Yesterday I interviewed a housekeeper with the National Trust for a newspaper (I’ll shout you when the feature is out). I asked her if there was one thing she’d learnt from looking after a large stately home that she now applied to her own house? I thought she might come up with something esoteric about bees wax and paraffin, but no…

She said the one thing she now did was move the furniture around from season to season. She remembered her mum doing the same thing every summer, and so do I. And in fact I’ve just done the same myself. Now I have a fire, I’ve huddled the sofa and coffee table close to it. Come summer, I’ll push everything back against the walls again. I love it – it’s a completely free shot of novelty, offering you a frisson of the unfamiliar in your own home that lasts a week or two. And then, when the season turns again, you just swap it back again, and get another shot. I think the National Trust lady also meant it was a good oportunity to really get the Hoover round. Each to his own…