Morning Moon

The soft start to the day gave no hint of the drama to come in the evening.  A lovely lazy breakfast with daughter and son-in-law, who arrived safely yesterday (too busy to blip then!)

TJ and M decided to walk up the nearby hill to stretch their legs, while daughter J and I went for a short drive to admire the scenery in the lovely winter sunshine, which was gradually melting the morning 's hard frost. 

An evening at a local Indian restaurant had been booked as a treat for Christmas Eve to ensure I had no cooking to do.  By chance, I went into the upstairs bathroom to change a towel and stepped in a huge puddle of water!!  The flexi hose behind the bidet had sprung a leak and hot water was spurting everywhere.

A frustrating call to our insurance company, where we are covered for Home Emergencies, gave no guarantee that a plumber would be available until after Christmas, so the search was on for the relevant stopcock to isolate the water.  This house was built to strange standards and there are pipes and controls everywhere, but we couldn't find the right one!

While all this was going on, I had cancelled the sit in meal at the restaurant to a takeaway and the delivery man duly turned up with the order.  On hearing about the problem, he offered to come in and help find the stopcock for us (obviously thinking we were idiots!), only to discover that he couldn't find it either!  However, he rang a friend who had been a plumber and sought advice and we finally discovered where the relevant control was hidden.  At last, the water stopped and the situation was contained.

The hilarious thing was, that our daughter and son-in-law had assumed HE was the plumber and couldn't understand why he was so useless at his job and had to phone a colleague!  They were most impressed at the kindness of strangers in this area:-  )

Five minutes after the water had been turned off, the emergency plumber turned up and fortunately had the correct spare part in his van which he fitted in less than 20 minutes, so we were finally able to sit down to our somewhat delayed Indian meal.

The washing machine and dryer have been going non stop ever since trying to clean up all the dozens of towels we used to mop up the torrents.  Not quite the peaceful Christmas Eve we had planned, but one which none of us will ever forget:-)

Hope your Christmas is far less stressful and you have a happy and peaceful time. X