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Tour fact - 7th Feb Sutton Coldfield (SOLD OUT) Sutton Coldfield is named after the actor of the same name who played Ted in Lovejoy and also Ted (same character) in Bergerac. No one ever referred to this bizarre character crossover and no viewer ever noticed, even though he appeared in every episode of both shows, wearing the exact same hat.
All tour dates here
It had been a tough night with Ernie anyway, but I woke at 5am thinking something was pulsing in the bedroom. But as I looked around I realised the sound was coming from downstairs and unbelievably (given all the gas was off and we hadn’t lit a fire for days) the carbon monoxide alarm was going off again. It didn’t really make any sense. It hadn’t been faulty last night and had correctly identified the boiler problem again. But where was the gas coming from now. The alarm stopped and then went off again. The reading was higher than last night's
I wasn’t going to mess around and called out Cadent for the second time in ten hours and third time this month. A different man turned up (I guess this industry sees a lot of loss of life - the average life span of a carbon monoxide detector can be measured in hours) and did all his checks. But there was nothing there. His machine briefly beeped after about 15 minutes but then stopped. We speculated that the reading might have been due to solvents in the concrete floor that had been put down for our new oven. But that would be a weird coincidence. As last night’s readings had clearly been linked to the boiler (they went down to zero as soon as the boiler was off). It was a mystery. The kind of mystery you don’t really want. Hanging over you for all the years you have living in a house.
After just a couple of hours of sleep I was already discombobulated. I was annoyed to see that BT had not turned on our new broadband as promised, so contacted them via the chat feature of their web page as I changed a huge shitty nappy for my son that had spilled out over his clothes. They didn’t know what had happened and said they’d ring me.
Which they did just as the oven installers turned up - they were already annoyed as their sat nav had taken them to the wrong village where they had woken up someone who didn’t need an oven. They also looked with scepticism at the work that had been done for preparation. They said the concrete wasn’t set and that they wouldn’t remove some bits of wood that were there to hold the new tiles in place and that the electricians had failed to put in an isolation switch, so they couldn’t put the oven in. It was a bad morning for the company that had done the work on our house, having both installed the boiler that was trying to kill us and failed to do this prep work (which comes on top of the huge delays that led to the week before the birth of our son being very stressful). I was trying to talk to BT and the man who had not prepped our kitchen as desired at the same time, whilst an engineer tried to work out why the boiler was still malfunctioning and two men were failing to install our cooker. And it was only 8am.
The oven installers were getting sympathetic as they realised what I was going through. “You’re lucky,” I told them, “You don’t have to tell my wife about this.” I knew Catie would be pretty cross (and rightly so), but it was so overwhelming and so much was going wrong at once that I was starting to find it funny. And the workmen laughed too now and their frostiness had disappeared. We were united by our many failures to please our spouses. Knowing that much of our failure was out of our control.
And on the plus side it looked like the boiler might get fixed by moving the flue to a place where the fumes didn’t get trapped in a little vortex (maybe, who knows, I still think our life might be two weeks of central heating followed by a couple of nights of poisoning and cold) and the oven men could come back next week, where hopefully the issues could be resolved.
I had to come into town to do some PR for the tour and meet my new tour manager. I realised it was going to be pretty tight to catch the train I needed and when I got to the station one car park was full and the other one had just one space that was only just big enough for my car. I struggled to get out and then the ticket machine was playing up. The train would have to be late for me to catch it and I still needed to get my ticket.
But my luck turned as just as I paid for my tickets I stepped on to the platform, five minutes late for the train, to see the train pulling into the station, also five minutes late. I let out such an audible sigh of relief that a man commented on my good fortune. I told him that it hadn’t been that lucky a day so far. And I assumed that the train that I’d Sliding Doored my way on to would now crash to teach me a a lesson.
But although it was hard to get through a busy day on so little sleep, nothing else went horribly wrong. I was even given a free cup of coffee in Pret, either because the man behind the counter thought I looked handsome and cool or possibly because he thought I was homeless.
The worst thing about all this (aside from the constant possibility of death) was the worry that we had another cold night ahead of us. But by the time I was home everything had been fixed (for now), though we had no idea why that second alarm had gone off still. If my family pass away in the night please avenge my death.
