Spend the early part of the morning cleaning the dishwasher, in preparation for the dishwasher repair man. He came round with his son (I presume), and after a few minutes the man said, “I’ve got bad news for you. There’s nothing wrong with it.” How many times had a switched it on and off and it failed every time? Yet when they turned it on it worked.
They charged me a £68 call-out charge and said, “You’d better just put it on a cleaning cycle. It was probably just a bit of gunk that got stuck in the pipes. What happens is, it sticks in the pipes then if you don’t use it for a while it dries out and shrinks, and the next time you turn it on it flushes out the pipes.” So, feeling crestfallen at having paid £68 for nothing, I put it on a cleaning cycle.
Just as they were going out the door the man stopped and listened. “It’s not working, ” he said. Apparently, if you want to know what’s wrong with dishwashers you have to learn how to listen to them. He noticed it was wrong, and sure enough the cleaning cycle had stopped. Each time they tried again it stopped. I felt relieved – that £68 was finally working for itself. “It could be the filter,” they said. “We’ll have to take it away and investigate. All the workings are in the bottom of these things, so you have to tip them upside down to get at them.”
Then to Newmarket to see PV, who was asking me what I’d done in the last month. It’s almost a month since the end of my contract. I said when I was working it was like I’d been spinning in a tornado, like Dorothy, and although I’d been dumped to the ground now I was still disorientated. It was a readjustment period, the first month. I’m still disappointed at how little I’ve done, though, despite PV telling me she thought I’d done a lot.
Then back home for my French lesson, where I wasn’t on form at all. There are some days when my brain just isn’t working, and this was one of them. I kept stopping to think of the word or tense, and my mind was blank. Sometimes it happens like that, and other days the words babble along like a stream in the Lakes, feeling perfectly loquacious.