@Maria, you can find a link under Jyro's name to send him an email via the forum, please do that, or check his website since we don't give out people's email addresses.

@Simba, the ice thing sounds fairly freaky. luckily our own issue wasn't that dire.
It turns out that the stopcock isn't actually a turn switch like every other stopcock I've seen, it's a lever you need to change from vertical to horizontal .

So there was me, turnning this section of pipe with the lever around and around and around and water was still on, then my land lord comes in and just goes "crunk!" and it's done! I can say  felt like a major dingbat for not working that one out .

Fortunately, the plummer turned up at 8 am yesterday morning, and thanks to the lone of some very handy fan heaters, we dried up all the water with no damage which was good.

Our landlord really is a very nice chap, he even bought us two rather expensive bottles of wine and shared one with us while we chatted waited for the plummer, and I was quite impressed that a 70 year old very straight lased ex antique dealer did know what I was talking about when I told him we wanted our front door bright green like Bilbo Baggins' .

One last amusing thing from this debarcle though was the heating. While our land lord is lovely, he does have that tendency which some older people have to  assume he always knows best.
So he set the timer on the heating before he left  to turn the heating off between midnight and seven am. We did ask him not to, on the basis that my lady gets cold and frequently one or both of us is awake anyway, but he wouldn't take no for an answer.

However, when he was gone guess what? no heating at all? it wasn't until midnight that day that I realized he had actually set the heating to be off! the rest of the time and come on! between midnight and seven.
Fortunately, this time my logic skills were up to the task and I was able to turn the timer off entirely, so we now have heating back .

@Family mario, I'm jealous, though you'll have to let me know how that retro thing goes. I've never been a big fan of emulation since playing on a keyboard is interesting and emulated games don't tend to work right, one reason I've relied  on original hardware. I have my snes currently hooked up and working, but my gamecube (which also serves to play gba games), is not in quite as good a state since we managed to lose the tv cable while moving. This is very annoying as I used amazon prime to treat myself to something I've been looking for for a long time, a copy of Mega man ii for the original gameboy, now meaning I only have four more mega man games to get to complete my personal "mega man games I can play" list, which encompasses megaman 1-8, Megaman & bass, all five original mega man gb games, megaman x 1-6 plus xtreme and xtreeme 2 and the four mega man zero games.

Unfortunately after this the games either got too 3d or moved onto inaccessible consoles like the psp, wii and ds.

Actually the Wii I am particularly sad about since it would be a good way to play retro games if I could get through the blasted menus on the thing, not to mention a few remakes like Mega man 9 and 10, though I suspect those would have menu structures too complex for me to handle.

In other news, unfortunately I'm going to have to wait on a hero's call because after buying a new Iphone 8 I'm severely short of cash, though hopefully I can transfer some from my savings and be okay in a few days. This evening we're taking my brother and his now fiance out to watch Starwars and have a meal as  celibration of their engagement, (assuming they're both recovered from their colds), which I'm looking forward to.

And that's about enough ramblement for me I think, and probably my last monthly chat for 2017 .