Fixed

When I went to boil my eggs for breakfast this morning the timer finally gave up the ghost completely.  It had been playing up for a while.   Usually a squirt of electrical terminal cleaner in the switch solves the problem, but not this morning. 
 
After breakfast (telephone timer to the rescue) I set out to fix the problem.  It swiftly became clear that a number of wires were becoming disconnected, so a complete rewire was the order of the day.  It was then that I realised why I had been hording those old defunct USB cables that nearly got dumped the other week – a source of multicore wire small enough to fit inside a small device like the timer, and a hundred times better than the original cheap solid core wires that were breaking off.
 
Unfortunately I did put the switch back in upside down, but we will get used to that . . .