Over at last… but not quite

There’s no surer signal that the festive season is over than the disappearance of Her Indoors’s Christmas decorations, and as usual, last to go is the china cottage (which had a brief mention in Mrs Capper’s Christmas). Here it is on the table along with the battery operated tea lights which give it a lived in appearance, ready to be packed back into its box and put away for another year.

It suits me. I’m not a winter person. But the end of yuletide doesn’t mean an end to the bad. For some reason known only to the fates, every New Year stars with some kind of problem. Going back a good few years, I had a suspected heart attack (which wasn’t one) early in the New Year. A couple of years back I had one of the worst chest infections I’ve had in a long time. Last year the car napped it on January 2nd.

And this year is no exception.

Yesterday (January 3rd) we noticed water dripping from the boiler cupboard and through the kitchen ceiling.

The house isn’t ours. We rent it. So we called a heating engineer out and he found the leak in a matter of minutes. Hairline crack on the cold feed to the boiler. Not his problem, it was one for the housing association not the heating contractors, but he did tie it off with a towel to minimise the issue and reported it to said housing association.

Now, January 4th, we’re waiting for the plumber to come and repair it properly. He’ll need to turn the water off and, obviously, the central heating boiler. A minor inconvenience except that it’s a glorious sunny morning, and in January that can only mean one thing: the temperature is lower than a snake’s doings.

So the prospect is a morning of shivering, sitting in the front room in overcoats while the job is done, and obviously, we don’t know how long it’s going to take so any chance of getting some work done is no more than a distant dream.

Off, I have never been so…

Footnote: the plumber took about forty minutes to repair the pipe and we are now warmer and leakless.