Why I feel a bit weary

The dishwasher chap came back. Good news? Well... .

But first, Zumba. In my pursuit of doing something rather than footering around during my retirement, I decided to add Zumba to piano lessons. I had an idea that I might be equally unskilled in both areas. I was right.

My friend Anne has been doing Zumba for a few months so I went along to her class today. (I had considered the one down the road but peeked in and saw lots of toned 30-year-olds in Lycra. No.) Anne's class is full of pensioners - much more suitable. It was quite fun and not as exhausting as I thought - or at least it wasn't till a couple of hours afterwards, when I suddenly wanted to lie down.

The teacher is a very nice, cheery girl: lean and muscled and an excellent advert for Zumba, though I imagine she Zumbs more than just the one hour a week. As Anne says, it's not just your body that gets a workout but your brain, as you try to follow the things the teacher is doing with her arms and legs. Anne hopes that it'll stave off dementia and make us more alert, though judging by the performance of the ladies who've been doing it for a while, I wouldn't put any money on this. The trouble is that the things that the teacher does with her arms and legs are a) moderately complicated, b) confusingly different from each other and c) quite fast. And then each sequence lasts only a maximum of four bars of music before it changes to something else, which means that you no sooner get the hang of something than it's time to do something else.

I kept getting the giggles at what we must have looked at to the teacher as she danced slenderly away at the front and watched twenty substantial ladies lumbering in various directions in the attempt to copy her movements. "Very good! Well done!" she kept calling out. Positive reinforcement. But lies.

Then I went home to the dishwasher chap, who reluctantly returned after my third phone call. He is not a cheerful man. Nor an optimistic one. To do him justice, he did once more unscrew the front, though his gusty sighs didn't inspire confidence. Nor did the way he shook his head and uttered the words, "Piece - of - junk!" as he gazed into the innards. He put it back together. It still wouldn't switch on. He said various things which don't belong on my ladylike blog. He took it apart again and put it together once more. It switched on!

"Ah," I said, "well done! You've worked your magic." (Positive reinforcement, you know.) He snorted. "Dinnae even ken whit I done." (ie "I don't even know what I did.") Hmm.

He hung around a bit. "I cannae switch it off now." Well, it's always been like that - once it's on, you can pause it but you can't switch it off till it's finished its cycle. This has never bothered us too much. He sighed deeply. "Does it always make that HMMMMMMM noise?" I thought it did. To be honest, I don't spend much time listening to my dishwasher. "It shouldnae make that noise," he mourned. He gathered up his tools and departed, clearly unconfident. "Let me ken if that disnae dae it," ("Let me know if that doesn't do it") he said as he walked towards his van.

Every line in his frown made it quite clear that he never wanted to see me, my dishwasher, any piece of kitchen equipment or probably any human being ever again.

Well, it did work, if by "work" you mean going through a cycle (granted, with no dishes in it, but I didn't have any dirty dishes at the time). But once the cycle had finished, it wouldn't switch off without our unplugging it at the wall, which involves pulling it out from under the worksurface.

Big. Sigh. I know there are people in the world who don't have dishwashers, indeed who don't have dishes or food to put on them, but, you know. Umm.

I post the picture to warn you off this particular model of dishwasher. I'd better not tell you the gloomy chap's name. He did his best. I think. But now what?