alive and well in Bér. We managed to finally gather our wits and catch the bus to Bér yesterday. Everything looked OK, but as soon as Roy turned the water on it was raining indoors in several places. We quickly turned it off and started searching for the source(s) of the leak(s). The main one looked like it was in the plaster board wall of the upstairs bathroom. The plumber who did it originally was thankfully at home, which was lucky as recently he had been working in Austria for months on end. He came eventually (he has a drinking problem and I think he might have been on the juice yesterday afternoon) and regaled us with stories of various disasters in all the villages while the really cold spell was on a couple of weeks ago. It must have been when I was freezing my butt off in the streets of Cambridge as the temperature plumeted to -12C.
Last night was really funny and Roy and I felt that this must have been how Britain felt in the Blitz, especially on the colder nights. We put on all our clothes: I was sitting around watching TV in two fleeces and my down jacket, wrapped in a blanket and still feeling cold. Roy doesn't feel the cold as much as I do, but even he was considering putting more layers on eventually.
The plumber promised to come this morning and thankfully his wife must have hidden all the palinka bottles well because he did turn up and was (and still is) quite sober.
After cutting a big chunk out of the plasterboard they found the errant pipe (see below!) and it honestly proves that all the curses we heaped onto our original plumber - who still works with iron, rather than copper - was probably right. You can see that the pipe actually gave way, got itself a bump and split. Iron would never have done that.
After that we were hoping that we had found the majority of the problems and things would improve. No chance! When the plumber started putting pressure on the central heating system it turned out that there were two more bubbles in the pipes to the library radiators which then promptly proceeded to soak my entire book collection. I think I know what I am going to do in the next 4 to 6 months: DRYING BOOKS!!! One needs a real sense of perspective to survive disasters like this with a degree of serenity. I only had to think of the victims of the current recession, people who lost their jobs, their homes and who live with extreme poverty and hopelessness and that helped to put this into perspective. I am not very happy at the moment, but neither am I depressed or too upset. Such is life!
Must go now as we are off to the builders' merchants for pipes, taps and other plumbing paraphanalia.
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