Daphne

A rather wet flower, which matches the watery problems today.  It has been yet another day of almost constant rain, and considerable wind.  Our lawn is covered in acorns and little oak sprigs, along with a few larger branches.  There are several trees down in the neighbourhood, at least one blocking a road.

In addition to the leaking roof and broken toilet discovered yesterday, we discovered this evening that our gas boiler has ceased functioning - it's flashing F22.  There was no hot water when I washed my hands before bed.  There are other watery problems that we've been aware of for a while, but have put off doing anything about - there's damp coming through the wall in the lounge and our towel rail (which is part of the central heating system) in the en suite bathroom was leaking in the spring - it stopped, presumably because enough water leaked out that the level is below the leaking joint, but before we switch on the heating we need to get a plumber to look at it!  And of course there is the ongoing saga of the pond, which is STILL losing water.  I think we could be spending all the money we saved by not going on exotic holidays this year on house and garden maintenance.

That all sounds like a miserable rant.  In fact, I feel better than I did yesterday.

The nerines are coming in to flower.

We're clearly not going to be firing up the central heating in the next few days - last year when we had the boiler serviced, the plumber warned us it was unlikely to be economic to repair - so we lit the wood burner in the evening for the first time this year and enjoyed a cosy evening.

We have electric heaters in the garden room and the studio, and we can bring a portable heater into the office (to supplement the showy but not very effective blow heater in the fireplace).  So we'll be fine for the moment.  We're going away for 10 days or so in the second week of October - hopefully the central heating can be sorted before we go.