She’s 14 and for the first time she is away on holiday for a week with a friend. Today has been the first day without her around and even though she’s been away for a night or two before, this time it feels weird. the house just seems emptier. I know that’s a daft thing to say, and maybe even feel, but it is the way I feel it today.
This must be one of those parenting ‘things’ I have to go through … I’m not worried about her at all. She is perfectly capable of looking after herself, being daft when it’s important and sensible when necessary, and she’ll not be homesick, but I guess it’s the fragmentation ? This is all now part of getting those wings and becoming ready to fly the nest in a few short years. All good, all healthy, all needed, all inevitable but things like this still have that oddly sad edge to what is actually a really good thing.

So the gas gets switched off two days ago because it’s unsafe. Then we are woken in the night by a heavy drip-drip in the roofspace above our bed. Hmm… the ceiling is wallpapered and I can see and feel the paper has come away from a metre wide section of the ceiling. Initially I left it at that and just rang the agents to tell them. An hour later, the skies opened and the drip not only got faster, but it was accompanied by what sounds like overflows. Good eh ?
Up into the roofspace ….. our bedroom is an extension over the garage so there is the original wall in place with a hole – and I do mean a hole through to the extension roofspace. And to get to this hole requires the flexibility of a pre-pubescent russian gymnast – there are pipes and cables and bits of wood and a water tank all between me and the hole. By moving around the other side though I can see the dripping and I can see a sodden patch of insulation that is at least 4 feet long between the joists. I rang the agents back. I reminded them that I had in fact warned them about a dodgy tile on the roof at least 2 months ago, and that should anything get damaged, I will happily supply the list of damaged items for their insurance company. I mentioned that the roofer they contact ought to bring a small child to do the surveying too.
An hour later – the purpose of my calls not only being to alert them to the problem but also to remind them we had no gas – they ring back. Everything can go ahead ! Gas starts being sorted tomorrow, and the roof guy will ring. They also mentioned that the landlord says Yes, we can have a dog – that’s nice ;)

(The roof guy just rang – he can’t do anything until it stops raining. Why do I find that amusing ?)

Gas engineer came round today as the Landlord’s certificate needed renewing. He did the fire first, and even my inexperience around such things could tell it wasn’t going to plan. Testing, umming, erring, much lighting of smoke bombs (sort of). In the end he slapped a large sticker on the fire saying we couldn’t use it. I did point out that as he had told me, and that as I would tell the rest of the family, and that as it was summer, that he need not bother with the sticker. He could save it for something important. Apparently though, the “Putting On Of Stickers” is an extremely important part of the job – and no way could I interfere with The Professional. Wearing his smug “I Got To Use A Sticker” face, he wandered to the cooker. He tried, oh yes, but the cooker was fine. We were quits at this point. Then he went to the boiler.
He chatted that it needed a service (did I mention it was about 16:35 by now ?) and that he’d only be a minute. I wandered off to the lounge. 5 minutes later he zips into the room and starts squirting something at the caps he’s used to block the fire. Then he zips out again. Back only a few seconds later he starts waving what looked like a gas lighter around under the fire and he moves rapidly out of the room. I follow. In a casual tone, I ask him what’s up. He tells me there’s a leak. Oh ….. and it’s not just a little leak. He talks about pressures, asks me if I’ve smelt gas … Nope, all is good say I. He then expresses surprise that the house is actually standing. He isolates everything, tests, isolates and removes the meter and tests, nips round with his gas detector (not lighter) and in the end gives up. He cuts our gas off completely. I’ve told the agents by this time that at 9am tomorrow J will be talking to them – I consider this to be a charitable act. We’ll be needing new pipework from the meter. Not a cheap job. Even if it were us having to find someone it would take time, but having to go through an agent to the landlord could take forever. Because J does not understand the term ‘forever’ and because we have a contract which says we have gas (and lets face it if we removed a window they’d pick at us!) they need this warning – and then Mr Engineer hands me a number of forms all of which I have to sign. Lots of big WARNING forms. As he’s picking up all his gear, I sneak a look at the meter and the boiler – they look fine. Not working of course but they are fine … he was pretty cheerful as he left, almost congratulating himself on having something other than a run-of-the-mill callout … and then as he shut his van door and started his engine, I realised why he was so happy. He’d stickered the whole damn house.