sorted

Fred the DPD driver appeared silently outside the front door just after lunch.  We have told him there is enough room for his van to drive around the turning circle, but he always reverses up to the house, stopping short of the porch.  He says he is afraid of running over a flower, and that we have a beautiful garden.

He was a welcome visitor, because he brought a box containing the replacement fan for the Aga.  The Systems Administrator opened up the top this morning, removing the louvred enamelled boxes that cover the electronics and the fan, and vacuumed out the dust that had collected since the last time the fan was changed, exclaiming with relief that the old fan unit looked exactly like the one he ordered yesterday, but after that there was nothing more to be done until the cavalry arrived in the form of Fred, and I sat eyeing up the disemboweled machine through lunch, thinking that I had never understood electricity when Mr Swift was trying to drill into my head for A level physics, and did not trust it now.  The SA assured me that it was extremely straightforward.

And so it appears to have been.  After no more than an hour and a half of poking about in the innards of the Aga, the top is back on and a flashing red light indicates that it is charging itself up using (gulp) daytime rate electricity.  Normally, vampire-like, it only feeds at night.  By tomorrow evening it should be hot enough to cook the pizzas I have already bought on the strength of the fan being on order.  That's if everything is working properly.  I rather wish I had not looked up the flashing red light on Google, which led me to a string of queries from people whose electric Agas were not charging properly, or not at the right time, but the SA did say that in the search for a new fan he had found instructions for the timer, a completely non-intuitive piece of equipment that neither of us have ever really understood how to alter, so I expect it will all work in the end.

Outside it was so cold and damp and grey, and my nose so snivelling and neck so stiff, that I decided the garden would have to look after itself.  Instead I finished tidying up my desk, filing away nine months' worth of things that needed filing and chucking out a great many other things, until I could see bare wood.  Now I am amusing myself going through the garden magazines that were mixed up in the pile, before filing them too in date order in boxes down in the garage.  Mr Fluffy also thought it was just too horrible to go outside, and filed himself in my in-tray for the second day running.  It is not large enough for him now that he is a fully grown cat, and he has to sleep with his legs trailing over the edge, and the plastic has already cracked under his weight so that I had to line it with paper in case he should trap his toes, but he is not deterred, returning there for the afternoon as soon as he had eaten his lunch.