OK once again I apologise for the complete crapness of this shot. It’s not my finest photographic hour but to be honest, it’s a real tale of today.

For the last few days, apart from my job searches (still nothing in the offing and I’m getting more and more panicky about it), I have done nothing but building work in our kitchen.

That’s why my posting is spasmodic because when I finish “work” for the day, I find myself slumping on the sofa without the slightest desire or inclination to take a photo and report in.

Today, I have dismantled another part of the kitchen. The bit that once housed a couple of tatty old cupboards and some overflowing shelving which housed my cookery book collection. There was not enough bookshelf space so the books were piled up in heaps with the ones to which I’d been referring at the top of the piles. All that stuff had to be re-homed, at least temporarily. I’ve become an expert in tucking things into nooks and crannies so that they’ve got somewhere to call home.

After clearing the space, I pulled the old bookcases away from the walls. The whole lot came down like a pack of cards, then the tiles needed removing so I set-to to remove them, I’m not quite believing my own self when I say that I was actually glad the real tiles had been covered with “tile-on-a-roll” because that stopped the bits from pinging all over the kitchen while I got them off. Believe me, I’ve worked like a dog today.

When one of the bookshelves came down, it revealed this loose wire hanging out of the wall. Even though I believed it could not possibly be live, after all, we’ve had the house re-wired since we moved in, the flipping thing was actually live, when DM poked his tester thingy in the hole. Blimey that was a close one.

It reminded me of an occasion early in our relationship when DM needed a builder for some work so I got in a friend of mine to do it for him. DM asked the friend to strip the rooms of plaster, then leave him a weekend to get the wiring sorted out before the new plaster went on. My mate asked him who would do the work and when he said he wasn’t sure, he’d probably have to do the work himself, my mate said “oh, just get Linda to do it for you”.

If you could have seen the look DM gave to Tony, you’d have thought he’d just been told I was a Concorde pilot or something. I was bloody determined that he’d eat his hat over doubting my abilities so I arranged to go and do the work for him. When I turned up, it was obvious he thought he was going to have to do all of the work and I’d just hang around watching, but I divvied up the tasks and set him off to get rid of the old and I followed behind installing new.

He was amazed.

By the time he’d got over the shock of finding he had a woman capable of such things, we got around to joking about idiots who electrocute themselves because they’ve forgotten to turn the leccy off.

I finished my work and said to him I’d start on the lighting circuit. Then it happened. I got a huge belt of leccy up my arm. I screamed, dropped my screwdriver and pliers and he came flying across the room to see if I was badly hurt. Luckily for me I wasn’t but since then we’ve not joked about idiots who don’t switch off the circuit any more, we check, double check and check again.

Cor baby you’re a real live wire!