It's like Beirut in my house

After all the trauma on Saturday, I was looking forward to a disaster-free and chilled Sunday. Ummmm yeh, that sounded like plan.

As I was getting Honey and Izzy ready to go out, I heard the beep of a text arriving. The text was from the tenants in my house in London. Let me tell you, after the Saturday saga, my tenants' texts have started eliciting a Pavlovian response.... dread. Preferable to salivating I suppose - that's never a good look.

I picked up my phone and pressed the 'read' button: "Hi Anne, just to let you know that the washing machine has packed up. Would appreciate if you could fix it because I am running out of underwear."

BLOODY HELL, it was like Beirut down in my London house. And really, I didn't want to know the status of my tenant's underpants. It conjured up images which were just wrong, and made my palms sweat a bit, if I'm honest.

So much was going wrong in London that I began to suspect that my tenants were sabateurs, and as such, I was seriously considering mounting a covert surveillance operation. Which of course would necessitate the wearing of combat trousers and facepaint, and donning a weapon. But what weapon? The UK isn't like America where you can readily buy over-the-counter fun things like guns, knives, surface-to-air missiles, crossbows, knuckledusters and tazer guns. In the UK, it's virtually impossible to build up a decent arsenal of weaponery with the pitiful off-the-shelf offerings. As far as I know, the most dangerous weapon available for purchase in this country is a stapler .

So, I decided to improvise and came up with this.......

Pic.No.1. My weapon of choice...... introducing....... the slotted spaghetti spoon

The cool thing about this weapon is that you can thwack someone over the head with it and it would really hurt. But even better, it looks a bit like a claw, so you could do menacing moves with it, like when a cat paws its prey. And, if you wanted, you could feed the long bit up your sleeve and it would look like a bionic hand.

The name isn't cool though, so I would rename it Spagoon (it rhymes with Platoon, which implies violence and fighting).

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Hang on a minute, could you see what I was doing there? It was blatant work avoidance..... the washing machine breaking was a pain in the ass, so I had decided to focus on weaponery as a diversion [taps side of forehead with forefinger. No flies on me, but you can see where they've been].

I needed to get back to the task in hand, rather than clawing languidly at my enemies with a slotted spaghetti spoon.

I despondently replied to my tenant's text; "Thanks for letting me know. I will drive down to London tomorrow to assess the damage caused yesterday, and see if I can get the washing machine fixed" [note: it has only been two weeks since I paid an engineer £78.00 after it broke down the last time].

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Sure enough, the next day, I hit the M40 motorway to London after dropping Izzy off at school. It was with trepidation that I opened the front door and surveyed the scene. It wasn't pretty. The only thing missing was shrapnel. It was enough to make you want to take to your nuclear bunker for a year and live off tinned spam and powdered egg.

 Pic.No.2. Leaky jacuzzi and spa bath with chromotherapy lighting... oh yeh.... this is the daddy bath

The leaky bathroom was subversive because it looked like hardly anything was wrong apart from the bath enclosure had been pulled out. Wrong. See those taps on the wall? That is where the leak came from, so all the wall tiles are going to have to come off in order for it to be fixed.

Pic.No.1. Dead washing machine, and a bloody great hole in the roof

Looking on the bright side, the washing machine engineer turned up on time. But after five minutes fiddling around with the controls, he turned to me shaking his head, "sorry love, it's dead."

"Dead?" I queried, with exasperation, "what does that mean?"

"The main circuit board has gone," he sighed.

"Gone?" I demanded, "gone where?" I had this imagery of a little green board with gold knobbly bits on it, sitting on a cloud drinking nectar.

"Blown," he added.

We weren't getting anywhere.

"Can it be fixed?" I asked, changing tack.

"Nope," he replied helpfully.

Absolutely. Bloody. Brilliant. In the last two days, the bathroom had leaked and will have to be pulled apart to redo the pipework, the kitchen ceiling had collapsed and the washing machine had broken.

I am at the point where I can't bear to talk about it any longer, so I will update you thus far....... I drove down to London two days later and had a new washing machine fitted. There were parts missing so the job couldn't be completed. Never mind, I am back in London again on Monday letting in tradesmen to give me quotes for repairing the damage, so I can do it then.

It is a bloody good job that I had Fish and Chips for my dinner this evening, otherwise I would have perished from the stress of everything.