Then Judith, my Judy, tried the bath. To her joy there was instant hot water, as the immersion heater had been switched on moments after entry. She declared the bath a success, but only after spending 45 minutes soaking and snoozing in it.
Baths took me 5 minutes, so I grew alarmed after 20 minutes and slid open the bathroom door. She acidly informed her new husband that baths never took less than half an hour.
Next day there was a list of jobs to do but we needed more tools than were actually to hand in a ( former ) bachelor flat. Holding hands, we walked up Bell’s Brae, the steep cobbled hill out of the Dean Village and into the prosperous West End of the city. Greys on George Street, Edinburgh’s most prestigious shopping Street was a large iron monger. Like all the shops on proud George Street they stocked goods of the highest order while it’s prices were uniformly reasonable. They stocked almost everything on our list.
We could not wait 2 days for our goods to be delivered by their van so Judy and I improvised out of a wooden step ladder a stretcher on to which we loaded brushes, mops, pails, cleaning things, gallon cans of paint, paint brushes and of course toilet paper for the WC. Like 2 ambulance men, we carried our laden stretcher home to the Dean Village; once there we had to confront the awful fact that Judy couldn’t cook.