I don’t want to bang on about health, but this I found quite amusing.

As a youth, one of the first Acts I planned on my elevation to the throne was to ban everyone over the age of 40 from discussing their health except with health professionals. I stick to that ukase faithfully; now all my friends are health professionals.

For the past two weeks I’ve been enduring bouts of giddiness. Standing up quickly, I nearly fall over. Rolling over in bed, I get violent pillow spin (no, it’s NOT the drink). I have to wait a few moments before getting up. At the Budapest exhibition at the RA yesterday I tilted my head to read a label on the back of a sculpture and carried on going down to the floor.

This morning I went to see the doctor about it. “Is it the drink?” she asked. She diagnosed it as inner ear problem; there’s some troublesome liquid inside which affects my balance. She prescribed some little tablets which I have to stick between my gum and lip and let dissolve. They’re called BUCCASTEM 3MG TABLETS.

Being a careful soul, I read the instructions which came with my anti-giddiness tablets carefully. They tell me:

“Side effects that may occur with Buccastem 3mg tablets are dizziness.”

I have experienced two movie moments where the audience reaction has been so startling that I can’t think of the movie without first remembering the moment.

Immediately after the big shock in the 1967 Audrey Hepburn film “Wait Until Dark” the lights seemed to go up in the cinema. It wasn’t; it was a thousand cigarettes being lit simultaneously to recover from the shock. An illuminating experience.

The other was in “Sunday Bloody Sunday” when Glenda Jackson, short of time having overslept, fills her mug and tea bag from the hot tap in the sink. The entire theatre went “BLEAGH!”

I was reminded of that scene when I saw an ad for a product called the Quooker. It’s an additional hot tap, delivering instant boiling water.

After overcoming my initial revulsion, I read that it can save up to 55% of the cost of boiling a kettle.

Now saving money has an atavistic appeal for me (there’s some Cardi in my Welsh ancestry) so I looked further into this. It costs about a penny to boil 1.5 pints of water, so if the Quooker saves half that (always remember that “up to” actually means “less than”) that’s 0.5p I’ll have saved every time I boil a kettle.

This is something I do four times a day. That would be 2p saved per day. And as the only possible Quooker for me is the one with the Heritage tap in a brass finish and the high capacity tank, a mere bauble for £1,305, I’ll have saved enough to cover the cost in only 1,787 years.

But hey — it might just be worth it, to see people’s faces when I hand them a mug of instant after filling it up from the hot tap.

You may remember from this earlier blog that I stormed out of my local Citroën main dealer when they proposed a fee of £235.00 for changing a headlamp bulb.

Well, I showed ‘em.

I bought two Xenon D2R bulbs off eBay for £17.95 and took the car to a little garage down the road.

Result? A bill for £397.15.

It could have been more.

The mechanic said I could wait while he changed the bulb. He reckoned 10 minutes, and it would cost £20.

As I had seen the process in this step by step photo guide on an Australian website and it involved taking the front bumper off, I declined and said I’d pick the car up later.

The garage rang later that afternoon. “We changed the bulbs but he no work. Mebbe wiring loom, we check fuse OK. We get lecrician man to check Thursday.”

The electrician man duly checked on Thursday for a nominal £23, and said that the headlamp itself had corroded, and needed to be replaced.

A massive old corroded headlamp from a Citroën C5

A new headlamp for a Citroën C5?  Certainly sair, that’ll be £701.65 from Citroën UK, please sair. Seven hundred and one pounds sixty five pence. That’s $1,080.96. That’s €854.07. For one headlamp? That’s more than the car’s worth.

How about one from a breakers’ yard, I wondered. They tracked one down very speedily, at a bargain price of £150.

So three hours labour, plus the parts, plus the lecrician man, plus the VAT (and I dare not count the time) came to £415.10.

To change one headlamp bulb. There’s progress for you.