Definitely not the Friday retirement blog I had vaguely intended to write but then our retirement life, never boring at the best of times, cranked up quite a bit and the topic changed. The last retirement blog I wrote was about superstition. In other words the actions we take to avoid bad luck and bring on good luck, as if there was such a possibility. Ha.
But then maybe I’m wrong, maybe we are lucky. And why would I even think this? Well because on Tuesday after the gas cooker set on fire, which I referred to briefly in superstitious blog, we had cause to consider our apparent good luck in not being incinerated.
We had rather thought this to be the case when the electric cable was sparking and gas was pouring out of a hole in the pipe at the back of the cooker. I must admit I did wonder why it hadn’t blown up. I don’t know much about such things but even I vaguely understood that a mixture of gas and electricity don’t go well together. But when the electrician arrived by the time he had said, you were very lucky or, you were very, very lucky, 10 or 12 times, I thought hmm, I guess we were lucky.
But I also thought he’s probably just preparing me for the cost of fixing the problem. Which incidentally when he eventually coughed it up, was indeed massive. Or so I thought. seven and a half hundred pounds as he put it. Not once but three times, just to prove I hadn’t misheard his idiosyncratic way of telling me. Maybe this was meant to sound less than £750.
The rest of his performance was a classic. Mixed in with the ‘you were luckys’ and, at every plug point he examined, there was sharp intake of breath and a fair spread of ‘that’s not good’ and ‘oh, look at that’. He insisted on showing me each ‘accident waiting to happen’. I had no idea what he was talking about. For example, look at that, the DCI cable is missing. To begin with I would ask, what does that mean? His reply was to the effect, it’s the PDQ something or other. After a while when he pointed to something with sharp intake of breath and asked could I see it, I replied ooh yes, that’s bad. Apparently we need a new master-board. But then given his opening remark was, I’m condemning all this, I’d have settled for pretty much anything he said – at that point
So we agreed to his exorbitant price (or so I thought) and he booked us in for about two weeks hence. In the meantime I asked, can we use the cooker? Oh yes, no problem, was his response. I’ll go and turn it on to restart the gas at the gas mains then. So I went outside to the box and pulled down the lever. I don’t know whether he actually screamed but he was certainly high-pitched. Turn it off, turn it off, nothing idiosyncratic about that. I did as I was bidden.
He left looking a little paler than when he had arrived (even his tats had grown lighter). We summoned the gas man who arrived two hours later. The woman on the phone, when Mrs Summerhouse called up to report a gas leak, told her we take this very seriously and a whole set of instructions all which were far too late but hey ho. The dogs were doing their impersonation of two looneys while Mrs SH was on the phone to the gas lady, oh and keep the dogs out of the way.
When he showed up two hours later with a cheery, ‘how the devil are you?’ which made me smile because an old cricketing chum and I used to greet each other with exactly that question. Us and nobody else as far as I can remember. Anyway that was about the last cheerful thing he said although I was upstairs keeping the dogs from biting the gas man, which they wouldn’t have but he didn’t know that. The electrician wasn’t bothered about the dogs by the way.
So when the gas man started with the ‘you have been very luckys’, we thought well, he’s not trying to sell us anything, so maybe we had indeed been blessed / protected by our guardian angel. Maybe unknowingly we’d seen two magpies, black cats had crossed in front of us, not broken any mirrors (although that can’t be right, Mrs Summerhouse barely gets through a week without smashing something mirror-like), anyway, no walking under ladders, lots of salt tossed over shoulders, and so on. The gas man left and then Mrs SH started to cry. PTS we called it. How we laughed through the tears – not.
So maybe I shouldn’t have been tempting fate by mildly mocking superstition. But then again, apart from the PST, we have (so far) escaped serious harm. Of course we have to buy a new cooker*, have it fitted and accept a bill of £700 and a half hundred pounds but that’s a small price to pay for our safety. Right?
Just an after-thought, yesterday afternoon we met our chum the dog-walker in the park. He used to do electrical type jobs for us, he fixed our generator at the barn. We told him what had happened. You know what he said? You’ve been very lucky.
*which we have now ordered and comes next week.