I’ve been asked to keep these stories shorter.  Hard for me because there’s so much to tell you, but I appreciate they have been a bit long.

Sunday

Months ago, we invited three of Sabine’s colleagues  to come for lunch.  That starts the week off on the wrong foot because one of the guests called on Saturday just as we were outside Lidl to buy the food to say he had CoViD, so he and his wife couldn’t make it.  At least we hadn’t bought food for 5 people – phew. 

We had decided to reschedule.  We had to reach the other guest but Sabine knows she didn’t look at her emails all the time.  Who would have thought in this day and age it would be so difficult to find someone’s phone number, and if she wasn’t old school and still had a landline, we might not have managed.  She calls on Sunday morning, having heard the message Sabine had left – phew.

We have the meal we were planning, coq au Riesling and blackberry and apply crumble, for lunch anyway.  Both dishes are delicious and it is a glorious day as well, so it would have been lovely to have people around.  Hey Ho.

In the evening we christen our CostCo copper firepit – possible the last chance for months to do so.  My cold seems to be over the worst (I’d tested for CoViD the previous Friday just in case but was negative).  Sabine is cold unless she stands down-wind of the fire but then she gets the smoke as well.

Monday

The stonemason replacing our garden steps starts.  He removes the old steps and prepares the ground for the foundations.  No rain.

I spend much of the morning on the phone to about six different people at Lloyds Bank being persuaded that just because the direct debit on my Lloyds credit card didn’t go through my HSBC account the previous Friday and my balance on Monday had reverted to the pre-direct debit amount, it wasn’t necessarily a sign that there was a problem.  It turns out that if you haven’t used the card in the last thirteen months, which I hadn’t, the direct debit falls away (news to me) but it was the weekend and the system was showing a pending payment, Sir, so it should be fine! 

The problem doing it by phone is that I don’t have the card and don’t know the three digit security code so I have to go through the telephone banking process and they then pass me on to the credit card people who then say that as I have come through Telephone Banking, they need to ask me more questions, most of which are the same.

The last person I speak to says if there was a problem with the payment, they’d make sure I didn’t get charged for anything.  Yeah, right ☹.

I take Sabine to the station for her commute into Glasgow.  I do some work in the garden, digging out the outline for the pond that Sabine’s mother and aunt who have ponds have said I should forget.

I feel a bit tired, have a snooze (as you do), have something to eat as I hadn’t been hungry, still feel tired, sleep for another 2 hours and think – hang on, this is what happened when I got CoViD last year.  Sure enough …. two lines on the test.  Damn and blast. 

I’d been given the CoViD booster in Jersey about a week before.  Was this a false positive caused by the vaccination.  Not according to Google.  Double damn and blast.

And then how do I break it to Sabine?  She wasn’t going to be happy as a) I’d given it to her last time and b) she has a very busy week at the university. She definitely wouldn’t want to get it and certainly not from me.

I phone her before I meet her at Helensburgh Central.  She takes it relatively calmly (phew) but thinks I should wear a mask in the house, keep away from her, watch TV on my own in my study and sleep in the spare room, all reasonable requests.  So far so good.

Tuesday

I’d slept well and wake up feeling fine – phew.  Sabine tests negative – phew.  I don’t need the car obviously, so Sabine happily drives herself to the station.

We’d reflected on the incidence of CoViD and I note that if our guest from Sunday hadn’t already got CoViD, there’d be a good chance he’d have it now.  We could have held a super-spreader event which wouldn’t have made us very popular – phew.

Our stonemason brings a young apprentice and they unload the materials for building the steps.  He tells me the forecast for Wednesday looks awful, so work will be held up.  It’s been like that the whole summer.

I feel the need to call Lloyds again as clearly there is a problem.  My statement now shows that the direct debit had failed.  The same rigmarole getting through.  I pay what I owe over the phone, email my Lloyds account manager only to get an out-of-office message, so I email her colleagues as the out-of-office message suggested, and call Lloyds again (same rigmarole) to remind them not to charge me.  Astonishing, I get put through to the same person as the day before, who remembers the conversation and confirms what he said – what are the odds?

Not raining.  I continue doing some work in the garden and on the pond outline.  Make hay and all that.  No sign of CoViD (phew), but pace myself, so no need for a nap.  I even have the energy to book BA flights to Innsbruck the week before Easter for what I hope will be my third and Sabine’s second skiing holiday of the season.  I read the Jersey Evening Post on-line – the weather there is unseasonably dry, sunny and hot.

Sabine comes home after yoga in Helensburgh, we both eat in the kitchen, she at the table and me at the island.  My mask is in my pocket just in case but eating is ok because you can’t if you’re wearing one.  She isn’t showing any CoViD symptoms – phew.  I enjoy another guilt-free evening watching programmes in my study that Sabine wouldn’t like.  The spare room bed is very comfortable.  This CoViD isn’t all bad.

Wednesday

Sabine goes off to university in the pouring rain.  No sign of the stonemason, and being a fair weather gardener, I’m not about to potter about outside either.  What to do?  Build the BBQ that I bought last week?  Seems the right thing to do, it isn’t going to build itself, so I do, in the garage. 

If anything is going to bring on CoViD symptoms, following picture-only instructions for something relying on open flames attached to a very large gas tank that would be standing on our brand new and very expensive balcony up against our even more expensive house would surely be it.  Especially when there is one picture I just couldn’t figure out till I accidently put the part into the right position.  Eureka.  BBQ 1, CoViD 0.

It helps that I had bought the exact same model in Jersey.  It was the floor model so it came built, but wouldn’t go up the staircase and seeing this, the delivery guys backed away and ran (almost literally), so I had to dismantle a lot of it, carry the component parts upstairs and then rebuild it on the balcony. Talk about déjà vu.

Someone from the Lloyds account manager team calls me in the afternoon. Nice but too late to help.

I test myself again just before Sabine gets home – negative (phew).  I break the good news to her when she arrives home.  I wasn’t expecting her reaction.  Clearly she doesn’t believe me.   She doesn’t come near me, she looks nervous, stammers, questions if this is a false negative given that it should take 5 days to get clear.  Clearly she’s not wanting our in-house separation to end just yet. 

However, notwithstanding the scepticism on the part of one person in the house, that same person reminds me that the real highlight of the evening is a Scottish Wildlife Trust webinar on the Life and Ecology of the Corncrake, 7.30pm to 9pm.  Corncrakes are now rare and we’d seen them for the first time last year in the Outer Hebrides on an Aigas wildlife programme.  However it took 15 minutes to introduce the speaker and while the talk itself was interesting up to a point, that point was reached about 7.55pm. 

Out of pity, I’m allowed to watch TV in the living room for the rest of the evening but I spend another night in the spare room.

Thursday

It’s still raining, so no sign of the stonemason again.  The slight inconvenience for us is that these steps are where we turn the car around, and his materials are stacked in front, so we have to back the car out onto the road.  The driveway entrance has a large car-unfriendly pillar either side on a slight bend, so reversing can be a challenge for some, especially when the car proximity alarms are going crazy.

The rain is a bit more intermittent, so I can get out and finish the pond outline wall.  I need to explain.  Where we want to put the pond is on a slope – the whole garden is on a slope so it wouldn’t actually matter where we wanted to put it, we’d have this problem.  However, as those of you who’ve read the previous story will realise, I am very keen on physics and it is my understanding that a slope and water don’t go well together – the water keeps trying to escape.  You need a flat surface for a pond. So do you build up the down-slope end or dig down at the back to get the pond level (or both)? 

I’d come to the conclusion that both would be easiest.  I’d build a wall in the front, and pile the spoil from digging out the back against the wall so that we get the base level faster with less digging.  Then dig out the pond.  Using some surplus garden stone blocks, a piece of wood and a spirit level, I was able to envisage how that would work.  And I confirmed it with a friend who came to stay around the time I was planning it out.  But I don’t blame him.

So that day, I finish the wall – a trench dug half-way round, each lower block carefully located so it is perfectly level with the one before, tested across the length with the spirit level and a long peince of wood, another block on top so the wall is about 30cm deep, forming half an oval shape.  It cuts into the slope increasingly deeply at the sides, the curve carefully managed by angling the blocks.  A work of art, true craftsmanship and I’m sure on the Tuesday I’d seen the stonemason looking admiringly at what I was doing.

So when Sabine asks why I was doing it that way, it was going to look like a swimming pool, I am somewhat taken aback.  And sadly, I don’t have a good answer.

I’m back in the conjugal bed, though.

Friday

Not raining …. yet.  The stonemason resumes work. I’m still thinking about the wall.

My Lloyds account manager calls and we talk through the experience.  She didn’t know about the 13 month rule either.  She says she’ll sort out any issue if there is one, bless her.

I’ve come to realise that my pond plan was going to make things much harder, not easier, than if I simply dug out the back to the same level as the front and put a nice drystone wall to contain the “cliff” at the rear.  That solved another problem – not having enough of those garden wall blocks.  I could just dig the outline trench all the way round and use the blocks I had in a single layer to get the level surface across the area of the would-be pond.  I’m happier and glad I worked it out now and not later on.  Thank you, Sabine.

She is out that evening at a mega 2 hour yoga thing.  It starts to rain.

I go to do some washing up, so she wouldn’t think I’d watched TV all evening.  No hot water.  Actually, no heat either, which I hadn’t noticed in the living room with the wood stove on.  My heart sinks.  Why?  What do I know about gas boilers?  Only enough to realise that when something was working and now isn’t, there’s a problem and likely a serious problem.

The pressure is way down and the temperature gauge reads 113 and falling.  113?  113C?  First I check the gas stove – it works so it’s not a gas supply problem (like across the whole of Jersey that night and well into the next week, as it transpires).  I play around with the boiler controls, turn it on and off at the mains, change the Hive controls and replace the batteries which were showing very low, and pray a lot.  Nothing happens.  Sabine gets home and her ex offers to come round to look.  He knows a lot more than I do, and restores the pressure.  Still nothing.  Manuals come out and get poured over.  Nothing.  Nothing but a cold house and cold water in it.

It is so all-consuming and upsetting that I even forget to tell Sabine that I’ve left her half a tin of baked beans that she could reheat and put on toast as I’d suspected she hasn’t eaten because of her epic yoga session.

It’s still raining.

Saturday

It’s still raining, torrentially at times.  It’s been raining all through the night.

I hadn’t slept well.  I have this feeling of desperation about the boiler.  The man who serviced our boiler had said last year that he was stopping doing it as his certification was expiring.  We call another local who didn’t seem at all keen, on his suggestion try British Gas who had sold and installed the boiler 11 years ago but I can’t be bothered to spend an hour pressing 1, 2 or 3 to try to get to the right part of the organisation which might or might not be able to help us, and finally call an outfit I Googled.

They’re very professional (smooth would now be my preferred adjective) and we like them.  But they can’t come till Monday afternoon.  With hindsight, we should have paused and thought is that’s what we wanted, but we didn’t.  We are left feeling that we are so lucky that they will put us to the top of their schedule.  Ok we think we can cope over the weekend, we’re out tomorrow for lunch anyway, it’s relatively mild, we have the wood stove and we’ll hopefully be up and running a day later.  How naive were we? 

Sabine leaves for her yoga session in Helensburgh around 9.45 and is back before I could clear the leaves out of an overflowing gutter.  The roads into town are closed because of flooding and they’re closed out of town the other way too.  Trains all cancelled.  The Rest and Be Thankful Pass has several mudslides so the route to Mull of Kintyre is closed …. Again.  The amber weather warning has proved totally justified.  It’s still raining.   

We manage without heat and hot water for the day.  I write this on Tuesday evening.  Nothing has changed.  More on this perhaps as the next story?

The rain eases off some time on Saturday night/Sunday morning.