Let us, as Nabokov says at the beginning of Transparent Things, illustrate our difficulties...
I got up the other morning to discover that the boiler - the boiler that has hitherto drawn reluctant gasps of admiration from hardened heating engineers - was leaking water all over the kitchen. Later that day it was declared officially dead. Defunctus est. And so it remains while estimates (for new boiler and quite possibly a couple of rads) are prepared, breath is drawn in sharply, telephone calls are not made, Christmas draws ever nearer, and, inevitably, a bravura display of Global Warming sweeps remorselessly south from the Arctic (which, when last heard of on the BBC, was little more than a subtropical lagoon). Snow tomorrow. And unfortunately the house is so designed that, in the absence of central heating, only one downstairs room can be effectively heated up. So there we shall huddle for the duration, sipping gruel and cursing our fate.
What is it with December? It was much the same last year... All this, and the inevitable NigeCorp workstorm, and the pre-Christmas frenzy, and the weather - December is in serious danger of becoming my least favourite month.
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Gruel! We dream of sipping gruel. We've just got tepid water.
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ReplyDeleteTepid! You don't know you're born...tepid. We've got a puddle of filthy ditchwater which 16 of us have to suck through one broken straw.
ReplyDelete(You could always have your gruel with whisky)
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ReplyDeleteSo sorry to hear this, having had the same thing myself over the years. Even modest little boilers are swingeingly expensive to purchase, too. A couple of el cheapo blow-heaters, binned after the emergency is over, is less of a hassle than pnuemonia, or that's how I justified the trip to Homebase. Hope this gets fixed for you asap.
ReplyDeleteI feel for you. Ours packed in a few years ago, also during freezing weather.
ReplyDeleteIt had performed heroically, being so old and leaky that it had stalactites hanging off its underside, which was sitting on bare earth in the basement. A conscientious plumber, some time during the twentieth century, had put a sticker on it saying something along the lines of 'Dangerous - Do Not Use'. Another ancient and possibly OEM sticker said 'Do Not Use in Confined Spaces', but it could only be seen by twisting around a bit in the tiny, cupboard-like room that housed it.
Take some comfort that once it's over you're going to love your new condensing combi.
Yes Nige - sorry to hear this sad news. The Mark/Gaw posts confirm a theory I have, that these supposedly inanimate gadgets do in fact communicate at a higher level that we are yet to understand. Why is it that they 'pack-up' at the very time that we need them most (cold-snaps, holidays etc)? And how do they manage, before they expire, to communicate with other 'white goods' in the house? Last Christmas our 30 year old Glow Worm died - two days after next-door performed the last rites over their Bosch. On the same day as our's expired, the Hotpoint fridge/freezer sitting ten metres away developed 'condenser' trouble that quickly became terminal. My latent agnosticism is put to the test at this time of year, but I am pretty clear on this; there is something going on.
ReplyDeleteThanks everybody, for your warming messages. Things are now looking up, inasmuchas the new boiler is promised for Thursday - and the people nextdoor but one, who moved there from our house, have lent us a stupendously powerful turbocharged blower thing which is churning out lots of hot air (usually that's me, hoho). These saintly people also told me that the much-admired boiler was installed by them when the previous one packed up just months before they moved - which makes it barely 6 years old! What is that in boiler years?
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