Editor's February blog
During the last cold snap there was a burst mains pipe, in Wales I think. Did anyone see the news item? By the time the TV cameras rolled in the community had lived an entire day without water.
“I haven’t been able to wash or run my dishwasher. It’s disgusting” complained one gentleman in that “something must be done” tone of voice. If he wasn’t old enough to remember the war, he certainly lived through the winter of ’63 and for sure there weren’t dishwashers around in his youth.
In another flat, a mother and kids - all in t-shirts so clearly no problem with the central heating - said they had been forced to buy bottled water to flush the loo. Out on the street a bunch of villagers were clustered around tanks shipped in by the water company (so they weren’t actually without water, only running water). Shivering in crop tops and bare legs, and clutching near naked babies in their arms they complained about having to come out in sub-zero temperatures to fill buckets.
Put a b***** coat on, then, and wrap that baby in a blanket! Do people have no survival skills?
Have they never been camping?
A friend here in Normandy has been waiting two years for her husband to install a kitchen sink - she does the washing up in the shower. Another family is still using the old outside staircase to reach their upstairs. Indeed, half the people I know here are either in and out of caravans or decamping from room to room as they build the dream project.
That’s the answer then: ship these whingers out to spend a week in a half-renovated house in Normandy! Call it a sort of outward bound experience. Turn it into a reality TV show.
I had this idea while using the car scraper to clear ice on the inside of the bedroom windows. Not knowing, obviously, that oil prices would tumble and we were in for the coldest winter in recent memory, we had the brilliant idea of not using the central heating this year.
During the very cold spell we dug out the electric convectors and decided to hell with the electricity bill. Ha! Our “rewired” house allows simultaneous use of precisely one radiator and one other electrical gadget. Go wild and try to run, say, the kettle at the same time as the DVD player and the entire supply trips. You waste 5 minutes of your life: thirty seconds stumbling to the mains switch and 4 minutes 30 seconds waiting for the low energy light bulbs to remember they are meant to emit light.
The cold, of course also sends outdoor creatures scurrying for warmth. Our resident mice no longer wait for us to go to bed before sauntering out to check the cheeses on offer. They fail to understand that, in return, they are meant to wait inside the trap until the door shuts. “Forget cheese” advises a colleague. “We ended up super-gluing Smarties in our traps. The final insult was when we found a mouse sitting in the cat saucer eating the cat food.”
I told our own useless felines that there’d be no more cat food on the shopping list while the house is full of tittering mice. They marched off, disgusted, and dragged back the corpse of one of our French neighbour’s rabbits.
The dogs, meanwhile, are so determined to prevent any heat being wasted on human beings that they press up against the petrol heater and periodically set themselves on fire. We use the old t shirts that we hang over the computers to protect them from falling plaster dust to put the flames out.
Even if you know compatriots with perfect, “normal” homes you can be sure they spent a year or so in a caravan or living in 1 1/2 rooms along the way. Many Brits grow so deranged during this renovation process than no sooner have they finished a house than they sell up and start on the next.
Why we all chose this madcap existence (something to do with quality of life, wasn’t it?) is another question. And when we could be living in a centrally heated flat and pouring bottled water down the loo!
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