We live in a group of houses that has a stream running behind it and a hard surface area in front. It is like the letter E with an absent middle bar.
We live at number 6 and for the past 12 years, at Christmas, Caroline has, with the permission of the other owners, hung a string of soft, warm, white lights around the bottom of the roofs of the four houses that makes up our block, facing the courtyard area. 45 metres of Christmas delight.
In her opinion, and grudgingly, mine too, they look quite nice.
Last week, when Caroline retrieved the lights from their storage cupboard, she found a fault. The socket at the end of the chain of lights that enters the transformer that goes into the three-point plug, was cracked and falling off.
A message on the box was very clear, stating that if such a thing were to happen, no attempt should be made to repair them and they must be thrown away.
Caroline, confident that her grade A in Advanced Level Physics was enough to protect her from harm, decided to ignore that instruction,.
“I’ll fix them,” she said.
“Are you sure you should try,” I asked. "It states very clearly that you shouldn’t.”
Caroline scoffed.
“They tell you to throw them away because they want you to buy another set,” she assured me.
“It’s a sales issue, and nothing to do with safety. You wouldn’t know where to start. For me it will be easy,”
She was becoming more determined by the minute.
“Just a simple matter of reversing the polarity of the terminal condenser.”
Ten minutes later, she called me back into the kitchen to witness the big test SWITCH ON.
“Ready?” she asked.
From my crouching position behind the washing machine, I nodded. She pressed the switch and 720 tiny light bulbs glowed a very bright soft, warm, white light.
Then, a tiny fraction of a second later, they all went out - permanently.
Later that afternoon, Caroline set off to various retail outlets but was unable to find any that were soft, warm and white. All that was left on the shelves this close to Christmas, were light strings with bulbs of red, green, blue and yellow.
A neighbour suggested that she tried Frosts, a nearby garden centre. They turned out to have exactly what she wanted and they were surprisingly cheap as well, at just £25.
The moment she opened the box, it was obvious that there were to be huge problems. Neither of us could see or find either of the ends of the string. By digging into the centre of the knotted ball of wire and bulbs, we eventually found the transformer that was at the plug end and that, at least, was a start.
We wanted to transfer the chain of lights from the box on to a revolving reel that our neighbour, Patrick, had made for us a couple of years ago but with less than a metre of untangled lights discernible, it was impossible to even make a start. An hour later, we had put possibly three metres of the total length of 50 metres on to the reel.
After four hours, with tempers that had passed the fraying point and were now laying in shattered pieces on the kitchen floor, we gave up, took off what was on the reel, and threw the whole lot into the bin. £25 and made in China! What did we expect?
Caroline went online, where she found and ordered some that are reassuringly expensive at £140.
They had better arrive soon!
They did!
