It started with a drip. Never thought it would come to this. Actually, forget that. What has happened to me since I called out the plumber last week is so traumatic that, try as I might to make it more palatable by dressing it up with a Hot Chocolate motif, it’s not going to wash.
As previously reported in this column, my boiler was dripping. A plumber came in and righted the drip by ripping the boiler to pieces. But the next day it started dripping again. So I called him back. ‘It’s all right, it’s just your undulating spivvlethwack valve,’ he said, or some such nonsense, as he cheerfully took it to pieces again.
Three hours and countless trips to buy parts later, he had said ‘it’s all right, it’s just your…’ so many times I was ready to slash my wrists. But he would only have said, ‘It’s all right, it’s just your median antebrachial vein. I’ll pop down to Travis Perkins and get you another one, no worries.’ Seriously, there was nothing that could go wrong that this guy wouldn’t tell me was all just part of the boiler healing process.
That is, until he made a really big mistake. Later, when I related the train of events that preceded the catastrophe to a builder friend, we managed to piece together the hypothesis that he had let the pressure build up between trips to Travis Perkins and had forgotten to release it.
I cannot recall exactly what happened, just blurred vignettes, a bit like the time when, as a rooky reporter in Northern Ireland, I turned my Peugeot 205 over and landed in a ditch while rushing to a riot. Afterwards, I could only remember: driving down a dark, windy lane in County Tyrone; flying through the air thinking, ‘This crash is taking ages!’; lying in the footwell of the passenger side of the car calculating how long I should remain wedged there before screaming; and, finally, being given a cup of tea by Bernadette Devlin MacAliskey. I still cannot tie any of these elements together but I do remember that the doyenne of Irish republican activism made a lovely cuppa.
In any case, something similar happened as the boiler exploded. I only remember the following: the plumber arriving back from Travis Perkins whistling and calling out, ‘Should have this fixed in a jiffy now!’; coming into the kitchen to see him putting his arms up to the boiler; a sound, like gurgling, and another noise like a roar from the belly of a monster from the deep; and then water. A wall of it. I ran for a bucket and held it pointlessly in the general direction of the boiler tsunami but the force of the deluge simply pushed the bucket from my hands. And all the while the plumber just stood there with his eyes shut taking the full force of the tidal wave in his face as if he thought he deserved it.
The water cascaded on top of him, at him, through him, drenching him from head to foot and at one point looking as if it may well have drowned him. And, when it finally subsided, he spat water from his mouth and said, ‘Well…that was interesting.’
The electrics were totally ruined, but of course he simply insisted on nipping to Travis Perkins. ‘It’s all right, it’s just the…’ he said, as he squelched off to his little van.
He did get it going again. And for the record, it’s working, but with a slow drip. So, £300 and a flooded kitchen later, I’m back to exactly where I started. But I have made a decision.
I’m starting my very own plumber comparison website. Called Demented.com, it will offer a one-stop shop for clueless suckers like me who want to find a plumber who won’t nearly kill them. On Demented.com you will be able to compare hundreds of plumbers rated by ordinary customers. Stars will be awarded for things like ‘not completely ruining the heating system’ and ‘not shorting the entire house’s supply of electricity’.
There will also be points for ‘amount of tea drunk while on job’ and ‘number of sugars taken’ — I’m serious, you have to factor sugar costs into the price of a plumber. Mine went through an entire bag of Silver Spoon. I’m surprised his teeth didn’t fall out in the force of that wall of water. There will also be a star-rating system for ‘amount of buttock cleavage shown’. I can only speak for myself, but by far the most traumatic aspect of witnessing the wrecking of my boiler was having to watch my plumber’s trousers creep southwards until I was basically just staring at his bare bottom. And then, after the pressure-valve catastrophe, his wet bare bottom. Enough said.
Melissa Kite is deputy political editor of the Sunday Telegraph.
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