Warming Up

8027/20968

The sitcom writers of my life had taken a nice long break after their successful season in which I cut my hand, broke my face and popped a car tyre, but they were saving all their best ideas for today.

Last week's winds broke our new automated gates and we've yet to get any response from the guy who put them in. We've had to leave the gates open or they flap around in the breeze but one of them is not flush against the wall, making the narrow entry to our driveway even narrower.

Catie over compensated for the gap on her way out this afternoon and caught the wing mirror and front section of the car, cracking the headlight for a potential MOT fail and buckling the front section so the two pieces slightly separated. I was more worried that the gates might be further damaged, but somehow they came out OK.

I had gone in the other car to the old house as we had some cleaners and decorators in, trying to make it a more attractive prospect for a potential buyer. Unfortunately the boiler has packed in again and they'd rung to tell us that the house was so cold that the paint wasn't drying. I headed over to see if I could get the radiators on and to light the fires in the hope of warming the place up.

The boiler was not playing ball though. I've been trying to get a guy out to look at it for the last fortnight but he's been too busy. It was a balmy 8 degrees in the house, colder than it was outside, somehow. I lit the wood burner, which immediately started spewing smoke into the living room. I managed to get it working properly but had to open the windows to let the smoke out, which dimmed the effectiveness of the fire. I got the open fire working well and burning furiously. I'd finished off all the kindling so chucked the wooden wine box we'd been using to store bits of wood on to the fire and went to check out the other rooms.

The smoke alarm went off and I returned to the snug to find the room full of smoke. I don't know exactly why, but I guess the box had diverted the smoke away from the chimney or burned so intensely that the chimney couldn't cope. I felt the sting of embarrassment in front of the proper men working on the house, though they remained surprisingly cool about it. I had to open another window and the front door and the smoke was so thick I briefly thought that it might be foolish to be in the room.

The guy running the operation was an impressive figure who seemed to have had every job in the world and as well as being a top flight house cleaner specialising in getting cookers looking brand new, also works in security and even has to taste food for one of his clients in case its poisoned. It seemed a bit odd that a man who cleans cookers also is a bodyguard for millionaires, but why would he lie? And he looked very strong, so I believed him.

It's annoying enough having one house with things going wrong and every little set back really gets to me. So my unfixed gates and broken car and non-working boilers (the one in my new annexe is also playing up and the one in the old annexe is making a weird noise too - and the one in the new house also had to be fixed last month - can anyone else claim to have four broken boilers in the same month?) really get to me.

I got the house a bit warmer and a friend lent us a little portable heater and we had one at home thta we brought across, so we should be able to get the house warmer for tomorrow. But this was a big stain on my day, when I'd just wanted to spend the afternoon listening to York City (an impressive 6-2 win today).

I got home and needed to charge the car. There were cars parked all up our road and in front of our gate, but you can access the drive via the pavement. But because there were more cars than usual it was very hard to get the right angle. I thought I'd done it, but caught the wing mirror (luckily I saw it coming and managed to stop before there was any damage) but then got stuck with the car at entirely the wrong angle. I thought the best thing to do was attach a hosepipe to the exhaust and end it here, rather than face another humiliation, but then remembered I was in an electric car so unless it spontaneously combusted I couldn't take the coward's way out. I repositioned the car, pretty sure I was going to take the gate post down, but although there was a scraping sound as I came through, I managed to get in with only a bit of paintwork taken off the gate and the car, I think, in tact. Luckily I had been very understanding of my wife's mishap or I'd have looked quite the fool.

I still looked like quite the fool.

And felt like quite the fool.

I'd already felt shitty today, but this just sent me into a pit of mild despair. It may be very funny watching this sitcom (or not), but no one thinks of the mental health of the characters.

I hate being this fucking useless. Luckily I am good enough at mocking my own craposity that I can usually pay for the errors, though my space ship full of money has a crack in the fuselage and the money is all being sucked off into the void. At least I am keeping the economy going.

There was some light relief from my son, who has been excited for weeks about the prospect of the return of the Elf on the Shelf (who is apparently called Rusty) and had found him ahead of time, hiding in a cupboard. He was jumping for joy and even though he was in bed when I got in, he had to come downstairs to show me. He left a note and a sweet for Rusty (dictated to his mum) and Rusty left a reply.

It's going to be a long month. And he might explode by the 25th. Now that will be a sitcom episode.