Thursday - leaky immersion...

We had discovered a few days ago that we had a leak up in the loft where the water tank is housed and John had been keeping an eye on it and a bowl underneath it but decided that if he was going to tackle it he would change our ball-cock and George's up the road (because it needed doing not because he has a thing about ball-cocks) and replace the immersion element as we reckon it is about five or six years' old and the water here is quite hard so it probably isn't as efficient as it should be.

The only problem with tackling this job is the complete lack of space up in the loft and the fact that John is bigger than your average bear or plumber for that matter.  Plus there is the small matter of dumping all the water in the tank.  This involved a lot of hose, a lot of swearing and a lot of water but eventually we managed to get as much as possible out and enough at least for the job to commence.

I hate jobs which involve water - we always seem to be the ones that get a leak somewhere awful and it does a lot of damage - I hate water and electrics even more and I hate it when John is shouting at me from the depths and the pump is going and I can't hear or worse my attention has been taken by something else and I am not even attempting to listen.

Boris has realised that there is 'stuff' happening at a higher level and he hates to miss out because stuff is interesting and stuff might mean food so he decided to take it upon himself to go up the ladder and check out what John was up to - the only trouble is that Boris is very good at getting in the way and sometimes no amount of shoving will put him off.  I had visions of him getting covered in boiling water or something so we had to get him down - he wasn't too happy about it as he was obviously convinced he was missing out on something he didn't want to miss out on but eventually he got the message and, with the aid of some biscuit shaking, disappeared into the kitchen out of harms way.  John was then left in peace to remove the bits he needed to remove so we could go down to Polis and get some replacements (hopefully otherwise it was a trip to Paphos which we didn't really want).

We decided to grab an early lunch and grab Charlie - he has now got so fat that sometimes he doesn't clean himself properly and can be seen waddling along sporting a couple of clinkers that need removing.  He doesn't like to be fussed with although he will let us comb him a little until he has enough and bites the comb.  This was going to be a delicate operation and so John rugby tackled him to the ground and I armed myself with some scissors.  This was not going to be an easy task and in the end I had to resort to pulling the offending lumps off by hand, hence the photograph of the clean bottom - and long may it remain so as I don't fancy doing that again too often.

Charlie clearly didn't go much on it himself as he got a right old monk on and sat on the sofa looking very cross.  If he was an only child I would seriously contemplate putting him on a diet but as one of four it would be nigh on impossible to police his eating but we are going to have to be careful with him.  We did take him to the vets for some blood tests only to be told that his problem was that he was greedy and we paid €50 to be told something we already knew.

So this is the offending element - quite badly rocked up and in need of replacement - we managed to get all the parts we needed and John came back armed with the bits and the tools ready to do battle in the black hole that is our loft.

Does John's bum look big in this loft????  This bit of the loft is the easy bit and John can at least bend over with his legs straight but in order to tackle the element he had to crawl to the right and contort himself around pipes and bits and pieces and bend himself in thirds at the very least.  He managed to get everything back together and working, pump, immersion and solar panels but an airlock caused the filters in the kitchen tap to blow off and subsequently the head of the shower!!  He then discovered that there was the slightest of seeping - in a really awkward place which he doesn't want to touch so we are going the bite the bullet and get in a plumber next week.  Everything works ok but we are keeping a bowl up here just in case!

Boris lost interest in the black hole and took himself off to the bunk beds that we keep threatening to throw out as they are so disgusting but we reckon the cats have worked out a rota and one or other of them is always to be found either top bunking or bottom bunking so the offending structure is saved for another day!!!