A grey and grisly, mizzly start to the day today. Lummy, any more of this and I will just refer you to the previous day. Actually, today was very similar indeed to yesterday including the mist in the afternoon. What today had that was largely missing from yesterday was an abundance of rain.

The very kind people at the forecasting office were so very keen that we should know it was going to rain they issued a rain alert. In the olden days, we used to call this a forecast. I cannot deny that on this occasion their forecast, or alert if you prefer, was spot on. I should not take the Mickey too much. In the old days if they forecast rain we used to go out with an umbrella; now we move everything to the first floor. Well, some of us do.

It was not raining when I took the little girl out first thing. For the second day in a row, I had to hurry along as I was meeting someone at nine o’clock. Today it was the fabricator who I wanted to ask to make some more robust brackets for our outside floodlights. Just as a small aside, you may think that ‘outside’ in front of floodlights was somewhat superfluous. Well, it is not. You may recall, dear reader, that a few years ago having struggled with finding the right bulbs for our bright uplighters, I eventually resorted to installing floodlights in them. The mark two versions of these are brilliantly successful.

Sorry, I digress. Now, where was I? Ah yes, waiting for Dan, Dan the fabricator man to peruse our new floodlights for the front of the shop and the later of the old ones for the side instead of our step lights. He told me that he would be there at nine o’clock but did not arrive until ten o’clock. In his defence, he did say that he would telephone me when he was on his way so that I was not waiting around for him. It was me who took him at his word about the time and went down to wait.

Rather that sit around doing nothing, I thought that I would have a little look at the work required to replace the store room strobing light. This, before I knew it, was turning into removing the old light because that would only take a minute and set me up nicely to putting the cable in place later followed by the new light later still. 

The only problem with this is that it took rather longer and more effort removing the old light than I anticipated. I had to unwire each end from the terminal blocks and, I only discovered after ripping the light from its brackets, that I should have removed each end of the lights so that it would glide effortlessly out of those brackets without all that ripping. It did not matter too much as there was no collateral damage and the whole unit and the brackets were going in the skip that we rather conveniently had hired just across the road.

Of course, now that I had opened the junction boxes and unwired the old light, I may as well wire in the new cable to link one junction box to the next. If I did not do that then we would only have the one light in the store room until I did wire it in. Surely, that would only take a minute anyway as the length of cable that I had guessed at in the wholesaler turned out to be pretty much precisely the length required. 

The only gristle in this this particular oatcake was that the lights in the store room are on the ceiling. For the avoidance of doubt, dear reader, this puts them just about in reach of a six feet tall grumpy shopkeeper standing on the second step of a stepladder. The second step on a stepladder for this particular six feet high grumpy shopkeeper is the outer limit of highness that this particular grumpy shopkeeper is willing to go while, in the common vernacular, pushing the envelope and, most importantly, hanging onto something solid. 

It should be noted, then, that to strip cables and insert wires into terminal blocks and screw them tight, unless one if exceptionally dextrous, which this particular six feet tall grumpy shopkeeper is far from being, requires the use of two hands. You will therefore have worked out, dear reader, the conflict that arose at this juncture, standing on the second step while holding onto something solid and using two hands to wire the terminal blocks. Something had to give.

The presence of four burly workpeople not a couple of feet above my elevated head who not only could probably climb higher on a stepladder than I could but could also do it without gripping with whitened knuckles the nearest solid object did not escape me. I dismissed asking them for help quite rapidly; we need our roof finished and they are pressing on very quickly. We have our electrician coming at the end of next week, but I had already removed the old light, largely single handed, leaving just one light in the corner, which was probably not good enough for a week worth of store room visits.

I cannot say what spurred me on. It was too early for an abundance of alcohol that would almost certainly have solved the going up a ladder crisis but might have introduced a dexterity issue. Instead, I clenched my resolve, braced my legs against some part of the stepladder that I was not going to look down to identify and pressed on regardless. It left me a puddle of quaking jelly but had the wiring job done. Had it been at ground level, it would have taken half an hour all told but had me quivering for more than an hour instead.

During the final stages of the wiring in of the new cable it became very clear that it would have been ridiculous to omit installing the new light at the same time. I was turning the final screw in the final terminal block when the fabricator man called to say he was on his way down the hill. All that remained after he left with samples of the brackets that required replicating, was to replace the covers of the junction boxes to finish the job.

We now have three brightly illuminated LED batten lights on the store room ceiling and a smug but broken grumpy shopkeeper gazing up at them. It is not the prettiest job ever done, as mentioned, cable clips just drop out of our ceiling, but it is functional and in the store room, no one can see us screaming, as it were.

The whole episode had worked out rather well. It was not raining when I headed down the slope to the shop. A short while into starting the lights, I looked out of the door and noted that it was teeming down. It was partly this that drove me to continue to finish the lighting job as I had failed to bring a rain jacket with me. By this time our man was half an hour late and having waited half an hour, I may as well wait until he arrived or I had finished the job, whichever came first. And, I should note, all this before breakfast.

I managed to get a run out with ABH before the rain started again. We headed for the Harbour beach soon after I had finished that breakfast I had waited for. We were potentially fortunate that there was another dog waiting at the tide line for its family who were cold water swimming in bathing suits, bless them. ABH made a semi-cautious approach and when the dog saw her, it chased her, which was the object of ABH’s exercise. It became clear quite quickly that the object of the other dog’s exercise was to chase ABH off, although not viciously, for which we must be thankful.

To ABH this did not matter at all. Another dog was chasing her; the purpose was immaterial. Obviously, with such a dichotomy of views, it was not going to last and, indeed, did not. ABH, though, had achieved her goal, albeit for a limited period and was good enough to come away when I determined what was going on and before it all came to grief.

We seemed reprise the situation shortly afterwards when a similar sized dog tore down the western slip to the tide line. Its family were following on more slowly. It mattered not a jot that the new dog was completely oblivious to ABH’s presence, the fact that it was running back up the beach to the approaching family was, in her mind, that dog chasing her. She repeated this several times and even when the dog launched into the sea, ABH paddled a bit and waited for it to come out.

When all the dogs had gone, ABH ran around the beach by herself for a while before collapsing in a heap at the bottom of the main slipway. She looked so crestfallen that her pretend friends had all gone home. I did feel sorry for her; Janey no mates.

Feeling sorry for her – perhaps I had forgotten that she had me up at half past three o’clock in the morning. It was almost certainly this that had me collapsing in a heap of my own on a chair in the living room when we got back. I confess that my short zizz did inadvertently metamorphosise into a rather longer than intended zizz from which I emerged a new, fresher and wider awake grumpy shopkeeper. 

Unfortunately, I had broken out of my chrysalis just at the time ABH might require another run around the block and just at the time that the proper rain of the day had arrived. The Missus had gone to the shop en-route to our neighbour who had been a brae bit poorly over the last few weeks. She was taking bread pudding made by her own fair hand a couple of days before, which would either fortify him or sink him without trace. As I went past the shop with the rain coming down in a curtain from our careful designed scaffolding, she was still in there as Hawkeye ABH also spotted. We had little choice but to detour and ended up walking around to the neighbour together.

We arrived home twenty minutes later, our respective full metal jacket waterproofs soaked. They were still wet on the outside when I wore them again just before tea when we headed for the Harbour beach again in the apparent dusk that had come early. It was unsurprisingly deserted but at least the rain had eased off. The downpour had carved deep gorges in the sand to the east of the slipway and had formed a large delta on the sand a little further west. 

The mist in the form of low cloud had either descended to just below the level of Mayon Cliff shrouding the old hotel and houses of Maria’s Lane. It left the bay relatively clear and the lower reaches of the cliffs opposite and the air was still and temperate. We did not tarry long.

I had intended to get to work on the slippy cobbles alongside the Lifeboat station using the station’s pressure washer when we attended Lifeboat training in the evening, but it was cancelled at the last minute. Instead, I did nothing at the house until it became apparent that ABH was getting a little bored and restless, so I decided a quick run around the block was in order. 

I might have reconsidered that and let her sort herself out had I realised that it was raining quite so hard again. It was too late by that time, and we arrived back just as wet as we had been earlier. Nevertheless, it did the trick and we ended the evening in relative peace. Over the last few months we have not often had all day poor weather and we have had possibly less than our fair share of rain. We are, of course, very grateful – until the next hosepipe ban.