Well, I expected to have to deal with some sort of homeowner's crisis at some point during my ownership of this house, but I hadn't really expected it to be quite this prompt.

It appears that all the electrical sockets downstairs stopped working yesterday evening, while I was out at a party. It further appears that this has nothing to do with the fusebox – none of the switches had tripped, and taking out the fuse for the defunct circuit and experimentally using it to power a working circuit proves that the fuse itself is fine.

Helpfully, the power came back on around the time I got home, and then went off again shortly afterwards, which caused a number of strange beeping noises as things started up again. I assumed this was the aftermath of a brief power cut and that everything would sort itself out by morning, and went to bed. But this morning it appears I was overoptimistic.

By means of long chains of my absurd surplus of mains splitters, I've managed to emergency-reactivate the fridge, freezer and network infrastructure using an upstairs power socket, but this is clearly untenable in even the medium term. So it looks as if I need an electrician, and ideally an emergency one who can come out today. Any readers of this got a recommendation?

Well, the emergency electrician has been and gone; the problem isn't fixed, but now we at least know what it is. Apparently the neutral wire in the ring main is no longer connected to the fuse box. Probably tomorrow someone will come back and run a new piece of wire to solve this.

‘Exciting,’ said Mum on the phone just now. Exciting is hardly the word I would choose.