The first delivery arrives

Perhaps inevitably, neither of us slept all that well last night, knowing that we needed to be up early in case the Argos delivery turned up first thing. By half six I was making cups of tea; I skipped having a shower, breakfasted quickly and then went over to the lodge at half seven.

I was, of course, able to get a shower there, inaugurating the wet room, which proved to be very good for the purpose. There followed a period of pottering about, experimenting with the new phone, reading through the stuff in the massive Owners Manual for the lodge and the like.

Sheila came across just after nine with enough gear to make a cup of coffee; we’d not long started the water heating in a saucepan on the stove when Robert from the office turned up with the Argos guys.

Quantities of parcels were carried in and the rest of the morning was spent unpacking, checking the appliances out (having first grappled with a whole variety of manuals) and trying to condense the packaging into manageable bundles to take to the recycling skips.

The one beast we couldn’t try out was the TV/DVD player, which didn’t come supplied with an aerial cable. We’ll get one tomorrow in Wilko for all of a quid; meantime we took some DVDs across after lunch to check out those functions.

Guess what, the first one didn’t play properly, stuttering and pausing. It was a DVD we’d played successfully before, too, so we felt a bit bothered. It seemed to make sense to try another, though, which proceeded to play just fine. Out of curiosity, I put the first one back in and it now behaved itself too. It must just have mis-loaded the first time.

After we’d finished all that, we retreated to the boat, lugging aforesaid huge manual with us. Sheila’s spent most of the afternoon photocopying the bits that the tenants will need, the sections that actually tell you which buttons to push when as opposed to reams of safety data and the like.

(The best of those is the first stern warning in the manual for the oven: “This appliance becomes very hot inside whilst in use”. Erm, it’s an oven?)

No matter, there is a sense of making progress, even if we both feel very part worn by now. I’ve got a frozen meal to do tonight, the other half of a chicken curry from a few days ago, so not much more effort is going to be required before I can call beer o’clock.