Flamin' hell it's cold...

Following on from my last entry, any of the mid-term meltdown stress I was suffering from has well and truly disappeared with the traumatic incident that happened in our student house this weekend. Although it most probably should have contributed to my very own breakdown, it actually injected a bit of perspective and a strange amount of adrenaline.

Let me explain.

It’s Friday morning. I’m deservedly rather excited about the prospect of a night out after what feels like a year-long week. I spend the day working out at the gym and wading my way through more reading and yet another essay.  I do all of this with a little shiver; not out of horror at the work, but because the house is slowly getting colder and colder. So much so at one point, I’m sure I felt the house itself shivering.

My housemate and I investigated and linked the lack of hot water with the ominous red light on the boiler. Pretty sure that was green before… Wisely, she phones the landlord who comes and resets it and all is funky-dory again! J

 He’d probably only been away for an hour when the main bulb in my bedroom blew. Now, we’re not the type of household to have spare bulbs lying around, so I just phoned our landlord and he came straight back. It’s a good job he did too – the red light of death returned on the boiler. We waited anxiously on the stairs whilst he slowly took apart the metal box on the wall, both silently aware that we needed the hot water to come back on so we could shower for our night ahead…

He emerged from the bathroom with a grin (to this moment I still don’t know what he found so amusing.)  He told us that the boiler needed a new part and he didn’t have a spare one! YAY!

So to sum things up, we had no hot water and no heating and we hadn’t showered yet. Sometimes I just can’t believe my luck.

Our landlord did try to help…but that’s when things started to turn rather dramatic. He showed us how to get the electric shower to pump out hot water and said that he’d wait in his van for 20 minutes with a clip on one of the boiler tubes just to heat the house up for that duration. Then, once we’d showered, he’d come back in and take the clip off – that way we’d at least have taken the chill off the house. It sounded like a good idea at the time…in retrospect we probably should have considered that by clipping a tube he was blocking whatever was running through it and letting it pile up…

My housemate showered and came out with a shiver saying the temperature of the water dropped. I attempted to shower and could not for the life of me get any hot water. I was just thinking about giving up when I smelt gas.

‘Don’t be stupid Steph. Why on earth would a bathroom have a gas leak?’  I thought. I turned the water off and poked my head round the shower curtain to look at the boiler.

The monster in the corner of the room. 

Or rather, the blue monster in the corner of the room as a tidy gas flame had engulfed the box.

I jumped out of the shower and grabbed a towel before the less threatening little blue flame turned into an ever so slightly scary real flame of fire which was coming from the boiler and into the room. The very room I was standing in wearing only a towel and my owl slippers. I freaked.

Yelling ‘FIRE!’ I grabbed my phone and reached for the door, which, by the way, is right next to the boiler. Yes readers, that’s right. My only exit was right next to the flame that was potentially endangering my life. And all for the sake of a sodding shower and a little bit of warmth.

With my housemates shouting at me to come downstairs, the landlord ran up and it was extinguished, mainly thanks to the draft of air I’d let in when I legged it out of the room.

Danger averted.

Well, the good news from all this is that our fire alarms work! The bad news is that I was ever so slightly shaken up and spent the next hour when I was meant to be getting dressed and excitedly putting make up on drinking tea, having a little cry and then having group hugs with my housemates. And I still hadn’t had my shower.

So where are we at now? We still went on our big night out – we saw the life threatening situation as more of a reason than ever to let our hair down a bit and de-stress with some cheesy tunes at Ocean nightclub.  And I finally managed to have a quick shower. But the boiler still isn’t working and the house is still rather cold. But we did learn a few things from this.

1.  Student life is not only damaging to your mentality with the threat of a mid-term meltdown, but it’s also rather unpredictable. Unpredictable but never dull.
   
2. Blankets are better than flames....