Lectrics., Dad and Neighbours.

My Dad died in February, which is about the same time as our outside light stopped working.

"I need to change the bulb," the Long Suffering Husband said every day without doing anything about it until the end of March.
"Don't worry," I said, hoping that if it was dark no one would find their way to our front door and I'd be allowed to wallow in peace. I didn't want my neighbours knocking on the door to borrow an egg or asking if I'd feed their cat.  Normally, I like this sort of thing but in February and March I didn't want to have any conversations that started with, "I'm so sorry..." I kept my head down and scurried to and from the car, to avoid hedge clippers,,dog walkers and parents wrestling their children into the car for the school run.  This was possibly a mistake.  Grief does make you feel lonely and it might have been good for me to pass a pleasant few minutes talking about the weather or the amount of foxes.

We changed the light bulb at Easter but it still didn't work.

Now that I'm talking again most conversations include the line, "And how's your mum?" said with a tilt of the head and a look of concern.  I think this is a coded way of them letting me know that they missed the chance to say. "I'm so sorry.." at the time.  When I tell them that she's fine they seem a little disappointed and I feel a bit guilty of depriving them of the chance to console at the time.

My Dad was always really good with neighbours.  They became friends and would call for an early beer or join a brass band with him.  Their current neighbours have been brilliant.  Every time I've visited a head has popped over the fence with an invitation or a man has appeared at the end of the garden (like a resident gnome) offering gardening services.

The other thing that Dad was good at was 'lectrics'.  As a telephone engineer he knew a lot about electricity and would be the person the LSH turned to whenever we bought a light from IKEA and couldn't work out how to fit it.

The LSH was possibly one of the more competent amateur electricians who turned to my Dad.  As a child, we would often get a call from an Uncle who had got into a mess.  Uncle Charlie was the the one I remember most.  Mum would hand over the phone, rolling her eyes and saying, "He's done it again.  He should come with a health warning. One day he'll blow everyone up." Dad would patiently listen, try to explain, talking about red, black and brown wires before saying, "Hang on, don't touch anything.  I'll be round.  Give me half an hour."

He would grab his leather clad GPO meter and I would go along for the ride.  When we got there there would be wires hanging from the ceiling  above a step ladder or a hole in a wall with wires poking out and my Uncle Charlie would be looking frazzled but as cheerful as ever.
"i never was any good at lectrics," he'd say.
  Dad would get up the ladder, Aunt Rene would make tea and find a Mr Kipling's cake and I would play with my cousins or listen to Uncle Charlie's gory stories about how he got his leg caught in a threshing machine when he was a boy.  Whatever the problem had been Dad usually had it sorted before the tea had brewed.

Yesterday, we bought a new light.  The LSH fitted it and it didn't work. He tried everything Dad had taught him.  He drew a circuit diagram, tested switches all to no avail.  At one point every downstairs switch was hanging off the wall.
"This is where we need your Dad," the LSH said, "Come on, you're an electrician's daughter you must know something."

I told him that I knew that you didn't need to wire a plug to make an electrical item work if you knew to put the blue wire in the left hole of the socket and the brown wire in the right.  He shuddered and remembered that was something he had trained me out of.  I told him that there were 100,000 volts in a telephone exchange switch and that it smelt of a cross between biscuits and garlic bread and that the black wire was neutral and the red was live. I could also remember Bye Bye Rosie Off You Go Birmingham Via Great Western but wasn't sure what it meant. He shrugged.
"The problem has to be that the circuit is broken somewhere.  You need a man with a meter,"to confirm it." I told him.
The LSH tried a new piece of wire and took off a few more switches and then he saw a neighbour.
The neighbour had a meter.
They stood and looked and tested, concluding that it didn't make sense.
The circuit to the switch wasn't broken but it was broken to the outside wire but the outside wire had been changed.
"It's almost as though this wire doesn't come off this switch," said the neighbour perceptively.

Then we remembered. My Dad had put the outside light in when we did our extension. The front door was off at the time and he connected it from a wire in the cavity wall. There would be no fixing it, especially as we now have cavity wall insulation.

It was sad to think that Dad will never turn up with his trusty GPO box but was nice to know that we have good neighbours.