We’re back on the decorating horse at the moment. Kirsty, with great gusto, started stripping the wallpaper in the dinning room on Saturday (while I made a Morrissey CD for Kev) and on Sunday we did the money spending (the CEO of Focus DIY is still weeping with gratitude), painted the ceiling white and put up some lining paper.

Putting up the paper wasn’t the hilarious fiasco I was expecting actually. I’ve only ever tried it once before as a favour to my parents a long time ago and it ... errr ... didn’t go too well. However, with two people on the case things seems to hit a rhythm and we managed to get the whole room done. The only problem arose as it was getting darker and I decided to shed some light on the proceedings.

I had taken the light fitting off earlier in the day and so we were left with bare wires hanging from the ceiling. I thought it would be a good idea to attach a temporary fitting to the wires and just have a bare bulb hanging there until we got round to getting something else. I had noticed when I was removing the previous fitting that it seemed to be wired strangely. Firstly there were two leads coming out of the roof so all the wires where doubled up. Secondly instead of the red wires being connected to the live terminal and the black wires being connected to the neutral terminal the two red wires were connected together and the black wires were split and connected to a terminal each. “Hmmmm” I thought to myself, “that’s not right” so when I re-attached the new fitting I connected the red wires to live and joined the black wires together and connected them to neutral. When we turned on the light it blew the fuse for the downstairs lights. Arrrrgh!

We had no fuse wire so I had to go next door begging. They were awfully nice and even helped me attach the new wire to the fuse before sending me back home with good wishes. The new fuse worked perfectly and relieved we set about finishing the task. It was only later, when everything was cleaned and tidied and I was wandering out of the living room to grab a quick drink, that as I walked into the dinning room, completely out of habit, I flicked on the light switch - and blew all the fuses again.