Rollercoaster

Bit of an uppy-downy day today. Started badly with unneccesary wakefulness and feeling rubbishness at 5am. After lots of grumpy tossing and turning, I lulled myself back to sleep with more of the seemingly endless book I'm reading about Charles II. (I thought I'd cracked it the other night when I finished the book, but was slightly disappointed that he didn't die at the end, which seems the right thing to happen at or near the end of a biography of a dead person. Then I looked at the cover and realised it was only Part 1.)

Proper and feeling slightly better wakefulness was achieved later, and all was going well until I was brushing my teeth. And realised the water wasn't coming out of the tap. I checked the stopcock, checked all the intermediate taps, and checked anything else I could think of, all the time with the sinking realisation that the pipes were frozen. So, once it was a decent time to call folk on a Sunday morning I called Dad (I knew 9am would be fine as, like me, he'd be up to feed the birds in the garden. As a small digression, perhaps you are grown up when you realise you're turning into your parents, and don't mind so much.)

Anyway, Dad sorted me out so, once dressed, I ventured out and poured boiling water over the outside bit of the pipe (the water for the kettle, in case you're wondering, came out of some of my many hot water bottles). With a loud and scary cracking noise, the water was flowing (out of the taps, not out of a crack in the pipes or anything.) Happily only two small parts of our water system are copper, and therefore prone to cracking. The rest is plastic. I foolishly commented to Dad, who is an expert on frozen water pipes - it seemed to happen every year when I was growing up, though probably that's me misremembering. But there was definitely a long spell when our neighbour dug a silage pit on top of our pipe, exposing it to the air (he was a farmer, he didn't just have a silage pit in his garden or anything) when we'd have a week every winter with no water.

Anyway, I was saying to Dad that at least when our pipes froze when I was little there was always snow to collect and melt on top of the stove for water. Right on cue, the snow started falling and within an hour we had two inches. It was through all this snow that I trudged back and forth with concrete blocks and two types of insulation to build a little hut around the bit where the pipe comes out of the ground and goes into the house. Be careful what you wish for.

Today's lotto (bingo) at school was, not surprisingly, cancelled; leaving everyone with a free afternoon. So once the snow had stopped - helpfully just after lunch - we all headed off with sledges to entertain the kids on a hilly bit of road. A really lovely time, with all the kids having fun, and the grown ups too.

So, by about 5pm the day had made a late surge into my good books. And then Mr B called. From the hard shoulder of a French motorway. Asking if I could look for the insurance documents for the car. Hmmm. Now there's no way anyone could ask that in a good way... Several (four) hours later he called back and I got the full story: icy patch, car spun round, car behind hit him. No-one hurt, the other car hardly damaged at all, our car quite badly damaged: driveable but all the lights broken. With any accident on a French motorway the police have to be called. Happily the woman in the other car spoke English and Mr B thought all was well, until the police took him off (driving terrifyingly fast on the icy roads apparently - and Mr B doesn't scare easily) to a police station. He foresaw a night in the cells... but it was just to fill in another form. So his punishment for hitting ice hopefully won't be more than a broken car and four hours standing on the hard shoulder up to his ankles in snow, in work shoes and no socks. Brrrr.

Well, I feel I've gone on a bit. Tomorrow is already preying on my mind: will I try and get the kids to school or not? Will I make it to the shops to replenish our supply of fuel for the paraffin stoves - without which we will be very chilly? But for now, here's a bucket of snowy pegs. Just because when else am I ever likely to blip that? Best go and fill some more receptacles with water in case my water-pipe-house doesn't do the trick overnight....