Today was my first day back to work after the bank holiday weekend. Weather-wise it can only be described as a wash out. Rain, rain and more rain. However the weekend itself was not a wash out.

The new cooker has been repaired, all that was required was a new bolt on the fan. It turned out that the one it came with was not to spec and also threadless!!

On Saturday we undertook a two hour journey to spend the day with my 90 year old aunt. This left us with Sunday and Monday free to do as we pleased.

The weather looked promising on Sunday morning so we ventured out to Ludlow for the afternoon. As soon as we set off the weather turned and it started to rain. When we arrived we visited Ludlow Castle book shop because Mr C thought there might be some books to interest him there. He came away empty handed. We walked through the bank holiday stalls and detoured into The Parish Church of St Laurence which we found to be a lovely church with interesting history and spectacular stained glass windows.

We didn’t stay very long because whilst we were there a baptism service started to be conducted near the main entrances to the church. Both Mr C and I thought it was inappropriate that visitors should still be allowed to wander round the church whilst a religious service was going on so we discreetly made our way back to the entrance and left. We will take time to visit the church when we are next in Ludlow. It was raining as we left the church so we returned home via the Ludlow food centre.

On Monday it was raining again so we spent the day at home working on the house and I had an extra day off on Tuesday when to be honest I didn’t really do anything at all… I was feeling rather tired and lethargic.

Over the weekend we were also informed that Yodel had ‘lost’ another of our wine deliveries!! On the plus side the new curtain material eventually arrived and have now been made up into curtains and are now looking rather splendid in our living room nicely framing the view to our garden

Just over a week ago, early on Friday morning Mr C learned that one of his closest friends had passed away suddenly the previous evening. It was difficult to take in the reality as the friend was only 51 and always so full of life. This left us both a little sombre over the weekend.

On Saturday we ordered curtain material to replace the living room curtains to co-inside with the fitting of a new curtain track. On Sunday Mr C was celebrating his birthday so we went out Warwick where we visited the Lord Leycester Hospital which houses The Queen’s Royal Hussars museum and the Warwickshire Yeomanry museum. Mr C had planned on visiting Warwick Castle but I was not so keen on the idea. Whilst it is still a castle it has been turned into a theme park.  Theme parks are not at all my thing! We did make our way to the castle shop to see if it had a good book selection related to the historical period of the castle. It did not, so I waited outside in the courtyard watching some of Britain’s finest wandering around.

I had to go back to work on Monday but Mr C had the day off and had volunteered to cook a roast lamb dinner. I was relaxing in the living room whilst Mr C was popping backward and forward to the kitchen attending to the meal. Mr C poured two glasses of sherry and brought me one and returned to the kitchen. As he did so there was a loud bang, a small exclamation followed by silence…

The cooker had shot out a large blue flame and had unsurprisingly stopped working taking out the cooker circuit with it. Luckily the rest of the house electrics were working fine. But what were we to do with a half cooked dinner? The gas part of the appliance was still working although obviously we had to resort to matches to light the rings so the veg were cooked on the stove top and the roast lamb and potatoes were taken around the corner to a family member for them to complete that part of the meal in their oven. The neighbours must have wondered what Mr C was up to ferrying a roasting tin to and fro in his car!

After a previous accident when the grill in the top oven was left on with the glass door shut we decided it would be more sensible to have a new one rather than repair the old one. Whilst all this was going on a replacement cooker was ordered for delivery on Friday.

The cooker arrived yesterday but unfortunately it couldn’t be fitted by the company who delivered it because the electrician had not yet been to check out the electric circuit. The reason for this was the cooker was unexpectedly delivered at 7.30 in the morning!! The electrician turned up, checked the circuit and everything was fine. A gas fitter was booked for 9.30 this morning. He arrived on time and connected the gas supply to the cooker and started to test it out. When it came to turning on the main oven it made a horrendous racket. There is something wrong with the fan. After several phone calls between the supplier and manufacture the best arrangement they could come to was that a repair agent would come out next Friday to see if it could be repaired or if it needed replacing. Another seven days without a cooker!!

Whilst all this was going the curtain fitter turned up early to fit the curtain track. The fitting mostly ran smoothly although he had forgotten that the track was being attached directly to the ceiling and not to wooden batons, which were to be removed. That was soon sorted out and it looks very nice. Now we just have to wait for the curtain material which was supposed have arrived this week but is nowhere to be seen…