Tonight I got home to a house full of wood dust and cardboard and furniture in strange places (we’re getting renovations done), and after twenty minutes sitting on a dusty sofa half reading Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk and half watching The West Wing (which my flatmate is completely addicted to, she’s like hooked up with a venflon or something), I felt so filthy that I decided to have a nice warm bath. We’ve got one of those really satisfying Victorian baths that is about five and a half feet long, so I can actually lie down in it and my toes only just reach the end. It must be really dreadful for the environment when it’s full up with steaming H20, but it’s a luxury I really appreciate, honestly. As I was running the bath water I realised there wasn’t any steam and the smell of Radox muscle soak had taken on a gas like odour… It turned out that the boiler had stopped working and there was gas leaking out from the extractor pipe. Do you know what though? I used to work for British Gas and am a legend in the gas department. (Though ‘legend’ is open to interpretation, and no, I don’t do house calls.) A simple investigation found that the builders had been chucking their rubbish (wood, old carpets, smashed up kitchen tables) down the front of the house, and this plethora of scrap had blocked up the flue pipe! Ten minutes in damp air outside heaving underlay layered with grime and trying not to rip my (new and unfortunately too big) Earl jeans on numerous bits of gripper rod, and the pipe was visible once more. A quick fiddle with the pilot light and we-hey! Hot water. it was actually one of the most satisfying things I’ve done in ages and I realised there must be immense satisfaction in manual labour, fixing things. I only really fix my hair. Anyway, the moral of this story is: always hire a skip.
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