And Lo! A Boiler was born!

Many thanks to green_amber and drpete for their advice.

The "head" plumber arrived last night when I got home from work and looked at the kitchen and asked if I minded the fact they would have to break some tiles in the corner the boiler lives in. I said, if it meant hot water they could do what the hell they liked.

So, he said he'd start removing the boiler there and then. Which he did. Much to his surprise, little things were apparent about the build quality of whoever did the original work. He removed the screws which held the flue in place, noticed it wobbling and pulled it, whereby the whole thing came out of the wall. "Umm... its not meant to do that, it should be cemmented in place."

Anyway, we arrive this morning and the whole thing is gone, and there are 2 guys manhandling a new unit through the door. Yay! With luck, according to plumber number 2, we should be good to go tonight. Superb.

I have suspended the Standing Order for January and I'll write a cheque, once we've had a discussion about the £20 for additional heating for coal and electricity and anything else we can discuss.

It's Christmas Time...

So, today. I had to pop out to Green Park Station for our Turkey. Had a nasty road rage pre-Christmas incident in the car park, but I won, so I don't care. The other guy did turn an unhealthy shade of purple. He should watch his blood pressure.

Had some concerns that I'd done a JPL style screw up on my metric/imperial conversions and had therefore ordered a 10kg Turkey rather than a 10lb one. 5.5kg's, phew!

Went to Sainsburys. Less said about that the better. If any of you out there just have a "few" bits to pick up, then I'd suggest you go in pairs and get somebody in the check out queue when you arrive. Ugh. It was bad, and in true Bath Sainsbury style they had run out of practically everything. Still, I managed to get everything, get it home and find that there is already a new boiler on the kitchen wall and a harassed looking plumber working to hook it all up.

Yay!

Called the family to tell them Christmas was back on.

Amazon seem to have screwed up the present order, so I'm a present for M down. Still, she can have 5 - which I think is an elegant sufficiency. Even if one of them is a bit of a con.

EDIT: I checked the package and they've cunningly fitted all the gifts into the one box - the 2 books were smaller than I expected.

It's the Cheese Grommit!

Sorry for all the spam. I'm waiting for a draft of a proposal we have to have out before Christmas and its a big one. I'm stuck spinning my wheels for a few hours.

I forgot the Cheese. There's a fantastic Cheese shop in Bath, Paxton and Whitehead and I want to have a nice cheese board for Christmas. They do amazing mature stilton and there are lots of other nice things there.

Ummm - which reminds me, we may have run out of Port.

This is the first year I'll have the family over for the holiday, so its going to be fun. I'm doing a traditional Boxing Day Roast Beef and Yorkshire pudding, followed by deserts (with a cheeky little desert wine I got from a stall at the Christmas Market) and then Cheese and Port.

Next year, however, I will be mostly dieting.