The Plumber Cometh

I realise I’m not making the process of having your bathroom re-vamped sound particularly easy (or, indeed, particularly interesting, come to think of it) here, but that’s because… Well, it’s because it’s NOT particularly easy, if you want to know the truth. Especially when you finally manage to get a plumber to return your calls, and he says he’ll come round on Monday to look at your radiator-come-towel-rack, but Monday comes and goes and the plumber… doesn’t… and then he gets his secretary to call you and say "whoops, the plumber was too busy to attend to your stupid ass radiator-come-towel-rack, can he stand you up on Wednesday instead?" and you say "yes" because there’s sod all else you can say, but in the meantime you’ve taken up the floor in the bathroom, so now you step out of the shower onto the kind of dirty, mess-strewn floorboards that would get you closed down if your house was open to the public, and then you spend the whole week trailing dirt from the bathroom floor to the whole rest of the house, which now looks a lot like a construction site, except NOTHING IS BEING CONSTRUCTED because you still can’t get a damn plumber to return your calls.

* BREATHE *

What makes all of this worse, of course, is if you haven’t slept properly since Friday night, because first your dog was sick, then he had diarrhea (Which you still can’t spell, by the way), and then once he’d recovered, he was all, "actually, I think I’d prefer sleeping in YOUR ROOM from now on, and preferably on top of your bed", so he barks loudly every ten minutes during the night, until you’re forced to bring him into the bedroom, where he alternates between snoring like a much larger animal and pattering around looking for shoes and other things he could possibly pee on ALL NIGHT LONG.

*BREATHE *

Oh yeah – if maybe your car could contrive to break down just four days after you collected it from the garage, where you paid the equivalent of a few good pairs of shoes to have a completely unrelated fault fixed, that would just finish things off nicely.

* BREATHE *

The plumber has promised to turn up today. The ceiling is still holding up, despite the massive crack in it. The floors… well, the floors still look like ten kinds o’crap, but that’s really the least of our difficulties at the moment.

Is it not 2009 yet?