Welcome home darling, now I have a little job for you...

As has been mentioned many times before, winter in Canada is to say the least exceptional. In Europe when it's cold you have to scrape your windscreen and use de-icer which is mildly irritating.

In Canada when it's cold you have to plug your car in. That's right, you plug it in, right into the mains power socket outside your house, otherwise you aint going anywhere...

Now here's a confession, back in November we noticed that last year's extension lead (neatly suspended 6ft above the ground on our washing line) had given up the ghost. Jim was off to Kenya for 6 weeks and he thought he could just buy any old random replacement leads (not worrying about whether they fitted) and leave me here to worry about it later.

I thought, "He's gone to Kenya, but it never gets that cold to January, so I'll sit this one out and he can deal with it when he gets back..."

Both of us very nearly got away with it.

But as you know, last weekend it got very cold, very quickly and the car wasn't plugged in and I discovered too late that the leads I'd been left didn't reach the drive. I could go in to detail here about how, in a last ditch attempt to save my transport I spent two hours running outside to hook up one bit of power cable and then running back inside to restore feeling to my hands and then repeating the process several times before eventually giving up entirely, but I think you get the idea.

So Jim came home last night and the car hadn't moved for a week, the weather wasn't going to get any warmer and typically the only store within walking distance had sold out of power cables. Nice.

The only solution was to borrow the work car (which was plugged in) to drive it to town to buy the cables, so we could defrost our own car overnight. So far so good and we did just that this afternoon and returned with the goods breathing a sigh of relief that we'd managed to get away with it all.

That was until we realised we'd bought the only external power cables in the whole town that were two pin, not three pin and the car as you may have guessed is three pin.

Never mind, apparently AMA (the Canadian equivalent of RAC) will come out to your house and "power up" your car so you can start it again, won't tomorrow morning be fun?

On a final more positive note, I'll leave you with a photo of some last minute Christmas presents I've knocked up. Is there ever an occasion when a personalised bag isn't the perfect gift?