Plumbing

The girl lay slumped against a wall in front of me and someone ran to push the emergency button. I was nearly at the bottom of the Jubilee line escalator when I came across this scene. I found it shocking, but then I’m not used to drama these days. An eventful day in West Cork is popping to the small supermarket in the village to meet my friend June for a takeaway coffee while she sits in her car selling tickets for the pitch and putt lottery. Someone we know might walk past while she’s hanging out of her driver’s window passing tickets to customers, and they might climb into the back of the car with me to tell us some urgent gossip: ‘Did you hear Roisin’s son has bought that big house on the road to Drinagh? It’s got a gate that opens when he presses a button.

The artists and hippies are re-wilding their land, which is to say doing nothing at all to it and watching it fill up with brambles. The builder boyfriend and I are un-wilding our land, which is to say pulling out every bramble we can find and cutting back the overhanging tree branches. ‘Seven hundred trees,’ she said, sipping her fresh mint tea, her artisanal walking crook propped against the wall We have nothing in common with the hippy English blow-ins who come to West Cork, of course. However, I have made friends with a few of the local lefties, including a very nice lady who lives down the lane whom I cannot help but like since she brought me honey from her bees.

‘Why are those pipes sticking out of the wall like that?’ said the bathroom fitter, surveying the work the plumber had done. He stood musing over the way the tubing poked through a stud wall at an upwards angle so you couldn’t attach it to a sink unless you bent it round and then he said: ‘Hmm, they do sometimes do that here. I’m sure it will be fine.’ The bathroom fitter is English, the plumber Irish. Who’s to say which one of them is right when it comes to the exact angle that new pipes ought to come through a wall?

The kitchen tap began dripping as if it knew perfectly well that this would land me in a predicament whereby I would have to brave a phone line. I tried a friend who is a plumber but he confirmed that getting a new valve would involve contacting the kitchen shop where I bought the tap, and he didn’t fancy it. ‘Fine,’ I said, ‘I’ll call them. But if I’m going to do the worst bit, then I might as well get him to fit it for nothing.’ By which I meant the builder boyfriend. My plumber friend agreed and then abandoned me to my fate.