Hiatus

I am suffering broken sleep. I get home, have some food, nod off for a few hours, wake up in the middle of the night and then get another few hours before it’s time to get up. I’m getting enough sleep, just not all at once. Makes life a little strange. Looks like I have one more week of this double-shift stuff – just enough time to get used to it before it stops.

Saturday isn’t so bad. I have one shift starting at 1 pm and then Sunday is a recovery day. Recovery from the week, and recovery from Saturday night’s likely (almost certain – okay, certainly certain) whisky excess. Then on Monday it starts again. The damn job was supposed to be part time. As it is, I might as well take in a bloody camp bed.

To add to my blogging crash, the central heating boiler has died. Great. Just as the weather turns properly cold. These modern houses have no fireplaces thanks to the bastard Green cretins so when the heating dies, you die. Being out for most of the day looks less bad under the circumstances.

I have a couple of fan heaters, they are running pretty much all the time (set to ‘don’t let it freeze’ when I’m not in or asleep) and balls to the expense and triple balls with knobs on to the environment. I’d rather find myself back in debt than find myself dead. Global warming? If I can do my bit to hasten that, count me in. I think it needs to increase by at least ten degrees and if sea level goes up by 50 metres I’m still above it anyway – and I’ll have a sea view. Sounds like a good deal to me. As for the cheeldren, we’d all be better off if most of them were drowned at birth or at least retrospectively aborted as soon as they express any interest in becoming MPs or Greens. The intelligent ones will move to higher ground, the scum floating at the shallow end of the gene pool will consider ‘higher ground’ to be the top floor of the tower block. It’s natural selection, which is at least a lot fairer than eugenics. Nobody is making the decision, you make your own decision and live or die by it. Chaos? Yes, but chaos is fair. Eugenics is someone else deciding what you should be. Chaotic natural selection is you deciding for yourself, and dealing with the consequences.

The friendly neighbourhood plumber (evening visits, cash sale)  reckons the boiler’s problem is the fan that extracts fumes from the boiler – it’s broken and if that doesn’t work, the boiler won’t switch on. Sounds reasonable. If there is no extraction, the boiler will fill the house with deadly fumes so you end up warm and dead instead of cold and dead. He’s trying to find a replacement, which is considerably cheaper than buying a new boiler.

He told me, with a pained expression, that it might cost as much as £200. I could have laughed. I was expecting to have to pay for an entire new boiler and pumps and control system – enough to wreck the efforts I have made to pay down the mortgage over the years. “Do you want to go ahead?” he said, while standing in my garage where the brass monkeys sing soprano. “Oh, I think so,” I said. “Just fix the bloody thing and I’ll worry about paying if I don’t die of cold,” I thought. It’s best not to look too nonchalant at a quote from anyone, that just gives them the nod to increase the cost.

Just think – If I hadn’t had a model railway in my attic, I might not have been equipped with fan heaters. There’s no other form of heating up there and you can get brain freeze just poking your head through the hatch. Loft insulation is great when you’re below the insulation but above it…

I think my innate geekery just saved my life.

Or at least my brass monkey bits.