Sparks and snow!

This has been agony! 

I am not, it must be said, a man with significant DIY skills. I'm not sure why this is. I think my dad is pretty handy. I remember him building our garage when we lived on Eton Avenue in New Malden sometime in the early seventies and when I ran past recently it was still there! Mind you, I also remember him stabbing himself in the thigh with some utensil or other, possibly during that exercise, so maybe that's what put me off.

Over the years I have occasionally tried my hand at doing 'it' myself. In the early nineties, for example, I put up some shelves in alcove to hold my CDs but the first two I put up couldn't take the weight of anything much more massive than a box of tissues. However, my friend Dean did quite a bit of DIY in the old cottage and encouraged me to join him, which, despite my surly reluctance at the time, I'm very grateful for; it's made me quite a bit more confident. Relatively speaking, anyway.

So, for a while I've been saying to the Minx - with a surprising degree of insouciance - that we should replace some of her light switches. While this seems an initially alarming project, I have calmed my electrical fears with the thought that we can turn it off at the mains and that after that, it'll just be a matter of turning a few screws. Right?

Yesterday, we went to buy the light switches and, this morning, we set about the task. It was while I was doing the first one that I suddenly remembered a plot-line from 'Brookside'. Now, to be clear, I was not a serial watcher of the soap but I did remember a story where someone's dad fixed a light-switch and then they - or their partner - were killed when they used it because... I don't know. It wasn't properly earthed or something. Oh, and maybe they were thrown downstairs.

Thus, while I was still pretty relaxed about doing the actual work, I was still very nervous when we turned the electricity on and I tried the switches out. You'll be pleased to know they all worked very well :-)

So, my picture today was going to be a rather proud shot of one of the switches. But then, while I was swimming later on, it started to snow. It had been wet and drizzly when I went in but when I came out it looked like this. And then, by the time I'd picked up the kids and arrived back home, it was so snowy, I couldn't resist the picture of the cottage above. 

Choosing which picture to put up - DIY success vs heavy snow - has been agony but, ultimately, I knew which was the better photo. So there you go.