Christmas

We got ourselves all ready for an early start on the road to Hampshire but,......
when we got up there was a horrible burning smell coming from the boiler. Bearing in mind what happened across the road we switched everything off and rang an emergency heating engineer number. We hung around all morning while he dashed from emergency to emergency then it was our turn. "No probs" he said " I can see what the problem is..." He then proceeded to dismantle the entire boiler which was laid out carefully all over the kitchen. The problem had produced masses of soot inside the boiler which he has to clean out, so he rang for his "mate" who turned up with a vital piece of equipment which he didn't have on his van.......a hoover!!
Having sucked out the soot (a lot of which seemed to land on him, he was filthy!) he then declared all was well so he reassembled most of the boiler and tested it. It was at this point there was a power failure which he wasn't sure was his fault or not so I had to ring the neighbours to see if there electricity had gone too. It had. In fact the whole of Felixstowe had gone off. It was 3.o'clock by this time so we waited for an hour but as it hadn't come back on he said he would pop back later. This turned out to be 10 o'clock the next morning as the power was off until midnight. The temperature was well below freezing and as we had no heating,lighting,tv,radio or sense of humour left we went to bed. So we didn't get to Gran's quite as early as we thought!

We have bought a new waste paper basket which worked a treat until someone took it over!!!