused in a highly emotional state.

I got naively drawn in to this utopian vision of getting regular weekend lie-ins again.

“You’re right, maybe they have!!”

On Sunday, at 5.45am, the little one was bashing a tambourine and the eldest wrenching the drawstring of her talking Woody from Toy Story: ‘YER MY FAVOURITE DEPU-DEE!’ But there’s good points to being up early. I was on the beach near Morecambe for sun-up last week. Photographed a pair of statuesque herons, tentatively hot-stepping through a shimmering large rock-pool, all framed by the distant Lakes.

The weather last week wasn’t too bad either. And like I keep telling Next Door - you’ve got to make the most of your garden in this weather, haven’t you?

So I positioned my chair in the sun, opened my book and reached for a long glass of cold beer... just as someone, somewhere nearby struck up a large industrial chainsaw and commenced eight hours of solid woodcutting.