Water, Water, Everywhere.......

I have been called many things in my time. I don’t mean nicknames as such; after all I’ve had plenty of those over the years from school upwards (Four-eyes, Joe 90, Brains, Pickles, Duracell, Trevor, Terence Trent Hayward, Brig, etc). I mean descriptions.

One Maths teacher wrote in my school report that at times it appeared as if I had my head on backwards.  This was actually a clever way to describe both my erratic mathematical abilities and the fact that I used to spend most of the lessons talking to the girls in the row of desks behind me. This is why I know little about quadratic equations and quite a lot about late 1980s popular culture.

Well, when you’re faced on one hand with a bearded Maths teacher wearing a pink bow tie and, on the other, a row of pretty faces, what else is a teenage boy with raging hormones to do?

What I’m labouring manfully to get at here is that I’ve never been described as practical. When I was a small boy my Grandfather wisely declared one day that when I get older I was inevitably going to end up in a job where I don’t get my hands dirty. I wasn’t sure whether this was a sign of disapproval or not but being brought up in a family of manual labourers I did appear to be somewhat of a square peg in a round hole, but that’s another story altogether.

So on Saturday, there I was sat minding my own business in the privacy of the loo, pondering which pizza I was going to order from the takeaway menu that evening (I didn’t take it in with me, I know it off by heart), when I heard a dripping sound from somewhere nearby. My investigations led me to a small tap underneath the sink which had created a bit of a puddle. I decided to manage this developing situation by turning the tap off.

“There”, I thought, “that was easily sorted, another problem solved by….oh”.

Unfortunately my intervention hadn’t had the intended result of quelling the annoying drops of water which now started to drip in earnest.

A practical man would have known what to do in an instant. In fact a more practical man would have known what this tap was for in the first place. All I knew was that it was leaking and there was water all over the floor. I decided to break the news to the present Mrs Hayward.

She was not thrilled with this turn of events and entered the bathroom, investigated the pool of water, uttered a few loud profanities and, before I could say a word, she had removed the floor covering, some sort of modern lino, to reveal more puddles of water.

I was shocked by this discovery and knew that, as the man of the house, decisive action needed to be taken, so I confidently instructed Mrs Hayward to call her father.

My father-in-law is a much more practical man than I by quite a margin. He was brought up in an era of ‘make do and mend’ and can turn his hand to most DIY based tasks around the house regardless of whether he has tackled the job before.

Some of his methods are unorthodox. He once tried to remove wood chip from our walls with a blowtorch and he seems happy to tackle electrics without first turning the electricity off.  

Unfortunately this job was beyond him. All he could ultimately do was turn the water off so that our smallest room didn’t become a (very) wet room. Don’t get me wrong, he tried in vain to rectify the situation. I can’t say that I really helped though. At one point he asked me where the outside stop tap was and my response was to look at him blankly as if he’d asked a complex question about nuclear fission.

Being the Sherlock Holmes of DIY he deduced that it was probably somewhere near the water meter and some elaborate tool was brought into play which is still sat in our bathroom as I type, just in case I need it. I’m not sure what I will need it for or how it will be of any use to me, other than to smash the window to escape the inevitable flood, but cometh the hour….

What I established here was that being practical isn’t all that. I don’t wish to denigrate his abilities but sometimes the mettle of a man is in who he knows. Whilst Mrs Hayward was hastily scanning the local free magazine for emergency 24 hour plumbers I calmly flicked through my phone to call a nice chap called Simon, who’d installed our shower a couple of years ago.

He’d come as a recommendation from another chap called Mark (whose sister works on the telly you know, but this isn’t really the point). He explained that, as it didn’t sound like we were about to be swallowed up by an impending tsunami, we should just turn the water off and live with it until Monday morning whereupon he’d come out and sort it for us. 

He explained that there was really no point in him coming out now as he wouldn’t be able to get the relevant parts as the traders were now shut and, in any case, it would cost more for him to come out on a weekend. 

Of course what he really might have meant was that it was 5pm on a Saturday afternoon and he just wanted to have a beer in front of the football rather than crawl around on our damp bathroom floor but his sage advice made sense to my little brain and I could now take charge of the situation in a sort of supervisory way.

So, with traditional British spirit, the availability of shower facilities at the in-laws house, and 10 litres of Tesco Value Still Water (17p for 2 litres – what a bargain), we coped admirably with the lack of water until Simon arrived on Monday morning as promised, sorted out our dripping issue, and charged me a modest £20 for the trouble.

My point here is that sometimes it’s not what you know but who you know. I may be a DIY ignoramus but if you know someone whose sister is on the telly who knows someone else who’s handy with a spanner then ignorance is bliss.