bring it back

Lovely times last weekend in Durham. When we arrived I had already been prewarned by my boyfriend that he wasn't sure what would be state of the flat, i.e if electricity and gas would still be switched on (he moved out 6 weeks ago and the flat has been empty since). He went up to the house as I started unloading the car and I was relieved to see him switch on the light in the entrance, we have power! As I came in to freezing cold flat (remember we have travelled 5 hours NORTH of london.... any further and we'd be in scotland!) I casually ask him to switch the heating on... we go to bed as it is already midnight. the next morning when the flat doesn't warm up we decide to investigate and discover that the pilot light had gone out. He calls up the gas company and as the conversation gets more and more heated when the person on the other end of the line is unhelpful to say the least, I decide to go and sit in the sitting room and wait for him to calm down. A while later, after plenty of shouting I hear him say the C word (oooh! how rude) and hang up. Ok, we'll just deal with this. We have no heating. No hot water. Luckily we have an electric stove, and can get on with cooking our breakfast. This is what we love to do every weekend, a delicious fry up of eggs, bacon, beans, tomatos, sometimes sausages or mushrooms. My only job is to make the tea and butter the toast. The flat is still freezing cold so me move some chairs and a little table to sit right in front of the stove, near the only source of heat. It's so nice and cosy, and we rarely eat at a table like this facing each other, we'd normally sit on the couch (for various reasons). But now we sit there and chat and enjoy our warm breakfast and cups of tea. Obviously we need to wash ourselves, so we boil countless of pans and kettles of water and fill up the bath. Then we have a lovely bath together, using a mixing bowl to pour water over our heads to rinse out the shampoo.

I think he was worried that I would throw a tantrum like some high maintanence city girl, but oh no, this was probably one of the nicest days I can remember.