You know, if we’d stayed in Romania, I think I really could’ve gotten into this ‘electricity’ business. They had it down in the town, of course, even if it was a small, rural place and they were somewhat behind the rest of the world, but we never got around to it in the castle. It was all torches and fireplaces and not all that many of those, if I’m honest. We like the cold and our family has excellent night vision, so mostly we just lit the fires when we had visitors.
Now we’ve had the residential electrician companies come breezing through and it’s all action stations on our usage of power. Had to get the whole place rewired, since it was apparently quite old-fashioned and a bit precarious (not that we would’ve noticed the difference), and now we have electric gates so I don’t have to hire someone full-time to stand at the gate and let down the drawbridges when we return from our visits. We do also have electric security lights, and lights in general down the corridors for guests to find their way, and I finally succumbed and got some heating for the guest bedrooms and the parlour, where our visitors will be socialising. Most of the castle-mansion is strictly off-limits to visitors because of the dark secrets that lie within, so I don’t see any real reason for those to be rewired, or otherwise given the touch of a qualified electrician.
Not that paying electrical bills is really going to break the bank for us, but over my life I’ve come to realise that saving every penny really does add up in the end. Fortunately none of our guests tend to stay for very long, and when we go out with friends, it’s usually far away from home, like when we went boating with the Clancy family.
They actually recommended a stellar Cheltenham electrician who’d work post-haste, which was quite wonderful. Speed really is of the essence for workmen and women in our home. It stops things from getting…messy.
-Ivanov