So, Friday night, I’m planning my weekend away to say goodbye to Trey – who’s heading off to climates colder and more northern – and I arrive home after my day shift to a phone call which runs thus:
Mum: “Kate… the cistern’s leaking again…. quite a lot…. do you think you could come down and fix it…”
The temporary repair I did a while back (because I couldn’t get the right bit) had finally given up – well, actually it’s given up because I replaced the ball-valve with the same type of ball valve instead of going with my (feminine?) instinct and deciding that the plumber had fitted the wrong kind before and changing to the type of valve I thought it should be.
Unfortunately I’d also agreed to collect my Victorian cistern for my new house (which I have not got) from Freecycle – before I left on Saturday – and so it was on Saturday morning that I flew out of the house and round Bristol to collect a toilet cistern. Having collected it the bloke said ‘do you want the toilet too?’ – I looked, and a Victorian toilet in *staggeringly* good condition (apart from being somewhat mud filled) became mine also. Of course, this meant that my original time saving plan was somewhat destroyed – having an *entire* toilet in the car was a bit much when travelling a couple of hundred miles.
So, I switched back, headed home (enabling me (handily) to collect my camera); unloaded the toilet and cistern and piled back in the car only to discover… a car accident.
Then I joined the M4 Roadworks queues. I got to my mums. I fixed her toilet cistern (seeing a pattern?). I jumped in the car and (more…)