Having had the chimney fire, I refused to light another until both chimneys had been swept and crow guards put on the chimney pots to eliminate any further possibility of combustion. The sweep took a few days to come around, but he eventually turned up and was a little grumpy.

I had bought the guards for the chimneys and I thought that he'd be on the roof anyway, but of course he can clean everything from the fireplace and doesn't need to go up top at all, so I asked if he'd put them on the chimneys anyway. He didn't seem too happy about this, primarily because it was awkward to get the ladder up, but he did one of the new pots and then took the ladder down to move it to the other chimney at the back of the house. I wondered why he hadn't put up the second one, but I figured that as there was only one chimney in use, he'd decided that there wasn't any point in putting up the second one, and anyway -- he was grumpy and sort of doing me a favour, so I didn't push it.

When he got around to the other chimney and saw that I had a guard for that one as well, he explained that the second chimney on the other stack was a fake and was closed off. But after he'd put the second guard up he duly went back up to put the third one up -- so it wouldn't look wrong. By the end of the visit we were like old friends (he even refused my trying to over pay him).

And now we are in imminent child mode. Thirty-six hours from now, she'll be out and about (all going well) and I still haven't got the name thing sorted. Our best laid plans were put out of joint a little by the fact that Sally's mum was sent to hospital with a suspected detached retina. She banged into a tree branch the other day and lost her center of vision in one eye. She's in the Eye and Ear hospital for the night now, but while they're not making a definite diagnosis tonight, they're saying it's more likely an infection. But I've seen too many episodes of ER to be comforted by that...