The experts came, saw, were defeated. A superior expert arrived on April Fool's Day, made a diagnosis and retired declaring that the necessary parts should not be long in arriving.

A week may well be a long time in politics but it's even longer in a house with broken central heating. Fortunately I have some alternatives to fall back on but I am still boiling kettles to provide hot water for cleaning pots and pans, dishwashers being notoriously ineffective in that respect.

But the weather is brightening up and life in the stair will also brighten up if the underpants tastelessly draped on a flat's door handle last week constitute the lift lunatic's dying flourish. Not that he's any closer to death than the rest of us as far as I know but I spotted a note on the dashboard of a parked car declaring the driver to be a new resident of the flat that I suspect to be the litter lunatic's lair. The note begged indulgence for not yet having a parking permit but failed to melt the heart of officialdom (what does?) for a ticket had been clapped onto the windscreen. Normally I would be sympathetic but it seems that having lost a lift lunatic (I fervently hope) we have gained a car park lunatic for he was straddled across three spaces at a little less than 90 degrees to the normal direction of parking.

But people do the strangest things. How to explain for example why a man in black tights and a wig standing facing a group of people should declare "Sunbeds Regulations Act 2010" to be followed by a similarly clad chap who had his back to the audience spinning round to face them with the words "La reine le veult".

Easy you say; all part of the prorogation ceremony that took place in the Lords the other day. Now I've seen the state opening of Parliament with Black Rod having the door symbolically slammed in his face before being admitted to the Commons to summon the lower orders to the house of peers to listen to the Queen's insipid delivery of a string of miracles the government is going to achieve in the next session but I didn't realise that there was an equivalent at the end.

Black Rod did the business as before but this time no Queen. Another of those chaps in wigs, this one wearing a cloak instead of tights, read a letter from HM saying how sorry she was that she was detained by pressing business back at base and had entrusted the assenting to divers acts and the proroguing of Parliament in this the 57th year of her reign to some loyal and well beloved chaps and chapesses who she was sure would make a good job of it.

The five said chaps and chapesses sat below the woolsack dressed in red robes and comic hats and one of them read out a speech in identically insipid tones to HM listing the miracles that the government had achieved during the session. I expect a number of the audience might not have counted all these achievements as miracles, or even as achievements but there was no heckling.

This was followed by the two man GB wigtight team reading out the names of acts and assuring us that the Queen veulted them. There was a speciality turn from the veulter at the start when in a long stream of Norman French the Queen remercied her loyaux and ben aimed sujets for having provided her with enough pocket money.

The whole thing was awfully polite and at various points the two red-robed chaps did some synchronised doffing. The ladies did not participate. Their funny hats were a different shape not well adapted to doffing but I expect that in time feminist pressure will succeed in opening up synchronised funny hat doffing to female competitors.

The final event in the Lords was the naming of the day that they should all meet again. Now we all know that there is going to be an election on May 6th and that the new parliament will assemble on May 18th but because this ceremony is taking place a couple of days before parliament is officially dissolved HM, in the person of her red-robed well beloveds chose April 20th as their next date. Let's hope they all understood this mad fiction.

After that the commoners trooped back to their little chamber and the Speaker read out the whole list of bills to which we had heard the Queen's proxy graciously assenting not fifteen minutes earlier. This presumably for the benefit of those members who had not been able to squeeze into a space within hearing distance in the Lords since they don't actually get to sit down on the red benches or even get very far into the chamber. Emails no doubt will go out to the several hundred MPs who, like the PM, weren't there at all.

How reassuring to see democracy in action. Had Sadaam seen it he would no doubt have declared this to be the mother of all parliaments.