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The washing machine stopped working again and even worse most of the upstairs cold water ran dry too. The toilet wouldn’t flush and the sinks didn’t work (though weirdly, the bath in the same room still had cold water), so presumably some of the pipes have frozen, The downstairs water supply is fine and there is hot water still, so it’s all most confusing. But this has not happened in the five years we’ve lived here, so I think this has to be the coldest weather we’ve experienced here. Even all those times when it was freezing and our central heating broke down. Hopefully there is no permanent damage, though there was some temporary damage when I forgot about the flush and did a poo in the non-working toilet.
It’s OK.i used a few buckets of bath water to flush away my embarrassments.
Phoebe is still off school, but Ernie was in today and excited by the swathes of snow in the playground. I tried to rush him past it, but he couldn’t believe that I was prepared to leave such fragile treasures unstomped and unthrown. I checked myself. He was right again as usual. At what point do we suddenly stop finding all snow impossibly exciting? How empty are our lives that we don’t chuck the stuff at each other at every opportunity. I’d had such fun with him and Phoebe yesterday. Why was I suddenly being all sensible and uncool?
I mean, it was because we were already late for school as the drive had been perilous and we’d then got stuck behind the bin lorry. But still.
He taught me a lesson.
But I still didn’t let him play in the snow. That boy has to grow up.
I had a fun chat with Rob Manuel, which will go out as the first RHLSTP Book Club of 2023 (there’s one out this week and then the Book Club takes a break over Christmas) though there were some technical difficulties. The Zencastr software crashed at my end after about 30 minutes and we thought we might have lost the whole thing (or at least my part of it), but there was also a delay on the line which made it very difficult to interject without talking over each other. It was still a great and funny chat about his Twitter stream Fesshole and the book that has come out of it. It’s worrying that Elon Musk’s preoccupation with one element of Twitter might put the whole thing in jeopardy, because whilst there is much to dislike about the site, there are great positives and it’s been a boon to creativity, building an audience for less mainstream ideas and raising funds for charity.
We’re all ill and exhausted and I just wanted to sleep tonight, but as I was just nodding off my phone bleeped with breaking news. I usually remember to turn the sound off, but hadn’t on this occasion. I should just have ignored it, but thought it must be important if it was coming in at 10.30pm. It turned out Freddie Flintoff had been hurt in an accident on Top Gear. There wasn’t much more info, but as much as I love Freddie, I am not sure this was worth a breaking news alert. Certainly not at this time of night. It wasn’t clear if he was OK or not, so the news would not only wake people up, but also (if they were fans) make it difficult for them to sleep. As it turned out the injuries were not life-threatening. Which made the decision to make this breaking news at 10.30pm (when any sensible person would be in bed) even more bogus. No disrespect to Freddie Flintoff but even if he had been badly hurt or killed I would have been OK with waiting til the morning to find out. I am sure the feeling is mutual. If Freddie Flintoff was woken up at 10.30pm (he’d probably be in bed) by the news that I had been killed in a bizarre stone clearing accident, I think he’d be annoyed too. Obviously if anything happens to Paddy McGuinness I want to know immediately.
But come on Breaking News guys. Use your powers responsibly.
I managed to get to sleep OK despite my concerns. Slept like a baby. Sorry Freddie.
