An early start, but not a good one
So 
stripey_cat and I both got up early this morning to be ready for the arrival of our cooker from John Lewis, accompanied by fitting team. The fitters duly arrived pretty much on the dot of 7am, took one look at the cooker's spot in the kitchen and said "we can't fit it there, it isn't safe". If we hadn't been fooled by the previous owners having had a gas cooker in the same spot (presumably installed before the regulations were tightened), we might have reached that conclusion ourselves. The presence of a plug socket intruding into the space above the cooker, the unprotected plastic wiring run down the wall, the bare chipboard immediately behind, the fact that the gas point isn't secured properly, and went sproing when the fitter poked it...
So they've taken our lovely new cooker away again, and we're stuck with microwave and kettle for the indefinite future while we find someone to refit half the kitchen for us. Which is definitely a "first-world problems" sort of problem, but it's a problem we'd rather thought would be ending today, not continuing towards (and perhaps beyond) Christmas.
[ETA: and a quick look at the weather forecast suggests today will be grey, miserable, and very wet, with a side-order of low cloud and ongoing heavy rain.]
[ETA2: then I moved on to the news, and the events in Paris really put our very minor problems in perspective.]
stripey_cat and I both got up early this morning to be ready for the arrival of our cooker from John Lewis, accompanied by fitting team. The fitters duly arrived pretty much on the dot of 7am, took one look at the cooker's spot in the kitchen and said "we can't fit it there, it isn't safe". If we hadn't been fooled by the previous owners having had a gas cooker in the same spot (presumably installed before the regulations were tightened), we might have reached that conclusion ourselves. The presence of a plug socket intruding into the space above the cooker, the unprotected plastic wiring run down the wall, the bare chipboard immediately behind, the fact that the gas point isn't secured properly, and went sproing when the fitter poked it...
So they've taken our lovely new cooker away again, and we're stuck with microwave and kettle for the indefinite future while we find someone to refit half the kitchen for us. Which is definitely a "first-world problems" sort of problem, but it's a problem we'd rather thought would be ending today, not continuing towards (and perhaps beyond) Christmas.
[ETA: and a quick look at the weather forecast suggests today will be grey, miserable, and very wet, with a side-order of low cloud and ongoing heavy rain.]
[ETA2: then I moved on to the news, and the events in Paris really put our very minor problems in perspective.]