Steam iron blues

Ms Diaspora and I are very fond of the magnificent Philips 4.5 bar steam iron we bought back in Blighty. It saw us both through many hours of heavy duty family ironing without requiring endless refills, enabling us to listen to the Archers (or whatever else Radio 4 had to offer) undisturbed.

When we arrived in NZ we bought ourselves a bargain basement Zip iron to keep us going, but it's light, badly designed and requires constant refilling.

Today we ventured down to our storage unit in town - where many of our boxes are still unopened - to see if we could find our old friend. After two hours of ripping open boxes and rummaging through wrapping paper - wishing we had been better organised with labelling things - we found the iron....hoorah!

Except that, on using it tonight - and in spite of carefully cleaning it - we discovered it's developed a very nasty habit of dripping rusty red water all over the ironing. Damn!

Hope that stops soon :-(