Annoying the Gods

We got back ok. The flight was good albeit long. We all seemed to get some good sleep on the two plane legs so that was ok too. It was a bit of a shock landing to 1o C after 38oC the day before but even that was ok.

No our problems started on the drive back to our house when Sonya's dad who was driving mentioned in passing that our central heating had stopped working. What? For how long had the central heating been off we asked? I'm not sure perhaps a week he said! A week of temperatures well below freezing! We are not quite sure why he didnt mention it earlier when we could have told him about the insurance cover we have and where to find the telephone number for an engineer or why he didn't put an electric heater on to warm up the house even a little. Things just went downhill from there.

The house was indeed freezing; almost quite literally. And yes the central heating was well and truly not working. All we had was an oil filled electric radiator for the whole house. No hot water and no heating. That night it was -3oC. We sent the kids round to their Dad's house and we slept fully clothed under 5 duvets. It took us two days to get an engineer out to fix the boiler.

The microwave also decided to stop working at this point. This however was not quite shock it may have been as it had been dying a slow death for many months.

We then discovered that the front windscreen demister in the car had stopped working. Anyone who has tried to demist a windscreen in very cold temperatures knows it almost impossible if you cant get the heater to blow hot air on the windscreen. The car can also become undrivable as you cant see a damn thing through the misted up windscreen. The heater was working; the fan was working. It would blow warm air onto our face just not onto the windscreen. Great. It spent a day in the garage only to be told it was a major job and needed open heart surgery on the electrics behind the dashboard. It goes in fro surgery this week

I then broke my glasses as i took them off to have a shower. Not just a partially broken but properly irretrivably broken in a frame snapped kind of way. I discovered that my only spare pair that i could find about a hundred years old. the snow has made getting about a bit difficult so it has taken until this weekend to get to the optometrist to order a new pair. being variable coke bottle lenses these take a week to fush glass that thick so i am still walking around with a constant low grade headache from the out of date prescription.

As you have probably been reading the unusually cold weather has made life a wee bit awkward. The cold isnt actually the problem. Gloves and a hat do wonders. The problem is the ice on the pavements and side roads. The crisp snow quickly gets compacted into a bumpy icy lethal surface. Just walking to the bus stop becomes a slow trecherous task. The car goes fine on the main road that has been gritted and then gently slides gracefully from side to side on the last half mile of ungritted side roads. This lasted a week. A week where we didnt go out much and didnt feel much like getting back into life back home.

Thankfully today it has rocketed up to 2oC and much of the snow has melted so walking around and driving are much less trecherous. Long may these balmy climes continue