Despite efforts not to be superstitious, I am much obsessed by the idea of disaster seepage. That is to say, when one thing goes wrong, a hundred others usually follow.
So it was that a leaking roof segued seamlessly last week into blocked drains, a broken catflap and a stolen mobile phone.
Have you noticed how we don’t have rain any more? Hence Britain was in the grip of seasonal flash flooding — much more terrifying — when my living-room ceiling emitted the first ‘plip’. It wasn’t long before the plip turned to a plop then a splat, then an ‘oh my god the roof’s coming in I’ll be homeless by the morning is the building even insured where did I put that renewal letter?’
Tony the odd-job man confirmed my worst fears: ‘You’ve definitely got some sort of leak.’
I knocked on the door of the upstairs flat and asked my twentysomething neighbour if she had experienced any unusual water occurrences.
Incredible as it may seem, she uttered the words, ‘How will I tell if I’ve got a leak?’ At which point I may have said, ‘Stand aside, I’m coming in.’
Anyway, to cut a long leak short, it was all do to with a defective downpipe which my neighbour on the other side, the sensible one, had sent me a letter about three weeks earlier, which of course I had ignored.
I knocked on her door, begged for forgiveness, and submitted myself to her original plan to get the whole thing sorted, which she duly did in 24 hours.
No sooner had I settled into a state of smug self-satisfaction at my brilliant handling of the situation than the bath started gurgling.
The drain people gave me one of those helpful 12–6 p.m.
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