Pages

Wednesday 13 February 2008

Things fall apart


In the last couple of weeks everything that possibly can do seems to have broken. The loo cistern, which has been threatening disaster for a while, gave up the ghost the night before I got home – and the plumber, of course, isn't answering his mobile. Half the lights fused. My own mobile indulged in a fit of silent sulks; the Dormouse's chair broke – for people who spend whole days at the computer this is serious but, fortunately, he pinched mine because I was away, and I happened to have a spare after I moved out of the Edinburgh office. Senior Dog ran into something and cut her paw. And OH has an appointment for a scan at an inconvenient time, but that's alright, because he was broken already.

We are all at sixes and sevens, with Older Son due home this evening for rest and recuperation. Most of the contents of the bathroom are in the sitting room after an unsuccessful foray into plumbing by OH: 2 hours and a lot of swearing and the old flush mechanism mostly still in place. After I unreasonably insisted on getting a plumber (apparently; I thought what I had done was say, albeit crossly, that there were people whose job it was to fix these things) he seemed pretty eager to stop. I expect that this will be A Sore Point all weekend, with snappish exchanges, though I try to avoid such moments when OS is home, since he once used a rather nasty expletive about how tedious parental tiffs can be.

I tell myself that these things are sent to try us, and tend to come in bouts. If I wasn't supposed to be working I would go and bake muffins or something to cheer myself up, if I could find the ingredients amongst the overspill of clean towels and loo rolls from the bathroom (the disadvantage of open-plan cottage conversions is that it's like having a downhill slope to the kitchen – everything migrates there, and it's tiny). As it is I should go and mop up the water from the bathroom floor, and try not to think about the way the cost of everything seems to have gone up lately, and now we have to pay a plumber.

Orange, however, following a phone call yesterday afternoon to say my phone was sulking, had a replacement handset here by 11.30 this morning. I know, I can use it to ring the plumber!

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh isn't it always the way!! I am so sorry. (And of course, part of me is being sorry for you in the hope that be being sympathetic I will keep such rotten luck away from my door.) I should go and make those muffins if I were you. By this stage i would definitely in the middle of the second, if not the third, round of tea and scones - preferably with large dollops of clotted cream.

BooksPlease said...

You have my sympathy and I know what it's like having an OH who thinks he can do plumbing - not any more now though after several times of flooding the kitchen and bathroom in attempts to fix things. He now calls a plumber double quick. I hope it's fixed now.

Jodie Robson said...

Muffins tomorrow and plumber Friday. I can bear it until then, but my instincts were right - the bolts were being recalcitrant, I was told, which meant that there was a grave risk of breaking something, and having to have the water turned off altogether. I recall a couple of floods in the past, now you mention it.

Elizabeth Musgrave said...

Know just what you mean about those spates of things not going right. You just have to wait until the wheel turns, I find!

Jodie Robson said...

Elizabeth, you're quite right, and today was a huge improvement, not least because it was a glorious day.