68:47

I don't know about anybody else but I for one am ready for the rain to stop. I think that the barley could do with a touch of sun to finish it off too.

The forecast today is for 25 degrees, mainly cloudy, and no rain until 11pm.

We were up early (for us) and I took Nell out so that Mr L could get stuck into the demolition of the bathroom before the day heats up. I went without a jacket and was treated to a nice cooling drizzle despite the forecast.

Received bad news when I was out, one of the dogs that we meet on our daily walk had died in the night. Nell is going to miss her, I think.

The washbasin was already out when we arrived home and the shower's water supply had been disconnected. I was able to assist with moving the cubicle out so that the electrics could be tackled.

We found the usual horrors.

We always find horrors when we renovate bathrooms. We could tell some tales but none quite so horrifying as today's.

Behind the shower we found an electrical connection that had been made via a connection block, loosely wrapped in insulating tape. In a bathroom environment! Which blockhead did that?

Anyway, there followed a period of safety checks and a long session matching circuit breakers to circuits where the labelling seemed to have little relationship to the actual connections. Mr L got his meter out to check before doing anything daft. He received a belt and yelled. Thankfully, CPR was not required. Golden rule: if the victim makes a noise, they are probably okay (I learned that at First Aid classes many years ago). Turns out he was the daft one as he had his meter set to AC not DC so it was reading dead on a live wire... Mr L is now officially designated Numpty of the day.

A phone call came in. We struggle with calls as we have no signal in most of the house, just a weak one in the bathroom. There was an incomprehensible message left. Something to do with delivery of the new shower. Mr L took his phone round to neighbours who speak good French to see if they could make sense of it. After ten listenings they took the phone to their French next door neighbour, who also struggled with it. She happened to be outside in conversation with our own next door neighbour, who was the one who finally extracted a phone number from the slurred and garbled message. Apparently the msg says we can't call back until after 2pm so unfortunately we couldn't ask her to make the negotiations for us :-)

And this is only Day 1 of the bathroom adventure, if we don't count the delivery disaster prequels.