A mammoth undertaking

I had a near miss of a domestic disaster before Christmas, when the toilet in the en-suite wouldn’t stop filling up and overflowing into the bowl. Clearly something had gone wrong with the ball-cock, but it wasn’t something I could see or easily fix. It was impossible to get a plumber out for anything less than a full-blown emergency for a few days (every plumber I tried in Malvern was completely busy with burst pipes) but I got one booked for three days later. In the meantime, I found it impossible to sleep with the sound of gushing water just next door to my bed, and the isolation valve on the cistern was too stiff for me to move, so I had to turn the water off at the main stop-cock every night in order to get some sleep!

The plumber came on time three days later (a minor miracle in itself) and fixed the ball-cock – there was a large piece of grit stuck in the mechanism and he had to disassemble the whole thing to clean it out. While he was here, I asked him to have a quick look at my kitchen sink which wasn’t draining freely, despite me putting Mr Muscle Sink Clearer down it. He tentatively diagnosed a blocked drain, then went out the back door to investigate the drain access.  He lifted the man-hole cover and dropped it again immediately. Yes I did have a blocked drain. Thoroughly blocked in fact – it had backed up to less than an inch from the bottom of the man-hole cover, and (without getting too scatalogical) I was within a few good flushes of wading in it.

He couldn’t fix it himself – it needed specialised kit, not to mention a complete set of overalls. But fortunately he “knew a man who can” and made a quick phone call to arrange it. That same afternoon, I had two people turn up equipped with heavy-duty rubber gloves and fearsome-looking rods and plungers.  They had some problems finding all of the man-hole covers, as one of them was buried under gravel when we had the extension built. There was a process of deduction, triangulation and excavation needed to find it, but once they had done so it was fairly straightforward and they managed to shift the blockage.

Disaster avoided! The problem had clearly been building up for a good long while, so I feel entirely justified in blaming Christopher for the original blockage. He was having such dreadful trouble with his bowels all through the chemotherapy that it wouldn’t be at all surprising if he’d managed to block the sewer pipe. That was one legacy I’d rather have done without……..