I've been hovering on the brink of insanity for the last month (OK, even closer to the brink than normal) thanks to my boiler. It decided, as is its annual wont, to stop working. Usually, someone comes round after a week or so of me shivering, hits it in some magic and very expensive way, and it starts working again.
This time, after a week of no heat or hot water, a bloke came round and hit it hard enough to make it work for a whole day, leaving me to make endless phone calls and get endless promises from endless boilermen, all of whom have lied. They've promised faithfully to turn up and fix it. I've stayed in. They haven't arrived. One bloke said he'd be here on Friday. And then called to say 'oops, it's a Bank Holiday and I didn't realise so I can't get any parts'. You'd think he'd have noticed. Or at least found somewhere that was open and charged an outrageous premium for fixing it. But instead, he swore he'd be here on Tuesday. Sure enough, he was. He looked at the boiler and said 'it's broken.' The man is a genius.
After the first week of coldness hell (where it really was far too cold to work, or do anything other than lie in bed, shivering and feeling sorry for myself) my ex turned up with a plug-in radiator for me, which made things rather more pleasant (yes, I could have got one myself. But I was still at the 'believing the lies of boilermen stage) I could work. I just couldn't wash. This made meetings a little tricky. It doesn't tend to give a good impression to editors if they can smell you three tube stops before you arrive at a meeting. It's also made having a glam cocktail-filled lifestyle unfeasible, because there's only so chic a girl can look with unwashed hair.
After a month of no baths, (To be clear, actually, I have actually had some baths in the last month, but they've been at friends' houses or made using the oh-so-time-efficient method of filling a gazillion pans of water and transporting them to the bath, resulting in a) RSI and b) between three and five hours of time spent doing nothing but fill a bath) the boilerman was lucky not to get punched for blandly informing me 'It's broken.'
So, today, the man has returned and is apparently fixing the boiler. So far, he's come in, asked where the stopcock is, opened the boiler, said 'Oh shit,' and left again.
If he doesn't come back and actually fix the boiler, this may be the last post I ever write as I'll have exploded with anger and/or tracked him down and hit him over the head repeatedly with the bits he's taken out of the boiler. Which will be particularly likely to get me banged up as I won't be able to have a bath to wash the bloodstains off my hands.
NB: Apologies for the boiler-obsessed post. It has dwarfed everything else in my life. However, to summarise, my book - now at about 11,000 words - is under consideration by a couple of publishers, I'm up for a couple of editor jobs, I've written various shagging-related articles, have several sex toys to test, had a fab night at live punk karaoke talking about pubes with Lou Wener (her boyfriend is in the band. He suggested we sang together. I declined, partly because I really can't do the karaoke thing without feeling horribly embarrassed and partly because *it's Lou Wener*. I can do without that kind of competition.) had a fun dinner party, in which 'sleb stories' were being exchanged and one of the guests managed to utterly trump everyone else by confessing to having shagged Thom Yorke, and have eaten an awful lot of chocolate. Enough to have gone up a dress size (I'm not normally a chocoholic but when you're lying in bed and can't work because it's too damned cold, chocolate and Baileys is the only solution).
Hmmm, OK, the boilerman claims the heating is now working. The bath beckons...
Posted by emilyd at April 14, 2004 03:17 PM