A quiet day for me with multiple yummy salt water mouthwashes. My jaw is a bit sore as expected but I’ve been taking paracetemol which is holding any real pain completely at bay.

Bob spent the day installing the last two pool terrace lights. These two were tricky because one of them was in a completely new spot ie not over a place where there was a previous lamp and the other also needed some extra work and he had to put the cable through a piece of conduit.

I rang a couple of marble polishers to get them to come up and look at our floors. The primary issue is that there is a large etched mark on the kitchen floor where some guests last year left a black sack full of lemon juice which leaked….. But I guess all of the ground floor rooms could use a polishing. I rang the first chap and he came up and said he could not guarantee he’d be able to remove the mark. This was not unexpected to be honest. He said he thought he could improve it, but probably not make it disappear. He wanted £480 to polish all the downstairs – about £4 per square metre. Ulp! This was a lot more than expected. To be honest, if he can’t get rid of the mark, I might as well clean and polish the floors myself.

I have another recommended chap and I have rung him and he’s coming up tomorrow to have a look. Maybe he will be cheaper. Or maybe I should just go with having the kitchen floor done.

The swimming pool light saga is ongoing. I rang Pools R Us in Alsancak and said to the nice woman owner that we felt someone needed to come and look at the pool and the existing lights to work out a. which sort of light is required and b. the necessary wattage. She thinks that we need 35w LED lights of the sort that fit into the existing “housings”. And she came up with the brilliant suggestion that she would send her guys up in the afternoon to fit one lamp. We could then observe it overnight and if it was no good, they’d come and take it away, no quibble tomorrow.

We also had a visit from the PoolTec fitter who looked at the lights and agreed with what the Pools R Us woman recommended.

The border between the TRNC and the ROC opened at all points in both directions today. To cross you need a PCR test in English taken within the last 7 days. There were queues both ways apparently this morning. LIDL and IKEA must be inundated!!! Although to be honest, it’s so cheap in the north with the TL being so low, in comparison with the eurozone south that I doubt people are doing that. Certainly GCs are queueing to buy petrol in the north.

The Pools R Us guys came up and fitted the first u/w light at about 230. The poor man had to get into the pool. He was very thin and shivered a bit!!!! Anyway, as soon as we saw it, we knew it was right, so I rang the owner and said “let’s go ahead with 2 lights”. I thought it would save him getting wet again. But…. foiled…. he didn’t have a second light on the van. So he went away and came back about 430. This time the cable on the existing light didn’t quite clear the surface of the water, so he had to lower the pool. By some strange sorcery (he created a vacuum by sucking on a massive hose and also opened the non return valve to the ballast tank), he got enough out of the main pool and into the ballast tank to be able to have the wiring above the surface of the water while he worked. He fitted on the second light and then put it on…. yikes….. it was really, really faint compared to the first one….. something was wrong. They run off the same transformer so it wasn’t that. Phone calls, photos… bit of back and forth between him and base camp and then he shot off to get another light.

I made a one pot chicken wonder tonight. Chicken, onion, garlic, green beans (so divine here), red lentils, chick peas, 2 potatoes, stock…. seriously yummy.

The guy came back and tried two more lights. Both of them were much fainter than the first one. The shop owner came up and they ran tests. There was a fault on the cable between the two lights. Yikes. The only solution is to lower the pool to below the cable level in the light and replace it. So we have begun that process. The ballast tank is already full so the only totally non wasteful thing to do is to keep running the watering lines in the garden and refilling the garden tank from the pool until the level is low enough…. sigh….

On a positive note: Bob’s terrace lighting is all working so well and looks fab. I was going to take a photo but now I think it will wait till the pool lights go on too. And Daisy’s return flight to the UK via Larnaca with BA is booked and paid for.