I’ve been away for five days, and got back home yesterday (Thursday) early afternoon, due to work Friday as usual and then head off a weekend away. While we were away the electrician was coming in to rewire our house – an expensive operation but a very much-needed one. The inside of some of the sockets had melted and the consumer unit regularly emitted sparks!!

Picture the scene, I flew back into the country yesterday, got back to Leeds, got a taxi home, and was wandering up the road looking in my bag for my keys when I realised I could hear something. Hammering. Coming out of my open front door into the street accompanied with a lot of brick dust.

We went in to the house to be met by an agitated electrician. He’s had a nightmare of a time with our house, the existing wiring was a mess and had junction boxes everywhere so he’s ended up drilling into more of our (solid brick, even on the internal) walls and pulling up more of our floors than he’d expected. So the floors are mostly up on the ground floor and they haven’t started the basement yet, i.e. they’re a bit behind schedule, and putting all the floors back down and making the house safe for habitation wasn’t going to help.

So I went in the house, opened my suitcase, removed the bag of dirty washing, replaced its void with clean underwear and t-shirts, shut the suitcase again and put the suitcase, the rucksack I had with me when I got home, and my laptop into the car. My employers were relatively relaxed about me working remotely today so we headed off a day early for our weekend in Northumberland and today I’ve been working from my parents’ place in Alnwick.

Fingers crossed when we get home on Sunday things will have calmed down a bit … although I suspect the mess will still be eye-watering!