With renovations having begun at her house, Marita has moved in for a little while. So while there were three people at my place (for part of the week), there are now four.

Happily, this hasn’t quite created the havoc I half suspected with things like the capacity of the bathroom (the second toilet has avoided clashes) or the kitchen (to my surprise, I was able to simply turn the table by 90 degrees to fit a fourth chair in).

No, what’s really confused things is I’ve suddenly had to cater for four people at once. (Hey, it’s my house, and I work the shorter hours, so I do most of the cooking). The making of rolls or sandwiches for lunch has become much more of a production-line than it seemed to be before. Ditto serving out dinner onto plates.

And of course I’ve had to adjust all the quantities when buying groceries. When you’re serving two adults and two kids, no longer does one loaf of garlic bread cut it. Packs of sausages with eight snags are also no longer enough — I’ve bought two packs, cooked ten and frozen six from the second pack.

A few days ago I over-compensated and made an enormous amount of mashed potato. I can see it’s going to be a learning process.