The Unfortunate Plumber

The unfortunate plumber is here. In the last twelve hours I’ve been turning over whether to tell his story, but it really is of a kind that needs to be recorded, as I hope you’ll agree.

I contracted the unfortunate plumber after the snow of six weeks ago buckled, terminally, one of the brackets on my spouting, because of which the wobbly drain pipe came away entirely. Of course at that stage I didn’t know–and neither did he–that the plumber was to become unfortunate.

He phoned me to quote a surprising cost to fix the minor collapse since, as it turned out, the entire spouting set at the rear of the house needed replacing. I didn’t quibble; fixing the spouting was one of the things on the to-do list in the builder’s inspection when I bought the house. The unfortunate plumber said he would be back within two weeks.

Yesterday he turned up, looking confused in the extreme and asking if I was Dr. Bird. He had, he explained, in the tone of voice one might explain one had just made a quick planetary orbit in a spaceship, replaced the spouting on the front house by mistake.

There are two houses on this section, each the mirror image of the other. Mine is the high-fenced back haven; the one at the front has the driveway and isn’t similarly cloistered. Failing to check which house he should go to, the unfortunate plumber had gone to the one with the visibly broken spouting–the front house, as it turned out–and first quoted for, then replaced it. Only when he checked his job sheet did he find the job was for the back house.

If a red-faced man can turn white as a sheet, then the unfortunate plumber had done so. I didn’t help him other than to give him the landlord’s number for the front house. I don’t think he’ll ring them, somehow. Such a mistake might be better concealed; my neighbours, the tenants, work long hours, and how many tenants contemplate their spouting unless they have to?

So this morning the unfortunate plumber is fixing my downpipe, which is, as it turns out, a minor job after all. Stranger things have happened, as Baldrick might have said, but this should still make it into an anthology of domestic oddities.

Domestic oddity may well be the theme of my morning, since I was inexplicably up early, without even the heat to blame it on, not realising it was hot until harvestmother turned up an unhappy shade of scarlet. I decided to stare into the maw of my insomnia last night, and sat at the computer editing teaching resources until I felt actually tired. A late retreat was followed by an early rising.

The answer’s probably biochemical, since I’ve first raised and then lowered the quantity of paroxetine within me following Evie’s birth and in anticipation of my recent psycho hose experience. Such tinkerings are rarely without follow-on fluctuations, of which I can only assume this burst of energy and unusual alertness is one. This I learned (again; how many times need one learn this?) to my peril a little over a year ago.

I’m experimenting with lower-level notes to self in an unexpected place at the moment, with the thought that perfervid yet fragmentary mutterings during the day might be sufficient of a mental pressure-easing to lend the longer narratives here more of a formal elegance. Writing is fuel for more writing, but also a kind of textual peel so that when I come to work on the projects that are the most important–the manuscript, the RH article–they don’t have to bear the weight of my ambition or my irrelevant thinking alone.

But too much solipsistic journalling will strip the day of the advantage of an early start. À bientot.