[julie_m]

Such a shame.

I hope he has a long and pleasant retirement, but general appliance repairs seems to be a dying trade. Everything is made to be disposable; and even if you can get the spares, they invariably hardly cost much less than replacing the entire appliance -- and of course you run the risk of another part failing sometime soon in future.

Considering that my initial ambition in life was to be a New Age Traveller, and my way of making money would have been by repairing and reselling found, discarded appliances, I think I actually got slightly lucky in failing my driving test and not getting the live-in vehicle on which I had been promised first refusal .....

Of course all this will have to change one day, when we start running out of raw materials and/or places to dig holes in the ground to put stuff in .....