Welcome home

There’s nothing quite like coming home after a week away. Though not necessarily to an empty house, devoid of wife and poodles and with the temperature set to just above freezing. While not on a par with the time we went away to the Loire (when the olive oil froze), it was a bit of a shock after a week of sunshine and heat.

It was so cold that I was forced to use the electric blanket on the bed. For me, that’s pretty desperate.

While it was a rather chilly welcome home, Mirinda had left the porch light on for me, so it wasn’t dark as well.

I went to bed at around 2am then was awake at 5:30, missing something. It took me a while to realise it was the call to morning prayers. I laid in bed and enjoyed the silence.

I had to get up to be ready for the BT engineer who was coming to fix our static ridden phone. Also, Dave had said he might be around to start moving stuff into the back garden. I sat on the lounge and typed my final Marrakech entry.

The BT engineer turned up at about 9:30 and started testing stuff. He quickly established it wasn’t the handset or the cables in the house or interference on the line. He was a bit mystified. I told him the broadband had been a bit on and off as well. He said that might have something to do with it.

His next port of call was the junction box under the eaves. He said he was getting his ladder to check the connection. If the problem wasn’t there, he was going to try the cabinet then the exchange.

Having changed into a hard hat and hi-viz jacket, he climbed the ladder and was busy for about 20 minutes. He came back in, triumphantly holding a bit of stripped wire.

“Have you had the tree trimmed recently?” He asked, talking about the wisteria.
“Before Christmas,” I said.
“I wouldn’t use them again. They stripped the cable almost bare.” He held up the cable. “It would have been fine until the water, from all this rain, started affecting it.”

And, just like that, the phone was fixed. He’d simply replaced the stripped wire. He was happy, I was happy, Mirinda will be happy.

I finished my final blog post then went into Farnham. Dave has a key so, if he turned up, he could start moving stuff whenever he felt like it.

At Starbucks, everyone asked about my week in Marrakech and mentioned how brown I was. They were quite miffed when I told them about the beautiful weather I’d been subjected to while they had braved wind and rain, flooding and fallen trees.

Back at home, the front garden was full of builders stuff but Dave was nowhere to be seen. I had a document to format for Mirinda so I sat in the office concentrating on that. Then, I heard a noise out the front, over the top of the opera I was listening to.

It was Dave and a brickie, offloading more stuff. I opened the gate and they moved everything round the back, including some wire fencing for the dogs. It’s rather high so I’m going to have to reposition the time lapse camera (which worked perfectly while I was away).

They left after a couple of hours, Dave telling me they’d probably be starting on Tuesday given the weather reports for the weekend and Monday.

The rest of the day was spent formatting Mirinda’s document, sorting and uploading my Marrakech photos to Flickr and trying to stay awake. I gave up trying at 9:30 and slept like the proverbial baby in a non-Moslem country.