I was working last night, and at about 9pm got a phone call from Chantal. The lights have all gone out! Well, actually I think that just some of them went out – the ones plugged into a socket. But in practice the situation was a lot worse than just the lights going out. The TV had gone off, and by the time that she phoned me the TV had been off for an hour. It takes a lot less than an hour without TV for Chantal to start suffering from cravings.
When the power went off Chantal sensibly headed for the fuse box, flicked the switches back on, but they promptly flicked off again. Clearly there was a faulty appliance on the ground floor that had to be disconnected. We have an awful lot of appliances on the ground floor, and Chantal systematically unplugged every single one. For some she had to use a small hooked crowbar to reach deep behind furniture and haul at the plug to lever it out of the socket, before seeing if the fuse box would allow power back into the circuit. On each occasion the switches stubbornly returned to “off”. She even turned off the security lights (which run off the first floor circuit).
An hour and about 40 appliances later she was getting desperate, and resorted to an absolutely last-resort plan of action. She phoned me. She went through everything that she had done so far, and said that the only thing she couldn’t unplug was the outside light on the Oak Stump. She said that she was about to go out with a screwdriver to see if she could take the bulb out. I think that she was tempted to go out with the aforementioned crowbar and give it circuit testing that it would never forget. I reminded her that the light had a simple plug into an outside socket, and she trotted out into the rain, eventually managed to open the waterproof cover, and switch off the light. She kept me on the phone until she had re-set the fuses, and successfully tested a few appliances – starting with the TV.
I wonder what she was watching, and what she said when the screen when blank? Any visitors trying to find our house after dark will be relieved to know that the Oakstump light has now been fixed – it just needed a lot of damp detritus clearing out from the bulb holder.
Technically we live in Oaktree House, but sadly the tree had to go.
We now have a thriving Oakstump at the front of the house.
