In a pickle

It occurred to me just yesterday, having written recently about the "progress" we've made with the house this year, that if you were to look at it from one perspective we've only really got one room that can be classed as "finished."

The perpective I'm talking about is having a room decorated, furnished, and laid out in a way you'd be happy to live with... well... forever.

So the room that's done is: the kitchen. It was completed as near to the date of that post as makes no difference, is kitted out pretty much with all the gadgets we need, is in daily use as a kitchen, and doesn't contain any extraneous furniture or shite that really belongs somewhere else.

The same cannot be said for ANY other room at the moment:

• Rear reception room. Erstwhile dining room, currently undergoing refurbishment as a living room, but finishing that project has been delayed by a postponed flooring installation, a leak in the new radiator requiring replacement, and we haven't chosen any new furnishings or entertainment equipment for it yet.
• Front reception room. Currently the living room, but when the new living room is complete will be flipped into a dining room, therefore requiring carpet removal and another new oak floor installation
• Hall. Currently a storage space for one of the sideboards. And the radiator cover needs attaching to the wall
• Garden. Reconstruction project starts TODAY!!
• Front small bedroom. Never decorated since two months after we moved in, requires plaster reskim and decoration, plus possible fitted wardrobes and bed replacement.
• Front large bedroom. Currently without any recognisable form of bedroom furniture since the old lot was sold on eBay in August and since then we've had all our clothes in cardboard "removals" wardrobes and the contents of bedside cabinets in plastic crates, pending the new handmade bedroom furniture which won't arrive until next month.
• Rear bedroom/study. Decorated and furnished, but currently home to a huge assortment of packing crates storing things to be sold on eBay, and cardboard boxes in which to parcel them up and send them off when they ARE sold.
• Bathroom. Second room to be refurbished back in 2007, we were never really happy with the result and have recently decided to do it all over again (at least in part) to get it right.
• Attic room. Still only half decorated, now two years since it was completed.

We have often said we're glad we didn't tackle the whole house at once, like our near neighbours who have basically been living in a building site for at least as long as we've lived here. But we're not that much better ourselves when you think about it!

100TWC - Day 64: Frost

Around this time of year as a boy, or maybe just a week or two later, I used to expect that on really cold days I'd wake up to frost on my bedroom windows. On the inside. Double glazing and central heating were unknown concepts to me growing up. My bedroom windows (there were two, one on each outside wall, which made my room probably the coldest room in the house and certainly the coldest bedroom. Even the bathroom, which also had two exterior walls, only had one window) were single-glazed, with metal frames, and hence particularly susceptible to the cold.

Interestingly (it has just occurred to me) when we sold that house in April of this year, those single glazed metal framed windows -- the original ones with which the house was built in the 1940s -- were still in place, still intact. I've no doubt they will have been replaced now, but they lasted almost 70 years.

My parents only got around to investing in central heating after I moved out. And even then, because they "didn't like hot bedrooms", the system they installed was only partial. A radiator beside the boiler in the kitchen, which I always thought was completely redundant since the boiler, being a 1970s vintage, was not particularly well insulated. One at the bottom of the stairs to warm the hall. One at the top to service the landing. If you wanted any heat in a bedroom you had to leave the door open. And that was it. Three single, narrow radiators for an entire 3-bedroom semi-detached house. The "through" lounge/ dining room had a gas fire.

But such luxury was unknown to me as a child. The only source of heat in my room was a two-bar portable electric fire. It smelt, when on, in that way old metal electric fires have. Especially the first time it was used each year in the run-up to Christmas. Having been gathering dust for something approaching nine months, the first time you switched it on all that dust would burn off the element and stink the room out for days. It wasn't just dust, of course. There would be the odd dead fly in there too. And possibly a few strands of hair that had found their way through the grille. I hated that fire, ugly brown dumpy little monstrosity that it was, but it didn't stop me from turning it on every night an hour or so before I went to bed.

No such luxury in the mornings, of course. Time switches were another technology denied to us in the 1960s and early 70s. Hence the frost on the windows. I could see my breath most mornings too, in that room. It's a wonder I ever plucked up the courage to get out of bed, especially once my folks had gone all modern and replaced our traditional bedding with those new-fangled "continental quilts" (duvets, to modern readers). Toasty warm it was, under my "quilt", and hence by comparison, even colder in the bedroom.

On school mornings it was a mad dash to the bathroom, once my Dad had whistled his signal that he'd finished at the washbasin. The bathroom had one of those ceiling lights with a heater in it, and on really cold mornings Dad would have turned it on when he first got up. So the bathroom (again, by comparison) was warmer than the bedroom. Warmer even than the landing which, being in the middle of the house, never got as cold as the outer rooms.

On weekend mornings I didn't need to be quite so brave. I could laze around in bed until the sun was up, and melted the frost on the windows. At least then it didn't look as cold in my room.

When I got a bit older, I found myself wondering exactly how cold it got in that room. I'd acquired a thermometer from somewhere and I hung it on the wall. Being of an analytical bent (OK, OK, I was a spod. I admit it), it was not enough for me to just glance at the reading every morning and evening on my way out of, and into bed. I had to write the temperatures down. And then, having written them down, I had to graph them up. And so it was that, by the age of 15, I had a year's worth of bedroom temperature readings on a graph on my wall, and I can tell you with absolute certainty that the coldest it ever got in my room one winter's morning, was 44°F.

I saw my breath THAT morning, I can tell you!

The graph spiked a lot where the electric fire was on in the evening, and not in the morning, but the trend of temperatures was still visible, as were the maxima and minima. Attentive readers will have noticed that even this glaring evidence of incipient frostbite in my room was not enough to persuade my parents that central heating was necessary, until after I'd moved out. Whether or not this constitutes child abuse I will leave it up to the reader to decide.

The frost on the inside of my windows did make exceedingly pretty patterns though. Which was, naturally, some small compensation for the discomfort.

Cat man do.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, our cat man promised to send loads more pictures of New Kitteh (name still being debated) between my first visit and the day he's ready to come home. Four weeks later and there hadn't been much evidence of promise fulfilment on the photo front. OK, no evidence. A prompting email provoked a blurry shot taken with a phone along with the promise of more pix "when I get home", a couple of days more nothing and then a brief whinge that emails "weren't getting through."

However eventually, this arrived:

and I think it's true to say he's even cuter now that he was when I first saw him.

Anyway, since we're fetching him home the day after tomorrow, it's suddenly become quite urgent to tidy up all the non-kitten-friendly parts of the house (i.e. ALL of it) and make sure all those tools, boxes, bags, screws, nails, pots of paint, piles of wall plugs, etc, etc, are either put away, thrown away, or behind a closed door.

Good job I finished all the wrapping yesterday!

Temporarily floored and carpeted

One of the unfortunate side-effects of the construction work we endured in the second half of last year was that the landing floor, already in a pretty poor state, became even more chewed-up than before.

Over the years - both before we moved in and since - alterations have shortened what was once the corridor leading to the small back bedroom to probably less than half its former length. The original door at the end was removed and boarded up when the two back bedrooms were knocked into one (before our time). Our bathroom conversion removed another door and the subsequent installation of a linen cupboard at the end of that corridor-to-nowhere has left us with a landing that is little more than the confluence of doors to remaining rooms.

As you might expect in a house of this age (100+ years) this landing has been used over and over again as the conduit space for each installed service. Central heating, electrics, phone, alarm, central heating extensions, additional wiring circuits - all pass along and across the landing, and all have involved lifting and replacing the floor.

Which brings us to today, the most recent set of work, and the parlous landing we've endured for the last three months or so. A floor board outside the study which is not so much floor board as floor shredded wheat. A board between bedrooms and bathrooms which has been left loose, and knocks against the heating pipes with a resounding BONGGGGG every time it's stepped on. And several other boards which no longer fit properly, or whose ends have been sawn off adjacent to a beam so that they dip and bend and creak when anyone walks past.

Long overdue for some DIY magic.

Which is how I spent (the working part of) yesterday and today. Sorting out something that's not as straightforward as it sounds, once you realise that 21st century floorboards from B&Q are (a) narrower and (b) thinner than their early 20th century counterparts, hewn (as they undoubtedly were) from the living tree by swarthy journeyman joiners who cared not one jot (nor, I'll warrant, a tittle) for cost, but only for quality. Or at least, width.

Anyway, this disparity, along with the fact that the modern materials are tongued and grooved, meant I had to assemble a kind of jigsaw piece of flooring, roughly 2 metres long and three-and-three-quarter boards wide, with edges that resemble a refugee from Tetris. That was yesterday. Today involved the complex assembly of four pieces off carpeting off-cut (one from the spare bedroom and three from the lounge) into something vaguely reminiscent of a Tangram.

Although it has a small hole in one edge, and falls short at the top of the stairs, it's decidedly more comfy than bare boards, and it no longer goes BONGGGGG. It'll do for now.

Let there be light...

I mentioned recently that we've been living in the shadows for a while. On the landing, at least.

A couple of years ago I installed a security light switch. A clever little beast with a built-in timer and a photocell which provided a wealth of options on when it would turn on, and off, and how many times, and on what days. Versatile enough to make even the most observant tea-leaf believe there really was someone in the house on those all-too-rare occasions when we go away.

Shame then that those clever electronics weren't also resilient electronics. Call me picky, but I'd have thought a light switch should be able to withstand something as simple as a blown light bulb. I'm not talking massive electrical storm, direct lightning strike, or rat-inspired short-circuit. Sooner or later, your light bulb is going to turn up its toes. A light switch whose electronics are fritzed by such a common occurrence shouldn't, to my mind, be allowed on the market. But there you have it. First dead light bulb... one dead light switch.

In my normal procrastinatory fashion it's taken me several months to shift my ass into gear but today I finally coughed up the £1.48 for a replacement switch - and fitted it! Not another electronic one, mind. No, that would have set me back at least ten times as much, and probably gone pop again the next time the bulb blew, so it's back to the relative simplicity of a standard two-way for us. Let's hope there are no burglars watching.

Creeping death

Woke up this morning to an unusually dark bedroom. The clock was off. Bedside light? Nope.

Given that this came on top of a gradually increasing failure of the house electrics (power and light to the attic room first, and then a blown bulb causing the death of the electronics in the security switch on the landing), I lay in bed for several minutes imagining vermin burrowing through the walls, or the total discontinuation of power to the entire house by a prospective burglar. Don't ask me how - my mind gets up to all sorts at three in the morning.

A quick trip to the loo proved that the study still had power - all the computers happily glowing their sickly blue across the carpet - and the alarm panel was still powered up, so I offered a mental shrug to the world and went back to sleep.

Didn't take long this morning to discover the problem lay with a duff bedroom power socket. The one we'd moved in to find with a short length of Sellotape holding the switch in a semi-on-semi-off state. A bit of fiddling soon revealed the socket only received power when the switch was held in this unnatural position and even small movements in either direction caused it to let out an alarming fizzing noise. I moved the extension lead to the other socket of the pair and made a mental note that there would be another socket to replace when the refurbishment timetable eventually rolls around to the master bedroom.

The thin veneer of civilisation

Our plumber eventually called back in response to my plaintive cries for help with our failed boiler. He said he'd "put money on" it being a common problem with condensing boilers, particularly in the UK. A blocked condensate drain pipe.

Why particularly the UK? Because we're not used to such extreme weather conditions, heating engineers don't bother to lag the drain. Their customers are driven by cosmetic concerns, especially when the pipe traverses a visible section of exterior wall. The pipe is small-bore white PVC, and doesn't call much attention to itself on its own. Lagged, it doesn't look as good.

Pour some hot water over it, our friendly plumber suggested, and all will be well. So I did, and it was. Within seconds, I'd reset the boiler and the interior temperature was climbing from its nadir of 7°C. Trust me, I'll be lagging that pipe.

But those two hours while I was waiting for plumbing help, and the few hours before when we'd dressed in the cold, drunk our coffee in the cold, and where I'd sat watching daytime TV (I was on strike again yesterday) and failing to get anywhere near warm, brought it home to me how thin and fragile our veneer of civilisation really is.

It's easy to feel safe, secure and superior when you're warm and comfortable. If your attention is permanently occupied with staying warm, there's very little time for other considerations. Cold weather: a barrier to philosophy.

As a boy, and in common with most of my contemporaries, I regularly awoke on winter's mornings with frost on the inside of my bedroom window. Being a geeky child, I kept a record of the temperature, which often dropped as low as 45°F - only a little above the 7°C I was complaining about moments ago. I suspect that would be grounds for accusations of child cruelty these days. Back then it was just the way things were. When did I get so soft?

The old boiler

...is not that old actually. The first money we spent on the house when we moved in (October 2006) went on a new boiler. Three years is not old, particularly for such a high-spec and well renowned boiler.

Last night, it developed a fault.

The last hour of TV viewing had become increasingly uncomfortable even though we'd had the fire on, but I'd put it down to the extreme weather. Forecasts predicted it would be even colder in parts overnight than yesterday, with some areas dropping to -20° - same as the South Pole - and that fire always was more decorative than practical.

But when we walked into the hall and discovered the temperature had fallen two degrees below the supposed minimum, we knew something was up, and the flashing blue light on the front of the boiler (and the flashing error code beneath the cover) confirmed that this almost-brand-new boiler had chosen the coldest period in 50 years in which to turn up its toes. Great.

I'd been holding off booking a service expecting our heating engineer to be snowed under (haha!) with emergency calls, but it looks like we'll be another to add to his list now.

Eradicate!

For several weeks now we've been finding dead wasps about the house. The odd one on the stairs (one perched rather precariously on a newel post), in our bedroom or the lounge. Occasionally flying around a lightbulb or crawling dazedly across the carpet. But mainly, and in copious quantities, in Blythe's room. Now regularly shared by Nat.

The last time they stayed for any length of time Blythe mentioned casually that there were a lot of wasps flying OUTSIDE the bedroom window too. A quick glance up at the fascia board above her window revealed a constant stream of the little blighters crawling under the eaves, and flying out, while several hovered about like transatlantic aircraft stacked above Heathrow.

We had a nest in the loft.

With an alarming lack of procrastination, I booked a pest control officer from Environmental Health. He turned up yesterday afternoon. I expected him to be kitted out in a full-body protective suit a la bee-keepers. No. Jeans and a T-shirt. Clearly a man of experience. I offered him frontal access, or the alternative of a short crawl across the rafters. "I'll do it from here," he said, and went to fetch his ladder.

The information sheet he handed me on completion of the job a few minutes later stated that we "may see increased activity around the nest for 2-3 hours after dusting." They're not joking. Heathrow never had a stacking problem like the one around my eaves. A temporary phenomenon - they should all be dead in a day or so.

Reinforcement fail

It didn't work. The shower still leaks. Bugger.

What a drip

Our friendly neighbourhood plumber came round first thing this morning. Good timing, as it turned out. The drip, which had started off really slowly, had worsened to the point where it was filling the bowl twice a day - right to the brim.

It took his more experienced eye less than a minute to discover the leak was not, in fact, at the joint in the pipe. This was merely the lowest point of dribble. The source was higher up. Much higher up. At the neck of the tap. If we'd looked more closely we would have seen it for ourselves quite easily. The water was clearly visible, running over the chrome.

Doh.

Silver lining? Ten seconds tightening with a professional-looking wrench and no charge. If only all drips were so easily sorted.

More bathroom woes

We've had a damp patch in the kitchen for quite a few weeks, directly above the boiler. Nikki noticed it first, where the plaster was bubbling above the kitchen window, but after a few days a larger damp patch appeared in the corner and slowly grew.

We entertained a few theories regarding its origin. On the outside wall in the same position is the hopper that takes waste feeds from the shower, basin and bath, so our first guess was that this had become blocked and was overflowing onto the wall. At the first opportunity (i.e. when the rain had stopped) I deployed my trusty ladder and went up to take a look.

It was as clean as a whistle, but while I was up there I noticed the pointing was in pretty bad shape. As we'd had some heavy rain, maybe it was a case of penetrating damp? That was my theory, although Nikki continued to believe the hopper was at fault. If it wasn't blocked, maybe it just couldn't cope with the volume of water? Tests were inconclusive, but we decided to call a builder in. We needed a quote for bricking up the kitchen door anyway.

Said builder duly attended and, while he agreed the pointing needed attention, he spotted a more likely candidate. An old vent hole that had not been sealed properly. What's more it matched the location and shape of the worst area of damp. Problem sorted, we thought.

That was until my traditional 2am loo break last night. With the house in silence an eerie tick... tick... tick... could be heard from the general direction of the bath. Now this isn't unusual in our bathroom, as the sash windows drip loudly onto the sills when it's raining. But this particular night, it wasn't raining. First thing this morning saw me with my belly pressed against the cold tiles, peering under the bath. One glance was enough. The puddle stretched for a couple of square feet and a slow but regular drip emanated from the cold tap supply pipe. I fetched a bowl.

The bath stands on feet on a tiled floor. It moves. I assume the occasional movement (when we nudge into it, or dry feet on it after a shower) has sprung a joint in the pipework. As if we haven't had enough trouble with this £$%&* bathroom!

Found Things

Next month we'll have been here two years. Where has the time gone? Anyhoo, for one reason or another, today was a sorting out day.

Ever noticed how, after moving house, things in boxes tend to stay in boxes? Especially things you rarely use. Or even never use. And if you never use them, why do you have them? The answer, as every hoarder knows, is "because you might need them."

So the space in the kitchen where the old boiler used to sit has been occupied, since the old boiler moved out in December 2006, by six plastic tubs; their contents largely indeterminate, except that I was vaguely aware one contained power tools and another heavy tools (chisels, lump hammers and the like). The others had "stuff" in them.

Having completed the lounge (the last job - putting the door back on - was accomplished this morning before I moved on to "sorting out") I needed somewhere to store all the decorating tools. Previously they'd lived under a sheet in one corner of the dining room, but the "new" dining room is destined to be a bit posher than the old, so that is no longer an option. They needed to share space in the kitchen and this was the driver for the sort out.

Well. How many times have I needed a 7mm drill bit since we moved in? And how many times have I shrugged, made do with the next closest in my toolbag (6.5mm) and gingerly hammered the wall plugs into the too-small hole? I lost count. Guess what I found at the bottom of one of the tubs? Correct. Doesn't look like it's even been used, but I suppose I must have used it once, at least. It's in my drill box now. Probably won't need it again :-\

Found a load of other junk too. My Sennheiser headphones - the ones I bought when I was 17 for use with my original portable stereo. I've dragged these from house to house for 35 years, my emotional connection to the memories of their use too strong to allow me to let them go. When did I last use them? I have no idea, but I certainly haven't plugged them into anything since I left the Village, and I don't remember using them even there, so my best guess is they haven't transmitted music since before 1988. About a hundred and fifty times heavier than anything on the market today, and a hundred and fifty times worse sound quality too, I shouldn't wonder. Not to mention I could probably pick up a replacement set of cans on eBay for not much more than a tenner. All of this logic still conflicted with my emotional attachment to these sad, dusty relics of my youth. But I couldn't deny that their time had come. I put them in the pile to go to the tip.

Wasn't easy though.

Amazingly the sort-out left us with three empty plastic tubs, two full of stuff for the loft and one containing current, usable tools that will remain in the kitchen until I build a tool cupboard, alongside the decorating box. End result: seven boxes (including the decorating one) condensed to two. Job done.

Chim chiminee, chim chiminee...

Bit of a blast from the past today: we had the chimney sweep round. We'll be fitting a living flame gas fire in the new lounge, and although we've been here 18 months and never used the grate in the dining room, we know the previous owners regularly had a fire in there, so it was certain to need doing.

Halfway through the job, the sweep - a gentleman I would put in his early sixties - called me down from the study to ask if I'd like to go out and check that the brush was sticking out of the chimney. Wow! This traditional proof that the sweep has actually done his work took me flying back to my youth, when my Mum would send me running to the end of the garden to watch for the brush popping out of the chimney pot.

I really never expected to see that again!

My erection subsides

Finally, after a week of cajoling, chasing, and being put off by the weather, the scaffolding started to be...umm...whatever the opposite of erected is. De-erected. Reducted. Taken down.

They still had to dodge the showers, but by the time I came home from my briefing session (around 1pm) most of the top platform had gone. Apparently it takes almost as long to take down as it does to put up, which I suppose makes sense because the fastenings all have to be undone by as many turns as they were done up with, and the poles and planks have to be hauled back to the truck and stacked for the next job. The only part of the task that is slightly more complicated and time-consuming on the way up is making sure the base is secure and the platforms level, which I guess wouldn't take long for an expert.

So it'll take two full days to be completely rid of it, which might stretch into Wednesday, but at least it's all down from the front of the house now, thus making the property less attractive to burglars.

I could never be a project manager

I've known this for a long time of course, but it was brought home to me again today when my roofer called to check whether the scaffolders had been to take it down. No, they haven't. So off he went to chase them up. And there, right there, is the reason I don't make a very good project manager, and in a similar way, I would almost certainly make a lousy producer.

I totally and completely hate chasing people up to chivvy them along to do something they said they would, or that I asked them to, and haven't. In fact it took me years ("thirty years" probably ;o)) to realise that you needed to do that at all. Surely, I reasoned, if you'd asked someone to do something, especially if it was their JOB, they'd do it. And years of experience to the contrary were not sufficient to ram that message home: that you need to be on top of people, or across the situation, or whatever the latest term is, ALL the time to make sure it gets done, gets done right, and gets done on time.

Knowing that it's a necessary part of a job is still a mile away from doing it though, and I continue to avoid situations where I'd need to behave like this. Like most things, it's probably down to some childhood trauma. I certainly have a lifelong hatred of being told what to do and, even worse, reminded when it needs to be done by, which may well explain why I dislike doing the same thing to others.

Noisy stripper

We've had a noisy stripper on our roof all day today.

Yes, finally the weather took a turn for the better and some real progress was made. The gang were working at the front, but even so the noise of several hundred tiles slipping and sliding onto the scaffold could be heard all over the house, and went on for about an hour and a half.

Followed shortly by the noise of battens being nailed back on over the new felt. This created a serious cleaning up task in the attic room, as just about every clout nail on the ceiling has now popped and showered everything in the room in small pieces of plaster.

Felt a bit sorry for the men at the end of the day, actually. With only a small section left to do, the heavens opened and the rains came down like stair-rods. They must have been drenched within seconds, but having started that final section they had to finish it to make the roof weathertight.

One side to go - but it's the complicated side, since it has 3 Velux windows.

The Scaffold

No, not the old Liverpudlian crew who did Lily the Pink. *Our* scaffold. For the roof. The erection started yesterday. Imagine that! A two-day erection! Makes your eyes water.

Fascinating watching it go up though. Not a job I'd fancy at all. Once they get going the structure grows by the minute. Reminds me of my old Meccano set.

Since I've still not recovered emotionally from the recent break-in, an unfortunate side-effect of having this framework surrounding the building is that I'm even more nervous now that access to the upper storeys is facilitated by a glorified climbing frame. Fortunately it should only be up for the next two weeks or so.

I disturb a burglar

Thank God for those night-time pees. On returning to bed around 3am this morning after one such visit, I heard a strange tapping sound. Now this old house has a variety of creaks, pops, murmurs and whistles that took quite a lot of getting used to when we first moved in, but this was a noise I hadn't heard before. I pricked up my ears and lay there in the dark, listening.

Tap, tap. Pause. Tap. Pause. Weird. I thought at first it was the cat flap, but it's never that loud, or that persistent. Then I wondered whether it was the high wind we'd had last night. Everything went quiet for a time, so I turned over. Tap, tap. And then another noise. Louder this time and even more unusual. No, something definitely needed investigating.

I stopped by the spare bedroom to see if I could see anything outside that could be causing the noise, but all appeared normal so I proceeded downstairs in the dark. The memory of this gives me shivers now. Not only would I not have been able to see any potential attacker very clearly, but worse, I was only wearing a pyjama top. Mind you, that would have been enough to scare them off! Anyway I peeked into the kitchen (nothing) and the lounge and dining room (nothing - although I wasn't expecting to find anything in there - if they'd tried to go in they'd have tripped the alarm). It was then I noticed the downstairs toilet door was open and there was a helluva draft coming through it. Sure enough the leaded window had been removed from the frame. The tapping I'd heard had been the chiselling away of the putty.

Whoever it was, and they must have been very small and skinny to get through that window, can literally only have been in the house a few seconds. When they heard me coming downstairs I presume they dived back out of the window so I never actually had to confront them. My initial scouting having revealed no missing property, the only other thing worrying my "3am I've just woken up" head was how to secure the house and get back to bed. I rooted out and fitted two strong bolts to the inside of the loo door, fastened them, and decided to leave the rest until a more reasonable hour (i.e. after daybreak).

Who was I kidding? Nikki and I lay there for almost an hour talking about whatifs and whatdowedonows so finally around 4.30am we got up and made ourselves a pot of coffee. It wasn't until we were on our way back upstairs with our coffees that I noticed all the keys on the keyrack were missing. When Nikki checked her purse, all her cash had been taken too.

All things considered though, we were lucky. When you realise what had not been taken that probably would have been if I hadn't disturbed them. Even my car keys were still lying on the hall table undisturbed, although the police later told us that was probably because the perp was too young to drive!

Still, it's bad enough. We have to have all the locks changed and so do the owners of the other sets of keys. Plus boarding up of the window in advance of getting a more secure unit made and fitted. And of course, when you take into consideration the insurance excess, loss of NCD and increased premiums, in the end it's probably not going to be worth putting in a claim.

When the police arrived to "take down our particulars" they asked if there's any CCTV footage. The answer, sadly, is no although I've since considered fitting it. In the end though, does that send out the wrong message? With the outside of the property bristling with cameras doesn't it simply say "there's summat here worth nicking"? A colleague of mine suffered a spate of burglaries over 2-3 years and each time he increased his security measures they managed to defeat them. He ended up with a full alarm system, CCTV, bars on all the downstairs windows and reinforced doors, and they still got in. I reckon all you can do is secure the perimeter (the window they took out was the only one without a sensor) and hope it's enough discouragement.

Something the SOCO man said as he was dusting for prints (as predicted, they wore gloves), is it was probably a kid sent in by older scrotes specifically to collect keys so they can come back later and do a proper job. I think that's the scariest part of all.

Glug, glug, splooooosh!

Our friendly neighbourhood rooferman came around this afternoon to inspect the problem.

Didn't take him long. I sometimes wish I was more use up a ladder, but above about ten feet I start to quiver and much higher than 15 feet I'm shaking so violently that the ladder starts to walk across the wall. I could never have been a roofer. Luckily for us, he can. And is. Up the ladder he went, returning after a few seconds to retrieve a length of plastic pipe from his van.

"It's either this, or I borrow your wellies," he said. "It's knee-deep up there."

!!!

A few seconds prodding about with his pipe and water began to gurgle down the main downspout. Then with an almighty rush, approximately a bath-full gushed out, overflowed the drain and ran splashing and flooding across the path and down the garden. Crikey. He climbed up into the valley and threw down a few handfuls of muck.

"Leaves, is it?" I asked knowingly.
"No," he said matter-of-factly. "Bits of tile. They're flaking so badly that bits of them are being washed down by the rain."

Eek! I got straight on the phone to the mortgage company to apply for an increased loan. There's no way we can let this go on any longer. :(