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Too nasty to go outside and already struggling with tiredness, this turned into an uphill struggle of a day, with a rambunctious 3 year old and a teething baby. I didn’t get a second to sit down for myself. I didn’t have a bath or a shower. I didn’t change out of yesterday’s t shirt or pants. I just wore a dressing gown over the top. Which led to a brilliant game where the cord of the dressing gown became a dog lead and my daughter dragged me all over the room and I had to pretend to be a canine - luckily the lead was in my hand, but she got annoyed if I stood up, because that was not authentic. I was willing death to take me away from this nightmare. Or at least its less final cousin, sleep.
I love those kids, but how I wished I was stuck in a snow drift on Salisbury Plains.
My brain was so out of gear I couldn't even think of writing a blog, even had I had five minutes spare without a child treating me like an animal.
By the time bath time was upon us I had already decided that I’d put Ernie to bed and would go to sleep as soon as he did. At about 7pm. What a Saturday night.
And it was a night of incredible and squandered luck. I woke up having been in a deep sleep, unsure of what time it now was. It felt like it should be morning (though had logic been at play I would have known that was not possible with a baby in the room) but suspected it would be something stupid like 11pm. It turned out it was exactly something stupid o clock. Ernie was still fast asleep, but I was wide awake. It’s hard to go back to sleep at this time anyway, because you suspect that the baby will wake any second, but you’re also aware that Herring’s Second Law dictates that as long as you stay awake, a baby will never rouse from slumber. I had a good four hours of tossing and turning. And once you’ve tossed once at my age and then not gone straight to sleep, that weapon is lost from your slumber weaponry for at least 24 hours.
Remarkably I managed to change Ernie’s nappy and give him a big load of milk at around 3 without him properly waking up. There was a chance that he would sleep for 12 uninterrupted hours and that just made my insomnia more annoying and more persistent. Imagine if I had taken my turn with the baby AND had the longest sleep I’d had since 2014.
I think I snoozed for a while, but was woken at 4 by my sleeping baby coughing. I realised it was pretty cold in the room. Surely the boiler hadn’t gone wrong for the fourth time in its short life…. but I checked the temperature and it was a chilly 16.5 degrees. I went downstairs to see what was happening and outside to the exterior room where the cursed boiler is situation. It was flashing one of its f warnings, but not the one that had led to carbon monoxide melt down. There is a light in that cupboard which I’d used last time an engineer came in the middle of the night to shut down the boiler. But when I flicked the switch it didn’t come on. The bulb was missing. Who the Hell had taken that? Sometimes we forget to lock the door, but surely you’d steal the expensive (though useless) boiler and not a light bulb.
The ghost who haunts our house hates modern heating and lighting systems - and has also fucked up our old fire a few times. I think he or she host hates me. I live here now mate. You’re dead. Get over it.
I got my phone and turned on the torch and tried to open the front panel. But I was thinking of the boiler in our old house. I pushed some buttons to no avail, came back in, searched for the instruction booklet, didn’t find it so came out to press more buttons. I’d turned off the hot water symbol. That wasn’t what I wanted. The pilot light was out so by error more than trial I managed to find the reset button and the boiler sprang back into life.
I held a carbon monoxide alarm by the flue to check we weren’t going to die. It was all fine. But not what I needed after a sleepless night at 5 o clock in the morning. I think the boiler had just been affected by the cold. Would it have been too much to hope that the installer might havre predicted that and done something to prevent it? Given he didn’t really understand where to put the flue to prevent our deaths, then it would have been too much.
I got another half an hour of weird dream sleep, imagining we were having a party in my old Shepherd’s Bush house in the safety of London town.
I love it out here. I really do. But I could have done without this tonight.
What must I do to appease you, oh spirits? One day I will be one of you (probably the day I try to change the bulbs in the hall) so it’s best we get on now, or otherwise it will be well awks.
