Thursday, December 31, 2009

It's been quiet around here ...

Alan in Belfast - Christmas profile picture

It has been quiet on the blog over Christmas. Quite a lot of that was due to the way that our broadband modem lost sync about half past three in the afternoon of Christmas Eve and has only just started working again (they reset the card in the DSLAM) a few minutes ago.

Of course broadband wasn’t the only thing to break on Christmas Eve. The boiler went first. To be precise, the ancient pump on the boiler went on permanent vacation just after lunch.

The ancient pump that was more or less welded onto the rest of the boiler, that was not simply released by the two screws that were supposed to hold it. Much hammering, chiselling, and eventually taking apart various other bits of the boiler to force it to separate, and the plumber got the pump off and a new one fitted about 8pm on a cold and icy Christmas Eve.

Thank goodness for a plumber who answered his mobile mid-afternoon on what may well have been the busiest day of the year and promised “I’ll get to you eventually, you’re on my list”. Now just to get an invoice out of him to pass onto the landlord.

The house was cold, and there wasn’t enough snow to construct an igloo, so we decamped to my parents’ house where we’d be spending Christmas Day. It would be fun to draw the comparison with Mary and Joseph making their way to Bethlehem to find accommodation all those years ago. Except throwing a suitcase in the car and driving less than half a mile to reach a warm welcome didn’t exactly grant us refugee status.

But thanks goodness for heat, water, food and family this Christmas, things not guaranteed across the world, not even in this country.

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