It was panic stations at Rancho Notorious this morning.
I’ve been getting ahead of myself of late: I thought that today, Sunday, was
already the 7th January. In which case… what was the Christmas tree
doing still illuminated by the set of cheap but serviceable lights I’d picked
up in Casa during the last-minute pre-Christmas mayhem?
I hardly dared to voice it. But… in that case, hadn't Twelfth Night been and gone? My technological wife confirmed it via her iPhone, which has
seen some heavy-duty service this Christmas, in the form of seemingly endless
on-line Scrabble with a friend. We set to with gusto, stripping our elegant
tree of its decorations and gathering up the greetings cards. Half an hour and
it was done. The commandos of Lympstone, near whose training camp I lived for a
year as a student, would have been impressed by the efficiency of our joint
operation. It’s wonderful how an element of panic focuses the mind.
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| Our Lady of The Heat Pump |
The thing is, you hear of all these terrible
eventualities that can befall you if your decorations exceed their sell-by
date. A whole year’s bad luck if you miss the deadline. Already the gods of
Twelfth Night seemed to have admonished us. I woke up to find that the
temperature in the house had plummeted. The portable thermostat, stationed in
our reading area, revealed that the heat pump should have been on. But it
wasn’t.
Clearly, we were being punished for our hubris the
previous evening, when we sung its praises to our new neighbours. They invited
us round for aperitifs and we cracked open another bottle of seasonal
champagne. They’ve moved down here from way up north near Lille in search of
the kind of peace and rural quiet to accompany their coming retirement and
their dream of running chambres d’hôte in a new house.
As with our previous neighbours, it seems to be a second
marriage. We’re busy trying to piece together the clues that were dropped.
Something about meeting in a family firm they both worked for. There are
children involved, and we suspect that they’re from the previous marriage.
We’ve already decided that Madame wears the trousers. Jeans in this case. Over
tan-coloured boots. She seems very pleasant, but her wiry frame, uncompromising
glasses and rather severe short grey hair suggest nervous energy and, probably,
a cork lodged somewhere up her fundament.
She’s continuing to work in what seems to be quite a
high-powered job, while her husband is clearly already enjoying a life of
newfound leisure. He sports a lightweight beard and the look of someone who
will be happy to shuffle around his new domain in cardigan and carpet slippers.
A momentary alarm bell sounded when he talked about reading a magazine entitled
Chasseur, but we figure that it’s more due to a love of nature than an
inveterate urge to go out at the weekends and shoot living creatures. Hope so,
anyway. I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt, because he and his wife have
been to see the jazz singer, Al Jarreau, in concert. Even though Al Jarreau can
veer towards the middle of the road, his fans are not generally killers.
I’m not quite sure how the conversation leaned towards
heating systems. I think perhaps it was prompted by a comparison of winters up
north and down here in the south-of-middle. In the north of France, as a rule
they’re as mild and wet as they are in the south of England. Last February, of
course, was an exception and they had the same kind of minus temperatures for
the same kind of duration as we did down here. Pipes froze across most of the
country. Getting onto the wicked price of propane, we told them about the
useless boiler foisted upon us by our useless plumber and the liberation that
came from pensioning it off in favour of our Mitsubishi heat pump.
That must have been it. So I’ve learned the dangers of
singing the praises of one’s heating system. It’s obviously as sure a kiss of
death as a cricket commentator extolling the technique of an English batsman in
the dangerous 90s. So I slipped on my pair of plastic Mocks, slimy from
early-morning fog, and ventured down to the cave with our wind-up torch
from Lidl to see what was up. But what do you look for? Disaster rarely stares
you straight in the face. I removed the lid of the electrical doings only to be
confronted by such exceptionally complicated printed circuitry that all I could
usefully do was to blow off any dust and replace the lid. All the correct
lights seemed to be on and there were no on-screen error messages.
So I did the only useful thing that I could think of
doing in such circumstances. I took the batteries out of the thermostat in the
reading area and swapped them around. The left one in the right space and the
right one in the left. Whereupon, the heat pump was heard to come to life on
our terrace. Thus it was that catastrophe was averted on this cold, clammy
January day.
My timely intervention coincided roughly with our joint
discovery that I had got the date wrong. Today is the 6th and not
the 7th. So there was still a teeny-weeny window of opportunity.
Time enough to grasp our now bare sapin with my new pair of water-resistant
work gloves from my mother-in-law, pull it out of the Sheffield chimney pot in
which our Christmas trees find their temporary home each year, open the double
door and throw it onto the lawn before it shed all its needles on our floor.
Hey presto, it’s Rolf! The decorations are boxed
again and restored to their resting place under the roof, the tree has been
stripped of its twinkling jewellery and unceremoniously ditched, and Christmas
2012 is but a memory. It passed well? It passed very well, thank you for
asking. It’s a very nice memory, but a memory nonetheless. The Daughter is
back in her Parisian digs, my wife is back at work and Reality rules once more.
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