Real life | 17 March 2016

Diamonds are for ever. Plumbers take a lifetime. They never finish. No job is too big or small for them to not finish it.

All I wanted was a new kitchen tap unit. The hot tap needed a washer fitting but, according to Tony the plumber from over the road, there is no point fitting a washer. It’s more work than it’s worth. The thing to do is to rip out the old taps and fit new ones, which he can do almost more cheaply, but certainly no more expensively, than fitting a washer.

Fine, I thought. The old taps are horrible anyway so new taps it will be. Tony got a catalogue from the Plumb Center and showed me the pages of taps, which were all mind-blowingly similar. I chose the cheapest ones and he said he would order, pick them up and fit them. And then nothing happened for six months.

And nothing would have happened for another six months, or ever, possibly, but for a leak coming through the bathroom ceiling from the upstairs flat. Tony came to investigate and read the riot act to the boys upstairs about their leaking bath taps, which they promised to put right, and which, after a lot of wrangling, were put right.

But one thing leads to another, and while Tony was investigating the leak at my end, he noticed there was very low pressure in my shower. He pondered this at length, drinking 75 cups of sugary tea, before concluding the Grohe had ‘had it’. To fix it would mean taking apart the central barrel, then taking apart the disc inside that, then taking apart the pin inside that, then taking apart the… You get the idea. We appeared to be on the way to splitting the atom when I could stand it no longer.