Relief Arrives

I return from my leave to find not the customary disasters or pastoral nightmares, but something going right: the gents' toilets are finished. Positively hotel-standard, these are. Originally, we thought the work that needed doing - replacing a nasty lino floor and refixing a wall of false tiles - would be a simple job taking a week or two that we could probably do in-house. Instead it's taken a year and cost £15000. In the course of it we discovered that the mysterious damp which had made the floor so nasty in the first place and which we've been investigating for years was down to a boxed-in pipe feeding the radiator that had never been properly soldered. Of such things, I find myself repeating ruefully, is the Kingdom made.