journal of a writing man

Sunday June 10, 2007

I’m glad it waited to happen until Graham got home this evening. I’d done dinner and was doing the fiddly tidy-up jobs that follow on. Graham had gone up to deal with some more of the vast backlog of spam that’d built up on his computer. Dolly was sitting in the open doorway, looking out at the night.

I finished up by washing my hands, standing dreamily at the kitchen sink and enjoying the wholesome smell of carbolic soap, turned the tap off and…

It’d be good to be able to say that the offending piece of plumbing uselessness gave off some amusing sound as it died. It didn’t, though. Just sat there, not turning off the water. I  twiddled the knob back, and I twiddled the knob forth. All to no avail. If anything, the flow of water increased.

Graham was not pleased. No pleased at all.

It’s perfectly reasonable for a chap to require a little pause at the end of his working weekend before starting in on the list of DIY jobs he’s been putting together. But there you go. When things go wrong they seldom choose the right time.

Tomorrow we have to go out early and buy ourselves a new monobloc tap for the kitchen sink. It seems that modern taps don’t have nice old-fashioned washers you can replace anymore. Instead, you have to either replace the whole of the inner workings–an unlikely outcome when the tap’s three years old and the manufacturer went out of business two years back–or replace the whole tap unit.

The extent of the emergency came to the fore shortly after Graham had determined the tap had shuffled off the plumbing coil and he’d blocked the outlet and was ready to restore the water supply to the house.

“This useless tap doesn’t have an isolating valve,” he said, along with a lot of words I don’t want to repeat in public and a few I don’t know how to spell.

“What does that mean?”

“It means we have no water to the house until we can fix the tap.”

“Oh. None?”

“None.”

“Not even for a shower?”

“Nope.”

“Teeth?”

“We’ll have to use bottled water.”

“Flushing the loo?”

“Just as well we’ve got three loos. Let’s hope they’ll tide us over or it’s going to get rather smelly round here.”

“Ah well. We’ll survive.”

“I’m glad you didn’t trot out one of your comforting little platitudes there.”

“Don’t worry. I know when to leave the platitudes out.”

“Good. Bedtime, then? We got stuff to do first thing in the morning.”