I really should blog in more detail about burglar related excitement, but there’s so much to do and so little time. What I’ll do instead is remind you that it’s Friday night, and I’ve now got broadband up and running in my lovely new house, which means I must stick to the promise I made you last week and reprise the dressing up game at last!

Normally, as those of you with memories stretching back ten thousand years will recall, this exciting event commences at eight o’clock on Friday nights. But my four year old nephew Thomas has expressed a desire to participate in the voting, and if we started at the usual time he’d be in bed before it was finished, so this week we’re kicking off at half past seven. I’m expecting a good turn out - if you don’t play, you’ll make Thomas cry. Do you want that on your conscience? No, I thought not. So be in the chatroom at 7:30 with some form of digital camera at the ready.

Of course, having just moved house I haven’t had time to accumulate much junk with which to create my costume, so mine will probably be rubbish. Even more than usual, I mean. At least I’ve got an excuse this time.

I love our little cottage. Two miles down a road which leads to nowhere - unless you count the reservoir at the top - it’s not exactly a thriving thoroughfare. Most of the time there seem to be more horses going past than cars. All of the neighbours are lovely shiny people, and the crime rate is about one a decade, so it’s the sort of place you can sleep soundly in your bed with the front door wide open and a sign that says “I’VE GOT LOTS OF EXPENSIVE STUFF AND I’M A HEAVY SLEEPER” hanging outside, and still wake up in the morning to find all your possessions where you left them.

So it’s just bad luck that we’ve been burgled.

Having heard about the reservoir at the top of the road, and having in the breadbin the stale remains of a loaf we made in our bread maker last week, Jess and I decided to visit said reservoir and feed said bread to the ducks. But when we got there we discovered a complete lack of ducks and a fairly unimpressive reservoir, so Jess proposed we drive to a bigger, more duck infested one nearby.

So that’s what we did. We were a bit miffed on arrival to find a family spill out of a car immediately before us with a great big loaf of bread and several children to do the scattering, but we knew the birds would appreciate our home made effort so we wandered round to the other side of the lake to do our bread distribution from there. But the ducks decided not to follow us, so we stood there for a bit looking stupid until the children got bored and the family piled back into their vehicle and drove off, at which point we returned to the side of the reservoir we were on in the first place and fed the ducks from there.

Then we went home to find a) the window of the front door smashed, b) the door ajar, c) one of the two lock mechanisms removed from the door entirely and placed thoughtfully on a shelf, and d) a jacket on the floor that neither of us had ever seen before. What we didn’t find were a) Jess’s laptop and b) Jess’s mobile phone.

Shame we haven’t got round to sorting out contents insurance yet, really.

Such is the amount of door-smashing-in that was required to remove the lock mechanism, the whole thing will need replacing. And because the cottage was built when people were three feet tall, its proportions are no longer standard, so a new door will have to be specially made. But one of the locks still works, and a kindly neighbour is going to fit some bolts on the morrow, so we’re relatively secure for the time being.

Meanwhile the boys in blue are on the case. They were round this morning dusting for fingerprints, and the jacket’s been sent off to the lab for DNA analysis, so they reckon they’ve got quite a lot to go on. If it was you wot nicked Jess’s laptop, be afraid. And if you could see your way to bringing it back this afternoon, that would be quite good too.

Having moved into our house on Friday and discovered that it had both a) a fridge and b) a freezer, despite having already ordered a fridge freezer from Comet, we went to Tesco to stock up on supplies. Returning home, we found that before we could refrigerate and freeze them, we had to turn on the respective appliances.

Turning the fridge on was easy enough, but the freezer proved more tricky. It had a little dial which was set to 0, and our challenge was to turn it to point at a different number. But instead of being a nice normal dial that you can turn with your nice normal hands, it had a slot that you had to stick something in and twist. A bit like a screw, in fact.

Had that analogy struck us at the time we might have tried doing it with a screwdriver, but instead we opted for keys, which were rubbish, and only served to mangle the plastic around the slot and render it increasingly unslotlike. Eventually we gave up, hastened to the home of Jess’s family, and put all our food in the freezer there. We then returned with her stepdad, who immediately turned it on with a knife. So we had to go all the way back to their house to get our food back.

The next day we discovered a screwdriver that had been deposited in the vicinity of the freezer which obviously existed for the express purpose of turning the dial.

And if we’re recounting tales of my general incompetence and its manifestation in the field of moving into our new house, I should mention my rug. My office - which is actually the landing - has a polished wooden floor which, in the fashion of these old cottages that were erected before the invention of the spirit level, is a bit wonky. I quickly discovered that my wheely chair, when placed on this surface and sat upon, rolls about like a crazy thing. I already have more than enough unpleasant memories of feeling hideously seasick when I’m trying to work thanks to that ghastly job I used to have in a former life, and I had no intention of forming more, so we went shopping for a lovely rug.

But first I had to determine the area, which in the absence of a tape measure I did by laying sheets of A4 on the floor and multiplying by 297, this being, as you will all know, the number of millimetres of the long side. Then we went shopping, but we couldn’t find any suitable rugs, so we went into Carpetright and got them to cut us a bit of carpet of the appropriate dimensions.

We then went home with our lovely bit of carpet, where I realised my error in multiplying the number of sheets of A4 by 297 along both axes. Clearly 210 would have produced more accurate results for one of them, with the consequence that my bit of carpet is significantly bigger than intended.

That brings us up to today, on which our ironing board and coffee table arrived. My attempt to assemble the latter has not met with great success - I’ve done to one of the screws what I did to the dial on the freezer - only this time I did use a screwdriver - and now the head is such a mess it can neither be screwed further in nor removed, and will remain protruding from the leg of the coffee table until someone with better DIY skills than I - i.e. anyone in the world - comes and sorts it out.

Tomorrow we get our washing machine and fatboy. Then I’m going to stop spending money and start working frantically in the hope of eventually restoring the former glory of my bank balance, which is presently about 7p.

Meanwhile, from our council website:

Q: What things should I recycle in my blue bin/bag?
Answer: The blue bin is for recycling

• plastic bottles, inlcuding (sic) plastic milk bottles (please remove lids and squash bottles)

Why won’t they recycle squash bottles? Not that we drink squash, but it’s the principle of the thing. I’m trying to save the planet here.

Dear Simon

I am sorry to have to write to you with some sad news that I have just received from your recipient’s transplant centre.

In spite of a very promising recovery the recipient experienced complications, common amongst post transplant patients. Unfortunately these proved too difficult for the consultants to resolve in time and he recently died.

I can only imagine you may be disappointed and sad to hear this news. But everyone involved, in both the transplant and aftercare, can be comforted by the knowledge that everything possible was done to help. The more positive times experienced following his transplant for him and his family, were only possible thanks to your selfless act and we are very grateful to you for that.

I thought you might want some time to reflect on this news, so I will call you in a couple of weeks. If you prefer to call me my contact details can be found at the address above. In closing, I would like to thank you once again for the unique help you gave this patient and am sorry for everyone concerned that the outcome was not as we would have hoped.

With kind regards
Yours sincerely

Sharon Armsby
Donor Welfare Officer

Hello! I’m in my new house!

What’s that you say? “You only moved in on Friday, the broadband can’t possibly be up and running yet. You must be leeching off a neighbour.” Oh look, a pigeon.

Well now, so much has happened since last we spoke. Our boiler was fixed so I had a bath and temporarily ceased to smell, but that’s all ancient history now. Let’s close that chapter and move onto exciting house-moving-related incidents, shall we?

And since I’ve already mentioned it, we’ll start with the issue of broadband. It was fairly vital that this was available in our new house seeing as I’m addicted to the Internet I need it for my work, so it was something I planned to check out before picking a property. As it happened, when we looked around this place I noticed a microfilter hanging from the phone socket, and since there isn’t, to the best of my knowledge, any conceivable reason why someone would have a microfilter other than for broadband, this seemed to confirm that it wouldn’t be a problem. So I happily handed over my life savings to the estate agent without giving the matter further thought.

But then I called BT and told them of my plans, and they informed me that our cottage is so far from the exchange, they couldn’t guarantee the availability of broadband. Given this uncertainty, coupled with the slim possibility that the microfilter had existed only for purposes of feng shui, I thought it prudent to settle the issue for definite. So when I drove up on Friday morning, just before I picked up Jess and headed to the estate agents to sign things which would commit us to living here whether we wanted to or not, I took a slight detour to the street on which our cottage resides and knocked on a few doors. Let’s meet the neighbours!

The only neighbour who seemed to be in - or at least the first one who answered their door - was Janine at number three. “Hello Janine at number three!” I said. “Have you got broadband?” “Yes, complete stranger who’s come to my door and asked me a fairly odd question which would seem to be nobody’s business but my own and apparently expects an answer, I have!” “Hurrah!” I said. “Now I can go and sign the forms without fear that it isn’t available this far from the exchange!” “Eh? What forms?”

So that was that. And the fact that I’m now leeching off the broadband of one of the other neighbours (I don’t think it’s Janine’s - she’s with AOL, and I can’t imagine that would work unless I installed all sorts of hideous bits of software) adds further confirmation that everything in the world of broadband is sunny and bright. Which is quite good really, because if it isn’t, I’m stuffed. And it’s just as well I checked with Janine, because I discovered when we moved in that the thing I’d taken for a microfilter was on closer inspection nothing of the sort, but just a telephone socket splitter type thingy. So without Janine’s reassurance I’d have been very slightly panicking that I’d just handed over something in the region of three grand for a place I can’t actually live in.

And then of course there’s the issue of the fridge freezer. You’ll recall that we originally ordered it from Dixons, but they decided they hadn’t got any so we ordered it from Comet instead. I’ve heard nothing from them yet - not even the confirmation email you expect when you order things online - so I planned to phone them this week to make sure everything was okay.

Meanwhile, after the meeting with the estate agents on Friday - bear with me while I jump about in time, won’t you - we went back to Jess’s house - what was Jess’s house, but now I suppose I’d better just refer to it as her familial abode - where her mum inspected the inventory of the cottage that the estate agents had given us. “I see there is a fridge freezer, then,” she said. She was right too. Oops. I’d better phone Comet and cancel that then.

I love our little cottage. Did I mention that it’s got a real log fire? The Internet had told us that it was “for display only", but we met the house owners this morning - they live at number five, just next to Janine - and they said we’re welcome to use it, it was the estate agents who insisted on putting that bit in. Apparently they’ve had as much trouble with the estate agents as we did - despite the efforts they (the estage agents) had made to put us off renting the place, they were eager for our landlords to take on another respective tenant with three County Court Judgements against them, which I gather isn’t a good thing - and they (our landlords) won’t be using them (the estate agents) again. I don’t think I will be either. And nor should you. Though I daren’t tell you who they are yet in case they find out that I’ve been bad mouthing them on the Internet and kick us out *cough*eleylongandcompany*cough*.

Right now I’m sitting on our lovely sofa, as Jess sits behind me playing Sonic and the Secret Rings on her Wii, which we bought this afternoon in Rochdale. And then lost and bought again in Asda. Because obviously moving house isn’t expensive enough.

And that’s about it for now. If you’re lucky, you might even get some pictures in a day or two.

I smell.

Our boiler’s been broken since Monday. The man said he was coming to fix it yesterday, so I had to wait in for him, but he phoned at 2 o’clock and said “Oh, that was a lie. I’ll come tomorrow.” So today I waited in again, until he phoned at 3 o’clock and said “Oh, that was another lie. I’ll come tomorrow.”

Which means I haven’t had a wash since the weekend, which is why I smell. Having lost the little faith I had that he’s ever going to fix it, I decided a cold bath would be better than nothing, so I ran one this afternoon and left it for a bit to reach room temperature. Then I put one foot in it, discovered that it was still the coldest thing in the universe, and decided I’d rather remain smelly.

So the boiler man is rubbish.

And then there’s Dixons. Somewhere on their website - though right now I can’t for the life of me find it - it says “To find out whether an item’s in stock, add it to your basket". Well that’s what I did with our fridge freezer, and there was still no indication of whether it was in stock, other than the fact that it had let me add it to my basket and checkout. So you can imagine my surprise - you don’t have to, but you can if you want - when I got an email from them this morning that said “Unfortunately, we have been unable to process your order as one or more of the products you have ordered is now out of stock.”

So Dixons is rubbish too.

We’ve now ordered the same fridge freezer from Comet, so we’ll see if they do any better. This time it comes with a bottle of evian, some milk, four eggs, three peppers, some carrots, a bag of frozen peas, and lots of things in packaging that I don’t recognise. No big cream cake this time, sadly. If you’re thinking of getting us a house warming present - and I can see no good reason why you shouldn’t - our lack of big cream cakes is something you might want to take into consideration.

“Hello Mr Barclays! I’d like to transfer lots of money to an estate agent’s bank account, please.”

“Well you can’t do it over the phone because you haven’t got a telephone banking passcode. You’ll have to go into a branch.”

“Oh okay.”

“But while you’re on the line, I notice that you’ve got great wodges of cash in your account. Do you have any plans for it? Because if not, you might consider moving it into one of our super mega high yield getlotsofinterestquick accounts.”

“Yes, I plan to go into a branch tomorrow and transfer most of it into an estate agent’s bank account.”

“Oh, fair enough then. Have a nice day!”

How come I can’t type ‘estate’ without it coming out as ‘estage’? I keep having to go back and change it. Except I got it right this time, so apparently I can.

Guess what? I just bought a fridge freezer! Yes, I’m excited too. It’s the LG GR359SQ, since you ask. According to the picture on Dixons’ website, it comes with Lilt, Tropicana, R Whites lemonade, four eggs, Utterly Butterly, two kiwi fruits, a pineapple, Dairylea, various things I can’t quite make out, and what looks a lot like a big cream cake with bits of chocolate on top.

From which you will gather that cottage renting activities continue apace. It looks like we’ll be moving in on Friday, though potentially we’ll spend the first couple of nights in the gutter, depending on how soon we can arrange to have our bed delivered. That’s going to be the Galaxy Janus. Jess wanted the Miranda but I thought the footboard would be annoying.

And then next Tuesday the broadband’s set to be activated, which means that, house warming parties permitting, on the following Friday the weekly dressing up game can live again! So all the new housey stuff we’ve purchased from Dunelm Mill at great expense will last in its new home for exactly a week before I start cannibalising it to turn myself into Windy Miller or something. But don’t tell Jess.

Hello! How was your weekend? Shorter than mine, I expect. Ours was mainly spent trying to find somewhere Jess could buy a Nintendo DS, for apparently the Wii she got for Christmas hasn’t sated her nintendolust.

First we tried the Trafford Centre up north. This is a great big shopping centre, containing approximately ten thousand shops that sell games consoles. The trouble is that the Nintendo DS comes in black, white and pink, and every single one of those ten thousand shops only had pink ones in stock. Clearly this was out of the question - what do they think she is, a girl? - but never fear, for the next day we were heading back to Leicesecesesestershire, which takes us right past Meadowhall, the biggest shopping centre in the WORLD. Well, England. They were bound to have some.

Well, yes, they may well have done. But by the time we’d got there and eaten all the shops were beginning to close - coupled with the fact that Jess’s legs had ceased to function due to some mysterious illness, it seemed wise to abandon the quest and drag her back to the car.

So the next day we had another go at buying one, this time in Leicesesesecester itself. Her legs had now recovered to the point that she could just about stagger between shops given sufficient incentive, and eventually we managed to locate a non-pink Nintendo DS. So she was happy. Apart from not being able to walk, obviously.

Anyway, the weekend continued as weekends do, and we got to Sunday. By this point her mysterious illness had departed, so she was able to tap dance and climb mountains and play those keyboard things like Tom Hanks in Big just like she always could, but we had none of those things planned for the day, for the plan was for me to bring her back up north and then go home again.

The bringing her back up north part of the plan was executed successfully, though it got a bit wobbly towards the end. While we’d been messing about down south, it had been secretly snowing quite a lot up north, and the roads were all slippery and slidey and I had quite a difficult time convincing the car not to slip and slide off of it altogether and mow down a variety of innocent bystanders. We just about made it to her house without causing serious carnage, but I didn’t fancy trying my luck on the way back, so I’m staying here overnight in the hope that some kindly gritting lorries go out and grit the roads by the morning. They better had, I’ve got lots of work to do.

And that’s what I did on my weekend.

Our exciting house renting escapades continue to be eventful. Yesterday morning I got a call from the estate agents to say that the company doing the checks to make sure we and our guarantor have got some money had reached a standstill owing to not having been provided with my dad’s accountant’s details.

We couldn’t rightly see why that information was something they needed - they told us they only need that if you’re self-employed, whereas if you work for a company a few payslips are sufficient, so that’s what we’d provided. Granted, my dad owns the company, but still. Anyway, I got him to give them a call and provide the necessary.

I told you yesterday that the cottage owners have now decided they want six months’ rent up front. I’d neglected to mention that to my dad - he only found out when he read my blog - and he thought it rather cheeky of them, since we’d originally proposed that as an alternative to a guarantor; now they were expecting both. Consequently, when he phoned them to pass on the name of his accountant, he mentioned all of this and told them that a) he was going to advise me to say “Stuff the house” as a matter of principle, and b) I was on my way there now to sort it all out.

All of which is fine and dandy, except that in telling them I was on the way there he was under a misapprehension, which only came to light later in the evening after the estate agents had all gone home to eat their suppers and draw their own conclusions about the significance of the fact that I hadn’t turned up. So I gave them a call first thing this morning, mildly afraid that they were going to say “Oh well we assumed you didn’t want it any more so we sent the demolition men round to knock it down.”

Luckily the cottage is still standing, but they’d thought it best to wait until hearing from me before giving my dad’s accountant’s details to the company that’s checking up on us. All of which means they still aren’t ready for us to go in and sign things, but I’m hoping it will be sorted out later this afternoon. It had better be, we’re supposed to be going down to Leicesesestershire tonight.

And last night Jess and I made a trip to the library at the University of Manchester, where she had some exciting coursework research to do. I helped her to locate the books, which doesn’t sound terribly thrilling in itself, but it was just like the old days when I used to spend many happy hours in the equivalent building in Essex. I haven’t felt so scholarly in years.

Except any university library other than the one at Essex is rubbish, because that’s the only one with rickety wooden lifts that don’t even stop so you have to jump in and out while they’re moving, and it’s against the rules to stay in them after the ground floor for the bit where they go underground and across before resurfacing in the upgoing shaft, but people always did because it was fun and a sneaky way of avoiding the queue, though you also had to avoid the eyes of the queueees on the way back up because they knew exactly what you were up to. How any learning establishment that doesn’t have those lifts dares to call itself a proper university I just don’t know.

I’m still waiting to hear from the estate agents when they’ll be ready for us to go and sign a form and be handed the keys to our cottage. It will either be tomorrow or Thursday, so I’m going up north tomorrow just in case. Which means another absurdly long weekend for me. Don’t tell my boss, he thinks I’m going to my guinea pig’s funeral.

I told you that when we were having difficulty persuading the estate agents that we’d be good for the rent I offered them six months’ worth up front and they declined. What I forgot to mention is that when they finally got in touch with the owners of the cottage and informed them of that conversation, the owners said: “Of course we want it up front if he’s offering! Are you mad?” Which means I’m going to have to fork out something unhappily near to three grand. So you’d think that I’d be quite keen to do some work at some point in the next five days and earn some money, really. But apparently not.

Actually - since you’re asking - things are going very well at the minute on the fiscal front. Being a freelance type person, I would in an ideal world have vast quantities of cash in the bank at any one time to tide me over should a lean period befall me. In the real world, I’ve never had quantities of cash that could be described as vast by our inflated western standards, but despite the fact that I seem to do about two days’ work in the average week, I do seem to have quite a lot of pennies now. Certainly more than when I had a proper job, which just goes to show. Though whether it goes to show that working for yourself is the One True Way or that you should move back in with your parents and live rent free is something for financial analysts more qualified than I to decide.

Normally when I don’t blog for a few days it’s because I’ve been up north, but this time I’ve just been lazy. But look, it’s my bloggiversary! I’m four years old! Is that all it’s been? My, so much has changed.

One thing that hasn’t changed is that I cut my own hair. Back then in entry the thirteenth I said “One day I’ll get the hang of it.” Well, I haven’t, it’s still usually a disaster. But it’s less hassle than going to the hairdresser’s and more of a challenge, so I’ve persisted.

For some reason, though, Jess didn’t like the idea of walking around with a boyfriend who looks like Duncan Goodhew from one side and Dennis the Menace when he turns around, so I promised that next time it needed cutting, I’d commission the services of a professional.

And I had every intention of sticking to that promise. But what happened, you see, was that I decided to have a bath. And so I ran my bath, and as I was running it I got to looking in the mirror, and I noticed that in one particular area my hair was considerably longer than everywhere else. “Well there wouldn’t be any harm in snipping that bit off,” I thought to myself, and so that’s what I did. And then I noticed another long bit somewhere else and decided to deal with it too.

Well of course I kept noticing other long bits. There comes in point in the process of hair cutting at which you really have no option but to complete the job, and the next thing I knew I was less hirsute than I’ve been for a very long time. I can’t say it’s an improvement - I think I did a fairly even job on this occasion, but it had already grown long enough to conceal the imperfections of my last attempt so it doesn’t really look any better, it just looks too short. Still, it’s weight loss - just watch that blue man leap down the scale after tomorrow’s weigh in. I suppose it’s too much to hope that my hair weighed half a stone.

Where were we? Oh yes, the owners of the cottage had told the estate agent that we could have it, but someone had to pop in and give them some money, which would have meant me making another trip up north, but my mum was fortuitously due to make a trip in that very direction and could therefore save me the bother.

Except it turned out my mum’s car was broken, so I had to do it anyway.

Now all we’ve got to do is wait for them to process us, and as long as they don’t discover that I’m 7.4 million pounds in debt* then there’s no reason to think they won’t be handing over the keys next week. But I can’t do my job without Internet access so we’ll probably have to wait a bit longer for the broadband to get sorted out before we can move in.

And then we’re going to have a super house warming party, and you are invited! Unless I don’t like you.

Anyway, I told Jess I’d blog about her. I did that because she told me she’d blogged about me, but when I read hers it was about me supposedly being “very odd” - and you all know what a ridiculous allegation that is - so if I write anything complimentary I can’t help feeling that I’ll have gotten the raw end of the deal.

I’m therefore trying to think of something I can say about her that isn’t a compliment, but such is her greatness I can’t think of anything. So I suppose I’ve got no choice but to grudgingly observe that she’s the best thing in the world ever and I love her more than pizza itself. Yes, even Veg-a-Roma.

There. Happy now?

*Just in case they read this, I should probably point out that that was a lie.

Part of the problem, you see, was that the estate agents had some rather strange rules which under normal circumstances they might be able to bend, but they couldn’t do that without the permission of the people who own the cottage, and the circumstances were abnormal inasmuch as said cottage owners are on a skiing holiday and not answering their mobiles.

But what’s happened now is that the owners have taken a break from hurling themselves down mountains to check their voicemail, and given the estate agents permission to bend. Thus they no longer need to see the guarantor in person, and we’re allowed to fax my dad to them instead. What they do still need is some hard cash - and it does have to be actual physical money - so I thought I was going to be making a trip thither on the morrow. But it turns out that my mum has plans to visit my sister on that very day, and it’s not too much of an inconvenience to take a detour to Lancashire.

So what all that means is that our worries are over, and the lovely cottage that we love so dearly is ours, all ours! A good job too, because I for one had rather set my heart on it.

And you’re hearing this news before Jess even knows about it, because she’s being rubbish and neither being online nor replying to my texts. Feel free to feel all privileged and special.

My dad’s attempt to talk sense into the estate agent was no more successful than mine. He again proposed that I pay all six months’ rent up front, but they’re adamant that that isn’t a viable scenario. I’M TRYING TO GIVE YOU £2700 RIGHT NOW AND YOU’RE SAYING NO! ARE YOU PEOPLE MAD? Well, no, apparently they aren’t mad, but sadly their hands are tied. It’s policy, you see.

Plan B was to use my mum as guarantor, but they won’t let her do it because the guarantor has to be someone in full time employment - it seems that someone who’s retired and has a healthy pension and the accumulated wealth of a lifetime’s hard toil sitting in the bank accruing interest and screaming to be handed over to any estate agent sensible enough to take it won’t do.

So that means we’ve got to move onto plan C, which is to do nothing until Sunday, when my dad’s available to make a trip up north. The obvious weakness of plan C is that anyone could come along in the intervening period and usurp us.

On a subject related to the above in no way whatsoever, have you heard what an awful place to live Cowpe is? Terrible crime rate, and it stinks of fish. And people spit at you in the street, and call you Mr Smelly Fathead. If you’ve been thinking of renting a cottage there, I’d rule it out immediately.

So we’ve been looking at houses.

We looked at one on Friday an’ two on Monday an’ three on Tuesday. That was today, unless you’re one of these strange people who thinks it’s tomorrow just because midnight’s been and gone. Prior to the very last place we looked at, we were agreed on our favourite, but there was nothing that stood out as the absolutely best place in the whole world ever - but then we looked at the last place, which was the absolutely best place in the world ever, with the possible exception of Disneyland but that’s way outside our budget.

This was so clearly our favourite that we didn’t need much time for deliberation, so I phoned the estate agent.

Me: Hello Mrs Estate Agent! We’d like to rent one of your lovely houses!
Estate agent: Hooray! Pop in and pick up a form and when you’ve filled it in and provided us with various documents to prove that you’re who you say you are and live where you say you live and earn what you say you earn, the place is yours!

So I popped in to pick up a form.

Me: Hello! I’ve come to pick up a form!
Estate agent: Oh, it’s the other branch that deals with renting. We only do selling.
Me: But I don’t want to buy it!
Estate agent: Hang on, I’ll phone the other branch and get them to fax it to me.
Me: Oh, that’s jolly kind of you!
Estate agent: Yes, it is!
Fax machine: bzzzzwxywxywxvvvvvvbzzbzzznnyyyyr.
Estate agent: Here you go!
Me: Hooray! Incidentally, the nice lady I spoke to on the phone said that I’d need to provide various documents to prove that I’m who I say I am and live where I etc. But those are in Leicesecesestershire and I’m in Lancashire, so what I want to know is whether I need to be able to wave those documents in front of you before you can guarantee us the property so we don’t have to worry about somebody else nicking it.

I’ve just realised that if I tell the story in full it’s going to take as many hours as it took to happen, so I’ll precis the rest. The gist is that I was told a series of contradictory things about what needed doing before the house was ours. In the end it transpired that a) they did need to see all my documentation, but faxed copies would suffice, so I wouldn’t have to make an overnight trip to Leicesecesestershire and back, but b) they also need someone to act as guarantor for Jess, even though the rent will be coming out of my bank account, and the guarantor has to go into the branch in person, and that’s got to happen before the house is secured. This was a snag, because at that point there was no one we could think of who might act as guarantor who’d be available before the weekend, and we didn’t fancy our chances leaving it that long.

I tried proposing various creative solutions - could we get around the need for a guarantor by paying all six months’ rent up front? Could I act as Jess’s guarantor? Would they settle for seeing an effigy of the guarantor constructed out of papier mache and plasticine? - but none of those got me very far, so in the morning my dad’s going to phone them and have a word - he rents property himself, so can talk the talk and will possibly get further than I did - but if he doesn’t, it looks like I’ll be making a day trip to Lancashire - I’ve come back to Leicesesestershire now, did I mention that? - with my mum in tow, she being the only potential guarantor available at short notice.

All of which is a long winded and very dull way of saying that we’ve found a house - nay, a stone built period cottage, restored and providing beautifully appointed spacious one bedroomed accommodation retaining a host of characteristic features yet with a contemporary feel, light finish woodwork, beams, etc - in which, if all goes smoothly, we’re going to live for the next six months, and it’s great!

“Woe, woe, and thrice woe! The weekend is over, and as such that nice Simon must part from his lovely Jess, return to Leicesecesesestershire alone, and actually do some actual work, the poor chicken!” goes the cry of all right thinking people, but fear not, because in this instance all right thinking people are wrong. The reason being that my wonderful boss has very kindly let me take today and tomorrow out of my annual leave, permitting me to spend them house hunting in Lancashire.

Today we saw a little cottage attached to a large house in which reside the old couple who own both of them - very nice, but a bit poky (the cottage, not the couple) - and an apartment which was bigger than the little cottage, and generally nicer, but costs more and is severely disadvantaged in the how-furnished-it-is department. We’re leaning towards the apartment at the moment, but we’ve got another three places to look at in the morning before making our minds up.

I suppose we did lots of wildly exciting things at the weekend that I could tell you about, but I can’t remember what any of them were now. It did occur to me last night that I’ve never told you about Blobs, but really I need pictorial support for that one and our scanner’s bust at the minute, so remind me in a week or two.

And that’s all I’ve got to say today. Goodbye.

I’m not very good with hardware. If something goes wrong inside my computer, the usual extent of my ability to do something about it is to hit it with a stick. So I’m quite amazed that today my computer broke and I FIXED IT! And it wasn’t just a matter of unplugging something that was fried and plugging a new one in - it involved taking things apart and squeezing gunk all over them! See, I knew you’d be impressed.

What happened was I was minding my own business when it started going BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP, which I knew was the sound it makes when its insides are overheating. I knew this from past experience, because the same thing happened, not unreasonably, at the height of summer. But it isn’t the height of summer any more, so it no longer seemed quite as reasonable.

I hastily switched it off before it melted, but now I had a bit of a problem. Obviously any sensible self-employed person who relies on their computer to do their job and frequently has imminent deadlines to meet would build a certain amount of redundancy into their setup, such that they always had a second PC they could switch to and continue with their work if the first one blew up. Unfortunately I’m not a sensible self-employed person, so I haven’t, which meant I couldn’t do any work until it was sorted out.

As it happened, I didn’t have any imminent deadlines, and I quite liked the idea of not doing any work, so I didn’t leap into action immediately. But as the day wore on I started to think that I should probably address the problem at some point, so I did what I always do in such situations - I phoned my old chum MCL and said “Help! My computer’s gone wrong and I don’t know what to do!".

Being a clever chap, he immediately guessed that the heat sink compound between my heat sink and my CPU had deteriorated so the heat from the latter wasn’t being conducted to the fan attached to the former, and that all I needed to do was go to Maplin, purchase said heat sink compound, disassemble my computer and squidge the gunk I had purchased anywhere I saw fit. All of which meant about as much to me as it means to you - unless it means anything to you, in which case it didn’t - but I thought I’d have a go anyway, and despite my hazy understanding of what I was doing, my general incompetence, and the roadworks on the way to Maplin that meant I had to work out a different route (though admittedly the DIVERSION signs were a help there), the mission was a total success! Which might not seem very amazing to you, but for someone who once spent hours researching what printer he wanted to buy, finally settling his heart on one which on further investigation turned out to have been discontinued, locating a single printer of that model for sale on ebay from the US, winning the auction and paying an enormous shipping fee, only to get it home, plug it in, and immediately blow it up because it was expecting an American number of volts, any attempt to mess with hardware that doesn’t end in it ceasing to function for the rest of time can only be considered a remarkable triumph, and I fully intend to have grandchildren just so I can tell them about it.