My life in France

I noticed that the heating water pressure was a bit low, so decided to top it up. As I open the valve I knew something was amiss as nothing happened. The water pipes had frozen up. So what do you when this happens?, you get out your plumbers blow torch out, select the widest nozzle and gently heat the pipe up. This worked fine for all of 3 seconds. At the 4th second the pipe decided it would burst. And burst it did, directly at me. Unfortunately it was -6 outside and the mains water stop tap is down by the gate. I didn't realise ice could form that quickly on your face, hair & clothes. So I've had the day off work to fix the pipes (& defrost my face). Big mistake, as by lunch the pipes were fixed and I decided it would be a good idea to take the boiler apart whilst it's switched off and vacuum out the soot. I had just turned the vacuum cleaner off when I thought I could smell burning. Must be the chimney as the fire in the house was alight. I had just finished putting the boiler back together, when I realised the burning was coming from inside the boiler room. As it turns out the soot hadn't cooled down as much as I thought it had & the burning smell was coming from the vacuum cleaner full of hot soot. But on the bright side, running around with a burning vacuum cleaner did warm me up a bit....