The Landlady battles with modern technology

If there is one thing as sure as Christmas arriving on 25 December, it is the depressing fact that by mid-October I will be in receipt of a wailing call from one of my tenants, claiming that their boiler is broken. I thought I’d got away with it this year, as by 14 October nothing had happened and the Landlady Towers Empire appeared to be functioning like a slick machine.

On 15 October, I received an email from my wonderful letting agent in Hastings claiming that the tenant in mine and Katy’s flat had no heating or hot water. In spite of the fact that these tenants are rather sporadic with their rent payments – in fact, they haven’t paid the rent for three months – they have a small child, and there was a brisk north-easterly whipping along the coast lending an undesirable chill factor. Heavy hearted (because I know that this particular boiler is the Lazarus of the central heating world), I called my Hastings plumber and awaited the bad news with chequebook at the ready.

Ideally, I’d switch off the boiler and emigrate for the winter, and I am suffering from heat envy having just received a text from a good friend who’s off to the Caribbean tomorrow. Even my own family members are off gallivanting and The Big Son has just returned from Turkey, where he spent a week with his girlfriend.

“Fool that I am, I actually expected a reply to my concerned missive…”

In the pub last Thursday while he was away, I was having a drink with a couple of girls The Big Daughter went to school with. One of them asked if The Big Son was any better, as she’d heard via Facebook that he was really ill. As I don’t – and will never – ‘do’ Facebook, this was the first I’d heard about it, so I texted him immediately to ask if he was okay. Fool that I am, I actually expected a reply to my concerned missive, but my phone remained silent for the rest of the week. I assumed he was either not as ill as we first imagined, or that he was so ill he couldn’t even lift his texting finger, in which case his girlfriend would probably get in touch, so I left well (or rather ill) alone.

On Sunday morning while having a lie-in, my sleep was rudely disturbed by two text messages coming through at once. It was the miraculously resurrected Big Son, his first text asking why The Big Daughter was not at work and the second urging me to go to her bedroom to make sure she was alive. The Big Daughter’s boss had texted him to ask why his sister wasn’t at work. When they were babies, I used to check they were still alive all the time. I didn’t expect to have to do it in in their mid-twenties. You will be delighted to know that The Big Daughter was indeed still very much alive, had overslept and was very indignant when I went into her room to check that she was still breathing. That’s scare-mongering modern technology for you.

Illustration: Jake McDonald www.shakeyillustrations.blogspot.com