Weekend

It's the Winter solstice, My Dears. The shortest day of the year, which means that nights will start drawing out again from tomorrow and Summer is only just around the corner. Which is odd, when you think about it since today is also the first day of Winter, which will now grind on until the end of March.

We have three, well two and a half, I suppose, working days to Christmas after today. What an excellent time then for the Karma Pixies to bugger up our shower. We have cold running water in the sinks upstairs and down and in the bath/shower. The boiler is working perfectly as is the central heating. The hot taps in the kitchen and bathroom basins are entirely up to snuff. But not the tap for the bath/shower. It reluctantly starts with a pitiful flow and then rapidly gives up entirely. OK, we can wash ourselves easily enough, but it will be slightly more of a challenge to wash our hair (less for little baldy me than Furtle, obviously) until it is fixed. I discovered the problem on Friday evening. Typically the damned thing had worked properly earlier in the day for Furtle, but just before bed when I wanted it, there it was, broken. Since everything else is working and we are in a very hard water area, we think that there might be lime scale trapped in the hot water pipe.

Anyway, we need a plumber. The landlord was fine, but quite candid in saying that it might be hard to get a plumber out on Saturday afternoon at short notice, so we are hoping one will arrive Monday or Tuesday at the latest. We are living in a world without professional artisans courtesy Tony Blair and his cronies. Since New Labour made it policy that people should be educated beyond their capability to learn and that everyone on the planet should have a degree, we live in a world full of unemployed media studies graduates and no plumbers. The plumbers that do exist can charge enough money to afford to work three hours a week and holiday in Marbella for six months at a time.

That's the post-socialist paradise.

Even if there were plumbers, getting one of the brutes out at a weekend has traditionally been difficult and expensive. When I was a kid, Sundays were the day the earth stood still, and it had nothing to do with Klaatu Berada Nictu or anything like that. It was simply that everything closed on Sunday. The world stopped. The newsagent would open for a couple of hours in the morning so you could get a paper and a packet of fags. Pubs would open at midday for a couple of hours and then close until evening when they reopened for a couple more hours. There was nothing on telly worth watching: there were only three channels and two of them would have some mad old cleric and a mob of blue-rinsed old dowagers singing hymns badly. The only place anything happened on a Sunday was in church if you could be bothered to go and be bored and cold there, or at home, where Mum would take the opportunity to make us all do millions of chores because there were no other distractions. Apart from Fluff Freeman and the Radio 1 chart show between 5pm and 7pm on the old tranny, Sundays were, generally speaking, washouts. If you awoke from a 20 year coma on a Sunday, you would know instantly what day of the week it was. You could feel Sunday like no other day of the week.

Of course, forty years on, it's not quite like that any more, especially if you work in retail. In the 80s the rules on Sunday opening and Sunday working were relaxed and nowadays they are more like the rest of the week, though with more people milling around the shops and out-of-town shopping and gardening centres.

Still can't get a fekking plumber, though.

Weekend

It's the Winter solstice, My Dears. The shortest day of the year, which means that nights will start drawing out again from tomorrow and Summer is only just around the corner. Which is odd, when you think about it since today is also the first day of Winter, which will now grind on until the end of March.

We have three, well two and a half, I suppose, working days to Christmas after today. What an excellent time then for the Karma Pixies to bugger up our shower. We have cold running water in the sinks upstairs and down and in the bath/shower. The boiler is working perfectly as is the central heating. The hot taps in the kitchen and bathroom basins are entirely up to snuff. But not the tap for the bath/shower. It reluctantly starts with a pitiful flow and then rapidly gives up entirely. OK, we can wash ourselves easily enough, but it will be slightly more of a challenge to wash our hair (less for little baldy me than Furtle, obviously) until it is fixed. I discovered the problem on Friday evening. Typically the damned thing had worked properly earlier in the day for Furtle, but just before bed when I wanted it, there it was, broken. Since everything else is working and we are in a very hard water area, we think that there might be lime scale trapped in the hot water pipe.

Anyway, we need a plumber. The landlord was fine, but quite candid in saying that it might be hard to get a plumber out on Saturday afternoon at short notice, so we are hoping one will arrive Monday or Tuesday at the latest. We are living in a world without professional artisans courtesy Tony Blair and his cronies. Since New Labour made it policy that people should be educated beyond their capability to learn and that everyone on the planet should have a degree, we live in a world full of unemployed media studies graduates and no plumbers. The plumbers that do exist can charge enough money to afford to work three hours a week and holiday in Marbella for six months at a time.

That's the post-socialist paradise.

Even if there were plumbers, getting one of the brutes out at a weekend has traditionally been difficult and expensive. When I was a kid, Sundays were the day the earth stood still, and it had nothing to do with Klaatu Berada Nictu or anything like that. It was simply that everything closed on Sunday. The world stopped. The newsagent would open for a couple of hours in the morning so you could get a paper and a packet of fags. Pubs would open at midday for a couple of hours and then close until evening when they reopened for a couple more hours. There was nothing on telly worth watching: there were only three channels and two of them would have some mad old cleric and a mob of blue-rinsed old dowagers singing hymns badly. The only place anything happened on a Sunday was in church if you could be bothered to go and be bored and cold there, or at home, where Mum would take the opportunity to make us all do millions of chores because there were no other distractions. Apart from Fluff Freeman and the Radio 1 chart show between 5pm and 7pm on the old tranny, Sundays were, generally speaking, washouts. If you awoke from a 20 year coma on a Sunday, you would know instantly what day of the week it was. You could feel Sunday like no other day of the week.

Of course, forty years on, it's not quite like that any more, especially if you work in retail. In the 80s the rules on Sunday opening and Sunday working were relaxed and nowadays they are more like the rest of the week, though with more people milling around the shops and out-of-town shopping and gardening centres.

Still can't get a fekking plumber, though.