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| #5 – Involuntary backyard pond |
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| Talk,
Martin Algesten,
12 February 2001 | |
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To prove that I’ve truly become one with the English, my moaning continues.
“En suit toilet.” I just love that expression. Despite grumpy attitudes towards their channel neighbours, the English just adore these French linguistic pearls. They do give dull everyday items a touch of glamour, even when it is completely absurd as in our case. Our guestroom has got one of these glamorous facilities, though if you ever experience it, the illusion shatters. Whoever created this luxurious lair had a taste for the darker sides in life. The room is small and long, low ceiling and three tiny windows. The walls are covered with brown natural cork tiles, which, thanks to the damp, has loosened slightly and deformed into a nice texture. The gigantic mirror is impossible to use, since you can at the most get a foot away from it. The porcelain toilet chair and wash sink is in the darkest of dark browns. And all over the floor is a lovely carpet, and yes, it goes all around the dark brown toilet, and yes, it is dirty and disgusting. The air is filled with a musky humid smell, like old piss in a wine cellar. We have turned the heating off, which makes the aroma slightly more refreshing.
One day, just after we moved in, I noticed that there was a significant amount of water in our back yard. Our back yard has decking all over it, and beneath it there was an unhealthy pond of stale water, rotten leaves and dirt. I tracked the problem to a little pipe on the wall coming out from our luxury toilet. It proved to be the overfilling mechanism in the seat itself (or is that anti-overfilling). However, I had by this time decided that we never would use the toilet anyway, and found a valve to shut the toilet down, get the dripping to stop and make our back yard dry. I thought naively.
The valve was too old to be used, and started dripping the moment I touched it. Not too much, but about one bucket of water in one night. This was of course Friday evening, and I didn’t know if it was okay to phone our landlord or not. I decided not, and spent the rest of the weekend remembering to change buckets. On Monday, one of my landlord’s “guys” came around with a brand spanking new valve to fit. He explained that there was no central valve to shut the water off to our flat, and therefore this might be a bit wet. Sorry, did you get that? THERE IS NO CENTRAL VALVE FOR OUR FLAT! What kind of inept person came up with that idea? The solution was scientific, yet amazing. We open all the taps in the flat to their maximum, in order to lower the pressure in the pipes, and when the water then floods out all over our en suite floor it will not be quite as bad as it could be (Duh!). So to the background noise of water bursting out in every available tap, the “guy” starts doing his wet deed. Water is flooding, soaking, the lovely carpet as he removes the valve just to find out that the new valve has the wrong fitting. Oh dear, why would these things be standardised, that would be far too easy
I’m bored and you get my point. This would not have happened back home.
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