But then....

Shortly after writing that last blog entry, I went off to bed with the hum of the water pipes like music to my ears. Just after eleven thirty, the electricity went off. We looked outside and thought it might be the whole village, but no, it was just us. And there was a suspicious hissing coming from the garage.

Mark's yell of horror didn't really convey the magnitude of what he found - a joint in the water main had burst in the corner of the garage and it was shooting a huge fountain of water up, over all the fuse boxes and electricity supply, flooding one side of the floor and streaming out under the door. The thing was, it was in between the house stop-tap and the mains stop-tap, and we couldn't reach down the 4" square, 2 ft deep pipe to turn it off. The quantity of water was unbelievable, the range and force of the spray made getting anywhere near it impossible.

Help was at hand - or rather in Calne - in the shape of the amazing young man who has been working on our bathroom, who had been trying to turn off the water earlier in the week and had similar difficulties. A phone call to him shortly before midnight resulted in a generous offer to come out and sort it for us - Severn Trent Water were telling me that emergency calls were taking over two hours to answer at that point. He told me it was just chance that he had a kayak strapped to the roof of his van when he arrived!

Half an hour later, having been sitting in a puddle several inches deep in this corner of the garage, whilst fighting a torrent of icy cold water to access the joint, we all reached the conclusion we had to turn that water off somehow. With a bit of Heath-Robinson ingenuity and a long piece of wood, that's what he did. The joint was soon repaired, water restored and a text message to the electrician requested an early call this morning to check the fuse boxes etc.

By 8.30am all was back to normal here. The garage was dry, we had running water and electricity too. I can't say I had the best night's sleep but hey, there's always tonight.

Unless something else awaits. Let's hope for no further excitement, please. Oh, and we intend to invest in a gizmo to reach that stop-tap. Don't want to repeat that experience in a hurry!