The other morning, I awoke to a disturbed wife. The house was in darkness. Apparently, when turning on the bathroom light, there was a big flash, followed by all of the remaining lights in the house going out. I had expereinced this problem in my old flat, so knew how to fix it. The light circuit had tripped, and just needed turning back on. I normally keep a torch by the bedside for these matters. Could I find it when I really needed it? Could I hell. Luckily, my mobile phone has a torch app. Unfortunetely, it drinks battery juice like Phil Mitchell drinks vodka. By using the phone as a torch, I might not have enough power left to call 999, should I fail to restore the lights to my house. Thankfully, I managed to haul myself out of bed, made it downstairs, got the lights working and my phone didn’t die. The bathroom light was still out, which presented an even greter problem…

I asked my DIY Man – AKA “Dad” – to come and change the light bulb. He is excellent at this kind of thing and I wouldn’t have been able to do this job. Being a shortarse 5 foot 5 and having as much balance as a one-legged horse, I didn’t really want to risk changing it myself with a stepladder, especially as the bulb is under a fragile glass dome, which would no doubt shatter into a million sharp pieces if I went anywhere near it, leading to me cutting myself, dying from blood loss and receiving a fine from the landlord for breaking his property.

My Dad managed to retrieve the bulb from behind the great glass ceiling dome. Except it wasn’t a bulb. It was a tiny tube. You know the kind you get in an office? It was like that but 100 times smaller. Where on earth could I buy one of these? One things for sure, I couldn’t buy one from my Tesco Local. I went to the shop that sells everything (apart from drugs and livestock)… Amazon.

After much thinking, I bought what I believed to be the correct bulbs, tubes, whatever… The next day, Claire rang me at work to say that they had been delivered, but they were too small! Yes, it was a tiny, tiny light tube. 1,000 times smaller than one you would find in an office! This was getting serious, there was only so long I could shower by candle light (OK, I used the landing light, with the bathroom door open). My Dad, the best handyman in the world, managed to find the required bulb in Screwfix and even fitted it for us. Everything is now working, there is now no longer a need for candles, but we do have a multipack of tiny light tubes that we’ll never need.