There will always be days like this. But this one had a very special patina I can only describe as profoundly excremental. That’s like exponential, but involving more and more sh*t as the day went on.

At around 11 am, the builders investigated something in my house about which I’d always harboured bad vibes. In a kids’ room at the far end, the beds had been built on a plinth by previous owners. This plinth, from Day One, seemed to me a design feature without a function; and years of cynical home ownership over four decades have convinced me that such features are there to hide something.

So it proved. Beneath the plinth was a beam consisting largely of sawdust held together by fifty years of mouse nests. An acrow prop was shoved under the beam rapidly. There are various options open to me re this one, but all of them involve large cheques.

I have learned to remain philosophical about such things, as all building estimates submitted to me these days are mentally multiplied by two, and then 30% added to be on the safe side. Since 1977, I have renovated six houses….and every last one held something unforeseen by armies of surveyors. The 1977 version involved a budget of £2,300; after the first day’s work discovered wet rot in the Victorian foundation footings, the budget steadily trebled in size. (To put this into some kind of contemporary perspective, the largest cheque I’d ever written in my life at that point was £370…as the 5% deposit on my first flat).

Anyway, I cruised on up to the issue of moving into the motor home, given that every day the builders make subtle remarks like, “You still ‘ere then?”. All was going well – I successfully filled and added turd-destruction liquid to the loo casquette, plugged the home into the mains, and checked that all systems were go – but then I tried to fill the water reservoirs. The reservoir tank cap unlocked….and went round and round. And round and round and round. Up to but not including the allowance of entry.

So I rang the dealer, explained what was going on, and said I was really rather keen on using the shower tonight.

“Can you bring the camping car into the dealership tomorrow?” was the limp response I got. It was all very French.

But at that moment, I spotted the junked bath sitting outside awaiting its final journey to the recycling centre. So I stuffed a bung in the plughole, filled some kettles and jam-makers with boiling water, and then sat out in the bollock-freezing cold of an early March evening. The paparazzi were conspicuous by their absence, something for which I will always be grateful. Suffice to say that the old todger looked like a shrivelled acorn by the time I got out. It will no doubt present an amusing tableau of imagination to you now, but it didn’t to me then.

However, everything else in Donald (yes, that’s his name) is working, so I’m off over there for a good night’s kip in a proper bed. Four nights on the sofa have proved more than enough for me. At 8.30 am tomorrow boss builder man will wake me up and discuss various solutions to Rotten Beam Syndrome (which spells RBS – entirely fitting in my view) and then I shall be expected to respond in a sensible manner.

I don’t feel up to it now, but things always look better in the morning. Or so my Mum always alleged.

Earlier at The Slog: George Osborne and Mark Carney aren’t the best of friends