For a long while, our plan for August was to take care of our living room. We planned to strip the wallpaper off the walls, take apart the uber ugly inbuilt cupboards, patch and paint the walls and the woodwork and have the original wooden floors, that we were lucky to find under a horrible carpet, restored by professionals. But as we talked about doing all that we suddenly realised that what we really want to do as well is have a bit more of an open space living arrangement downstairs.

To achieve that we need to partially knock down the load-bearing (unfortunately) wall between the living room and the kitchen diner and the only logical time to do that is now, before we spend hours redecorating our foresaken (it has not been touched in 25 years apparently so you can imagine how bad it is) living room.

So it’s back to the drawing board for us – we will have to watch Netflix on my computer while sitting on two deckchairs in the middle of the living room for a little longer than initially anticipated. It sucks, but we think it will be worth it in the long run.

I am currently on a mission to find an experienced and reliable builder to carry out the works and a nice internal door that will dictate the extent of our demolition. We also need to move a radiator on each side of the wall into a new position to accommodate the new door, so it will be a bit of an upheaval, but it’s now or never and we are ready to get our teeth into it. Hopefully we will have a mostly finished living room in time for Christmas – fingers crossed.

This is probably the simplest ‘recipe’ that you have ever seen me do, but this is genuinely what I have been having for breakfast all summer, ever since it became too warm to cook porridge, so I thought I would share. What I love about this recipe is not only how cooling and nourishing it is, but also how quick and easy it is to put together, how portable it is and how there are no stubbornly dirty pots to wash up afterwards.

Simply put three ingredients in a bowl, mix well and stick in the fridge to wake up to a ready made breakfast base that you can jazz up with anything that takes your fancy. I like to top mine with cinnamon, a touch of maple syrup (although having watched this TED TALK I am down to a teaspoon of it) and heaps of berries cos they are delicious and I cannot get enough of them.