What do you do when the wind blows a gale, the temperature’s in the single figures and rain beats against the windows?

You can’t garden, you can’t go out for a walk, you can’t do the laundry, you’ve done all the housework and read all the weekend’s papers and their magazines. You’re so desperate you’ve even read the business and employment sections. You need a project.

(Okay by now, dear reader, you’ve sussed that ‘you’ was actually me. If none of the following bears any resemblance to how you cope with rainy days at home, just change ‘you’ to ‘I’.)

You sit at the keyboard, poised, awaiting inspiration for that short story you’ve been meaning to write for the last year. Ditto the email to a friend you’ve been meaning to write for a week. Then you notice that your shoulders are starting to ache from all that sitting poised at the keyboard.

As you stand up and stretch, you remember a promise: one rainy day you’ll insert all those loose photos in the suitcase into the new album. That’s the suitcase that’s ready to grab and run when the bushfire strikes and that’s the new album, in dark green mock-alligator, still wrapped in plastic. Since last Summer it’s been waiting to receive 300 photos into its pristine, acid-free, archival quality, plastic-sleeved pages.

Before you bought it, you wrenched at least 500 photos from the sticky brown-edged pages of their 35 year-old, acid-laden, photo-chewing albums, slid them into envelopes and packed them into the suitcase. Now they need to be sorted into…

But you decide to save that for later. There’ll be a big block of time to be filled on a night of indifferent television. No point in starting something before dinner, not while there’s sewing to be done.

A pair of moleskin trousers have hung over the back of a chair for a month, ever since you pinned a new zip into them. They’re beautifully tailored, bought at the op shop for $3. A perfect fit, they’re just the right weight for a walk on a bitterly cold day such as this. Except that it’s too bitterly cold to go out.

As you drag the sewing machine from its hiding place and set it on the table, you remember a piece of crewel embroidery that your mother gave you at least 15 years ago. She’d found it, unsurprisingly, in an op shop. For years you’ve been thinking that one rainy day you’d turn it into a cushion cover. With the sewing machine set up, you decide to strike while the motor is hot.

After struggling for more than an hour with the zip, and succeeding after a fashion, you rummage around in the fabric collection for the embroidered fabric. Once found, you rummage some more to find a piece to join to it. You turn up a length of fine, rust-coloured wool that one rainy day you hemmed and turned into a table runner. That was before you decided table runners were naff.

So you cut a piece of the table runner to size and after fiddling with the machine and winding new cotton onto the bobbin, you sew the fabric together, first one side, then the other. On the third side, the sewing machine decides to chuck a wobbly. While your sewing at first appears perfect, on the reverse you find a line of berserk stitches that hold together nothing but themselves. You’ll finish the stitching by hand later.

By now it’s almost nightfall. While your partner cooks dinner (bless him), you drag the suitcase out from beneath the guest room bed and begin to sort photos into subject matters. Piles of small monochrome snaps begin to creep across the bed: Dad as a young man, Mum before she met Dad, Mum and Dad together, Bill as a baby, Dad during the War…

It’s cold in there, too cold. You carry the new albums, the sorted photos and the envelopes of unsorted photos into the warm living room. You construct piles of photos – in rough chronological order – on the settee, the ottoman and the lamp table. Soon there are so many piles that your head spins.

You eat dinner on your lap in the living room because the sewing machine still occupies the table. Surrounded by snaps of sunny holidays, you watch news reports of the damage wrought by atrocious weather. You finish dinner, take the plates to the kitchen and return to your sorting. Your partner (bless him) washes up.

Finally, the photos are in the best order you can manage and your neck’s aching. You impatiently slide the snaps into the new album until, finally, they’re gone. You feel pretty pleased with yourself.

Then, out of the corner of your eye, you notice something on the lamp table. It’s another pile of photos. You groan.

Impatient and irritated, you drag photos out of the album and replace them with others. You decide to throw away dozens of wedding photos filled with strangers. The marriage failed and, anyway, why keep photos of people you’re never likely to see again?

When your partner kisses you goodnight, you smile weakly and murmur that you’ve almost filled the new album. Only 200 or so left to go.

Without someone to share a memory over the occasional snap, it’s a lonely business. You lose the will to go on. You dump the remaining photos into envelopes and pack them into the case. You haul the case back to the guest room and shove it under the bed. Note to self: buy another photo album.

You retrieve the cushion cover and begin to stitch it by hand as you listen to Lateline. Economic theory washes over you. By the end of Lateline the cover’s still not finished, your head aches and your eyes feel full of sand. You fold up the cushion cover and put away the needle and thread.

With a bit of luck, you might finish it before the worst of the weather is over. Or maybe leave it for another rainy day… or until after you’ve written the short story… or finished sorting the photos…

Whichever comes first.