We walked out into the cold, wet parking lot of the Croydon IKEA this evening to find our car window smashed and our satellite navigation system gone. The IKEA staff were rather unmoved; they did eventually muster up a dustpan and make a cursory stab at getting some of the broken glass out of our car, but that was as far as they were prepared to be involved.

It is all such a nuisance - the filing of the police report, the insurance claim for the glass, the insurance claim for the sat nav - which we hope will be covered by our household insurance, but which might not be ...

Oh well. So it goes. This may stop us being so pathetically dependent on the sat nav system - we will actually have to read the street signs! Or - gasp - buy a map!

So the IKEA thing was annoying, and then, when we got home, we realised that the washing machine wasn't draining. So we performed some rather messy open-pipe surgery on it, removed a startlingly large amount of seriously nasty goopy stuff, and are now hoping that it is going to manage its current load of washing, because if it doesn't, none of us will have clean underwear tomorrow.

On the plus side, our dishwasher still fills us with an unreasonable amount of joy. And there are crocuses coming up in our garden.