At the opera

A busy and rather frustrating and worrying day that ended well.

My central heating is acting up. The boiler pressure has deep-dived and the rads are only partially heating. My new neighbour is having a new bathroom installed at the moment and has also upgraded the house with everything energy-efficient. I asked him for a recommendation for somebody who'd check out my place and fix my problem. Turns out the energy-saving people do that sort of work exclusively, so can't help … but then the neighbour and the bathroom-installation guy downed tools and helped me out twiddling valves outside and in and got things working at least until I find somebody to cast a professional eye over things. The worrying part is that there was talk about what was felt to be a high possibility of a leak, which is not good news at all.

Anyway, I did some radiator bleeding to clear out the air and the rads came back to life. All of this ate into the day and suddenly it was time to call a taxi to bring me to Grand Canal Dock to meet two musical friends for a bite of pub grub before going to Irish National Opera's new production of Puccini's La Bohème. It was a terrific night. Great staging, wonderful orchestral playing and fine singing. Another triumph for Irish National Opera.