My heating is broken and I have no hot water.

Do I stop wamming? Nope, course not! Read on...

This has been an eventful week. Just as I came down with the cold from hell and a chest infection, at the height of the recent rain/wind storms, my heating broke. Oh joy. I was so ill too I had to re-arrange one of this weeks sessions, being heatingless AND ill was just too much.

So - I called a plumber right away and he didn't show up - called later and arranged to visit the next day instead. Gave me a quote, then called again to refuse the job, worrying that he wasn't 100% sure what was wrong and din't want to end up changing the gas valve then it turning out to be something else and charging me twice or anything. Okay then...

Called another plumber, arranged to visit the next day - didn't show up, calls going to voicemail. Now it's the long weekend, so can't see it being fixed anytime soon.

Anyway, I had a session booked in yesterday, and as I was finally feeling better, decided to go ahead with it as planned.

From heating emergencies in the past, I know that if you keep water in buckets from boiling point, then a few hours later it's the right temperature for cleaning off/playing with. So at 7.20am, with my visitor confirmed as on his way and my heating still definitely not working despite my best efforts - I started filling buckets and my massive 80 litre tub with warm water - that I heated myself using my stove, a kettle and the microwave. I got fan heaters heating the room up, and started general prep.

In total I heated 364 litres of water this way and it took four hours. Yes, you read that right - three hundred and sixty four litres.

Twenty six buckets worth, at fourteen litres a go. Some was for getting clean and beautified pre-session, some was for storing to clean off with afterwards, and some to turn into gunge, custard, porridge and cake batter for the session itself, plus the massive tub just full of water for some extra head dunking. We also used four huge gateaux and a washing up bowl full of shaving foam, some extra cartons of custard, plus jam and lemon curd.

My visitor took it all in his stride and embraced the situation and the effort I had gone to, and still saw through the whole 2 hour session, stopping in the middle to top up the hot water, we kept warm with no problem and cleaning off was fine.

It's amazing how clean you can get with even just one bucket of water. The trick is partly to lather up with shampoo and shower gel while still messy, and the rest of it is having someone there to tip jugs of it over you and point out any messy bits you are missing, and to target the water to any of those missed bits. Quite fun really and amazingly effective, often with enough left at the end to tip a load of for a final rinse off.

It was worth all the effort - so much so that I'm getting messy yet again tonight, even though I'm in the same heatingless situation! The hot water production line is about to begin again...

I'd like to say a big thanks to my sploshy visitor yesterday, and definitely no thanks to local plumbers so far.

Here's to more fun and wam in the face of adversity

Candy xx