Kurt Vonnegut had a story in his first collection of stories, "Welcome to the Monkey House", that I think of often and more so recently. I'll tell you why.

The story is told by a first person/narrator, friend of a woman who has great plans for redecorating her house when she has enough money and time and energy to do it. The woman keeps a workbook with swatches of material and paint samples and designs for everything she plans to do "some day" in her dream redecorating plans. Before some day happens, the woman has a bad fall, breaking a lot of bones and requiiring long-term care before she can return home. Her husband enlists the narrator's help to take on the task of redecorating the house before his wife returns, according to her long, detailed design as outlined in her workbook..

It's a complicated job, tracking down the materials and paints and material and getting it all finished before "homecoming." The narrator says they were lucky in finding everything except one item. The material for the living room curtains was no longer available. There was, however, a similar fabric in a slightly paler yellow than the sample in her friend's workbook. That was the only obstacle they encountered and they were satisfied that they had compensated for it.

So - home coming. Together the husband and the friend collected his wife and brought her home, anticipating her pleasure at seeing the fruition of her dreams. They brought her in the front door and led her into the living room, freshly painted , with newly recovered, reupholstered furniture and lavish new curtains across the front window, pale and richly glowing yellow.

The wife looked around the room with pleasure but no obvious surprise, which puzzled her benefactors. The husband couldn't help himself. "Don't you notice anything, dear?" he asked his wife. "aren't you pleased?"

"Oh, yes,"she said. "You took care of everything very nicely. You couldn't help it if the sun faded the curtains."

Her plans were so clear in her head that it was as if they already existed.

I'm going through something like that kind of illusion now. I have very clear plans for a magic tidying (according to Marie Kondo and me). In my mind I have already tossed out things and re-filed and organised everything. Each day when I come across an awkward arrangement, I am a little annoyed because it's not as I picture it in my mind. Soon, soon - well, as soon as I can manage it with everything else I have to do - I will make it all come true. In the meantime, it is as I imagine it will be.

Bliss.

- and I feel pretty good about it, wrapping up some noodges and glitches and unfinished business, and setting a new pot of soup (bone broth) on the stove. I finished reading another large book, too.

A Notable Woman: The Romantic Journals of Jean Lucey Pratt, edited by Simon Garfield, is 712 pages long, another book I can read only at the breakfast table because ti's too big to hold in my hands to read.I mentioned it a while ago when I planned to read as far as the years covering World War Two and then leave it as i didn't like Jean very much at first. She grew on me, though, and I stayed with her as she matured. She began her diary on April 18 in 1925 when she was 15 years old and ended it 61 years later just a few days before she died in 1986. Her editor, Simon Garfield, has published 16 books and I have a couple of them, both edited books: Our Hidden Lives: The Remarkable Diaries of Post-War Britain (2004); and We Are At War: The Remarkable Diaries of Five Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times (2009), both much smaller than Pratt's tome (published in 2015). I was bound to read them, not only because I am committed to diaries but also because i need lots of background knowledge for my screenplay set in WWII. Garfield knows some influential writers who gave our Jean some commendations, notably Hilary Mantel who said she was interested to find out when Jean would lose her virginity.

There was more to it than that. Poor Jean Pratt was one of that generation of young English women who lost their potential husbands in two world wars. The men who were around had their pick of women and I guess she was not the choicest morsel, although when she hits her stride she sounds pretty insatiable. She says later in life when the fire has cooled that she could have been a nymphomaniac.

She was well educated, a writer - of sorts? - actually published a book, a biography of an English actress. In later years she ran a bookstore, specialising in books for cat-lovers, being herself a lover and owner of cats, lots of them. And, of course, she kept a long, faithful diary. I've noticed in the course of my reading women's diaries that many of the long-term writers came to regard their journals as their lifetime achievement. They were right. It's only in the last couple of decades that women's "life writing" has begun to be valued as more than mere private, self-indulgent pages. I cherish the insights they give me into "ordinary lives" as Simon Garfiield calls them, and gain thereby further insight into my own ordinary life. I find them very humbling. We must all "come to terms with nothingness."

And tomorrow is the next day of my life.