GURGLE! PLONK! DOINGG! WIBBLE, WIBBLE…

Ah! The weather forecasters are predicting - or possibly guessing, it's hard to be 100% sure about these matters - that we are about to have the first really cold night of the year. This was, of course, the cue for the central heating boiler to go on the blink, as it regularly must whenever the weather prompts it so to do and its outpourings  might be actually quite vital in contributing to our survival instead of merely adding to our basic level of comfort.

There I was, “merrily” (yes, the fundamental flaw in that statement didn’t escape me) typing away during the darkest hours just before the dawn when I caught a slight waft of that tangy, familiar slight smell of burning dust which occasionally accompanies my pill-taking, but more usually accompanies anything electrical when it has been feeling slightly overworked.

To be honest, I thought that it was coming from the computer and I resolved to shut it down just as soon as I had finished unravelling the particular thought I was mulling over.

However, as I was thinking about that, a voice drifted up the stairs telling me that the boiler was making “a funny smell” and the source of that troubling yet slightly familiar scent became rapidly obvious, not so much from the boiler itself, but more the radiators as they started to reach that critical temperature where they are too hot to touch without running the risk of getting a bit of a branding, and the enamel paint starts to think about blistering and possibly even melting.

Still, I leapt into that thing I do that can only be vaguely described as “action” and pretty much everything to do with heating our draughty little abode was immediately shut down and, as we shivered through another breakfast time, the telephoning of the service engineer put on the “stuff to do” list, which the beloved duly got around to at a more “appropriate” hour because I am, admittedly, one of those people in life who has a tendency to put things off and really should not be trusted with such tasks when it comes to conversation with almost complete strangers about matters of a practical nature...

After all, the boiler did pretty much the same thing about the same time last year and was dealt with in much the same way. “Why”, you regular readers of all the various matters I dwell upon at length in these pages might well be asking, “did we never hear about this tale of woe?” Well, I started to write about it then, but never got around to completing the tale as events and circumstances and the whole sort of general mish-mash of life rather took the moment away from me...

It’s funny – or is it just slightly tragic…? – how things seem to go around in cycles… It was just over a year ago, at around about Christmastime and during what we now think of as being a “proper cold snap” that the very same central heating boiler threw a bit of a similar wobbler and also needed some proper professional care and attention, and was looked at, as it happens, by the very same engineer.

We got up from the sofa late on a midwinter evening and suddenly thought: “it’s chilly in here.” I went and looked at the boiler, which had a red light burning brightly next to the little spanner symbol. Not a good sign.

Nevertheless, I rather bravely (I thought) hit the reset button and it started working again – big sigh! -  but then started to go seriously mad and making mechanical sounds that reminded me of when a nuclear reactor goes critical in a spy movie. Pretty soon, all of the radiators in the house were seriously piping hot and were reaching temperatures at which you could barely touch them and there was a bit of an acrid smell…

I was starting to get a bit frightened now that there might be an explosion or a fire and so I shut it off and we spent a chilly, sleepless night worrying about the financial implications of this development but also rather grateful that we’d been at home to deal with this sudden altered state that the boiler had suddenly acquired.

Next morning I ran the hot tap briefly and it made a terrific and rather final sounding noise like something out of a Goon Show episode… GURGLE! PLONK! DOINGG! WIBBLE, WIBBLE… and we resolved to call up an engineer as soon as we could which, it turned out, was no simple task on a midwinter day around Christmastime…

Granted, we’d somehow managed to leave it going seven years (maybe more) without a service, but that shouldn’t have made it so difficult to actually get hold of someone to fix it, but yet there were many failures in our telephonic efforts and we started to get seriously depressed by the whole wretched business. Eventually, however, we did manage to get hold of a pleasant sounding Mr Local who couldn’t come that day, but promised to appear the next day instead and so, because it was a bit of a chilly day, we went to a supermarket, ostensibly to do some food shopping, but really just to get warm and possibly have a cup of hot chocolate in the café, but, as it turned out, the café was closed, so that plan didn’t work out all that well and we instead cadged a cup of tea off the beloved’s parents before heading back to the ice box.

As promised, the next day the engineer arrived, found us both in a relatively thawed condition, and checked the thing out and it has been fine since, but as he was pursuing his investigations, he told me many horror stories about bad installations and ridiculously overpriced service contracts with allegedly more “reputable” companies which I filed away for future reference.

So that was a year ago and, to be fair, with regards to the heating at least, it was a fairly untroubled year followed his ministrations, but we are now once more looking at that large white box on the wall and wondering quite what it will do next and how much dealing with the problem is going to cost us.

Anyway, after shutting everything down, and as the house started to cool off, I headed off to work in my car hoping that the house would not be a burned out shell upon my return to it, and, would you credit it, at one point, the car also started to give off its own rather familiar burning smell, which it does seem to do whenever the gears get a particularly vigorous going over...