'Nother Solent

I can't.

Sorry, Brian, but I just can't oblige.

There are two reasons for this: (a) I've blanked it out. I can't even remember if the problem to do with the header tank and the problem to do with the ballcock stop valve were connected, physically or metaphorically. The header tank is either full or empty, whichever it should be, but nonetheless the central heating heateth not and we still can't use the lavatory.¹

Never mind - literally in my case. My mind never can seem to hold onto details about plumbing or building or electricity.² The only reason I know that the ballcock stop valve isn't called the ballstop cock valve is that even plumbers of the sort who leave us to freeze while callously earning thousands retro-fitting some rich git's bathroom to resemble a boarding school shower room circa 1950 wouldn't stoop that low. My highly evolved brain steers all thoughts of stallpock bop valves to the back door almost as soon as they come in through the front. Our household would not pass the sexism check in a modern textbook: although my husband can cook with the best³ and I can wield a rifle or a cordless drill with the, er, respectable third or fourth best, basically it still comes down to Man Stuff and Wifely Duties. Speaking Unto Plumbers is not a Wifely Duty. If I were to give segments of my brain independent commands the sad, passed-over one-star General in charge of plumbing, new garage roofs and the like would have the title NoToDoWiNat.

Where was I? Oh, (b). I gave you an (a) earlier and for every (a) there has to be a (b), which would be a good Cole Porter line. In fact (b) is that the collapse of the garage roof was lot less dramatic than I have made out. Know the awful truth: this blog lies for laughs. Long neglected-multiple leaks causing chunks of sodden chipboard to fall from ceiling just didn't hack it dramatically. And I traduced the plumber; he didn't actually forbid us with menaces to call another plumber, only inertia and a masochistic British pleasure in wood fires and hot water bottles stop us doing so. The bit about the 1950s school shower room is also pure invention. Although people really do do that; I've seen it in house magazines. Futile, really, since Matron must be 90 by now.

However the good news, if you can believe it given my record of mendacity, is that now we have a pitched garage roof. Let us consider for a moment the entire sweep of European and world architectural history over the last twenty thousand years. Buildings have been raised in stone, wood, reeds, wattle and daub, concrete and brick. The purposes of these edifices were equally varied: home, barn, church or temple, workplace or fort. What principles can they possibly have had in common?⁴; I'll tell you one: if it's rainy where you live, mate, make the bleedin' roof slope. So of course our house just had to be built in the thirty years when architects had decided that Essex was Yucatan and flat was the new slopy. Anyway, three excellent chaps came, jointly we drank tea and sneered at the EU and safety harnesses, and severally I sewed and they built roof. Then I signed cheque. Wifely Duties stretch that far.

Oh, poot. The whole point of this post was "I can't describe my domestic miseries" and now I just have.

¹Do not think sad thoughts. We have other lavatories, any number of 'em as Toad said of his children while pretending to be a washerwoman. But all the working lavatories have cold lino floors and, as I may have mentioned, the central heating is centrally kaput.

² Or, come to think of it, anything else. I felt an instant sympathy with the historian who confessed in a magazine article that once her books were safely with the publisher she invariably forgot half the dates and details in which she had been a world expert while still writing. I'd like to link to her article but I have, of course, forgotten who she was.

³ He went into a sort of male-bonding ecstasy when he read Jonathan Gewirtz's comment to Instapundit that "Dude, I've got two favorite tools: my Glock and my Cuisinart." I'm with you on the Glock, Jonathan.

⁴Besides the fact that unexpected complications have caused them to run over budget.

Whew.

I'm sorry that a combination of circumstances has kept me away from the computer for several days. Would you like to hear about the pump on our boiler, our header tank and the partial collapse of our garage roof? No, thought not.