Our house was due a routine inspection from the letting agency today. We therefore had to clean the place, ensuring it was all shipshape; taking special care to hide the crack pipes, needles and Satanic worshipping statues.

The house is relativly tidy anyway, so it wasn’t a huge job, although weeding the garden was a battle in itself – those weeds just won’t die, no matter how much weed killer you pour onto them. I am sure that they are some form of alien life form.

The biggest drama of the house blitz came when attempting to clean the extractor fan cover above the oven. After removing it and cleaning it in the washing up bowl, Claire tried to reattach it to the fan.

I was in the other room at the time, when I heard her scream. Thinking she had seriously injured herself and being a caring, responsible husband-to-be, I came rushing into the kitchen. It was then she broke the news to me. She wasn’t hurt. Instead, she had accidentally dropped the cover down the back of the oven. Marvellous. There was a gaping great hole above the hob and we had a house inspection in the morning.

While Claire panicked, I tried to think of a way of moving the incredibly heavy oven and retrieving the cover, without panicking myself. It was difficult. Somehow I managed to move the oven. This was either my summoning super human strength from somewhere, or simply grabbing a part of the oven which let me pull it forward easily. I’ll be honest, I think it was the latter. While I held oven in midair (a slight exaggeration), Claire manage to rescue the cover, by climbing on the work surface and using a pair of kitchen scissors as a makeshift claw to grip it.

While all this was going on, I was slightly alarmed. Not due to the real danger that the oven may fall forward and kill me, or that the gas pipe would fall out the back. No, my concern was of a huge spider named Dave living underneath the oven, which would run out onto the kitchen floor, after having its home disturbed. It would no doubt do something horrible, like run across my foot.

There was no spider, the oven didn’t crush me and the pipe didn’t fall out, causing a gas leak. We even managed to reattach the extractor cover. A drama out of nothing.