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It has been frustrating, to say the least, how nearly everything we’ve had done up in our house has gone wrong (sometimes dangerously so). We had a brand new boiler that has broken down three times and tried to kill us twice, the new dishwasher doesn’t work properly and hasn’t been fixed by two engineer visits and today our new cooker shot out a blue spark and made a pop and knocked out all the electricity in the kitchen (even though we had the whole house rewired). For a while I couldn’t work out how to get the electricity working again and faced the prospect of having to eat everything in the freezer, but my father-in-law flicked a switch that I had thought wouldn’t flick and we had power again. The new cooker, however, is not getting up to the right temperature.
I am sure it will all get sorted - all these things are still under warranty. It’s just incredibly aggravating and dispiriting. And yes, first world problems, right? But that’s where I live. I know it's hard to elicit any sympathy as all of this comes from the good fortune of being able to afford to live in our place and pay people to do stuff (however incompetenlty) for us.
But with gas and electricity fucking up there is the constant fear of seeping or explosive death. And even without that my time is already over-consumed by family and work, so it’s inconvenient to lose more to faulty appliances that you’ve bought brand new and expected to save you time.
And (believe it or not) I hate to complain or get angry with the people responsible, so if, as today, I fire off an angryish email I then feel guilty about it all day. Especially if I manage to turn on the electricity in the time between sending and them responding.
The elephant in the room with all this is my own technical hopelessness. If only I were competent at DIY or flicking switches then I might be able to solve all these issues myself. It points up my own inadequacies.
But today at least there was one victory of self-diagnosis and solution to a problem. I’d noticed that the paint in the corner of the kitchen ceiling was peeling a bit. I had assumed there was a hole in the covering on the flat roof and had had someone over who is going to repair all our roof issues in the second wave of renovations this year. He said he’d locate the issue when he started work.
But he doesn’t need to. At least I don’t think so. I was out in the garden, emptying kitchen waste into the composter when I heard the sound of gushing water. I located it at the drainpipe that comes down from the bathroom and then into another pipe at the corner of the kitchen. My wife had been having an afternoon bath and had clearly just pulled out the plug, but instead of going down the drain the water was cascading all over the wall and floor as the top of the second drainpipe looked like a flowerpot, with grass and other plantlike growing out of it. Eureka - this was why the kitchen roof was peeling.
And the top pf the drainpipe was only about seven or eight feet off the ground. I could fix this. I turned over a flower pot and reached up to pull out the plantlike. It started to come out, along with great clumps of slimy compost that had formed in this makeshift plant pot. It smelled bad and dripped over my jumper. I realised I needed an implement to save me, but all I had to hand was an archaeological trowel that I had been gifted when working on Excavating Rita. There could not have been a more middle-class and less manly way to solve this problem, but it worked. I unblocked the drain pipe, it let out a gloop as the last bit of detritus fell down inside and now the water could flow down its intended course. I was covered in the filth of rotten vegetation and the residues of the baths from my family and presumably the people who lived here before. For once this was not the fault of bad workmanship, just neglect. And as baths are mainly taken at night when no one is in the garden it was just good fortune that led to this discovery.
But at least I solved something for my family and literally got my hands (and my nice expensive jumper) dirty. I felt like a conquering hero.
Our haunted house still seems to want to kill us, but being dead themselves, you’d think the ghosts would be more adept at murder, than weak-arsed plots to gas and electrocute us and have cars drive into our walls very slowly and make a bit of the kitchen ceiling that no one really walks under fall on us after a protracted length of time.
They’re just here to annoy us I guess, but over time, like a clogging drainpipe this probably has the best chance of finally covering you in crap.
