What social distancing taught me about plumbing
Offspring has a shower. Water drips through the ceiling into the kitchen from the bathroom above. I roll my eyes, and situate bowls to catch drops until it stops. I gently ask offspring to take a little more care next time. There is a hint of indignation, but mercifully no resentment. I think. I take some towels to see if I can mop things up a bit, but there isn’t really that much water on the bathroom floor. In the kitchen it seems to take longer between drips, until they stop. So that’s good.
A few days later the drips return. But the last person to have a shower was me. I recall guiltily my patient but confident attempt at encouraging good bathroom etiquette and think about how to apologize without looking a complete fool. I decide to think about it more after I’ve checked the seal around the shower.
Well, the seal around the shower might be a little bit cracked. Hard to say. I see what might be gaps the water could get through. Happily, I realize I can issue my apology while still indulging an apparently knowledgeable and fatherly pronouncement about how to use a bathroom. ‘Best not aim the jet where the seal is until I get around to fixing it,’ I say, pointing at the shower head. ‘Lower the shower head a bit so the spray doesn’t spread out too far. Because there’s a drip downstairs, see, if the water gets through the cracks in the seal. There. Look, there, see?’
That should do it.
The next morning the kitchen floor is covered with water before the bathroom door has so much as been opened. Pearls of water bloom at different points over the surface of the ceiling. I don’t have enough bowls. Upstairs, by contrast, the bathroom floor is completely dry. An interrobang is the only possible response. What?! I had a solution to this problem! I announced it to everyone!
I close my eyes and take a little breath. I kneel down and feel behind the pedestal of the sink where the pipes connect to the tap. Dry. Other side: wet. Wet, wet, wet, all the way down through the floorboards.
It’s fine. There’s an isolator valve at the top of the pipe which I can screw closed. It’ll shut off the water to that tap, and although there’ll be no hot water in the sink until it can be replaced, handwashing in the bath won’t kill anyone, and the leak will be gone. I fetch a flat-head screwdriver, reach behind the pedestal, and turn the screw. It seems to have a deep thread, because I’m turning and turning and turning and the screw never seems to lock. I keep turning. It really is a deep thread. Surely it would come out the other side if it took this much turning? Turn, turn, turn. Turn. Stop turning.
I switch on the tap. Water flows gently. I turn the screw clockwise. Water reduces to a dribble. But the screw doesn’t lock. Screw, water comes back, screw, water dribbles. The screw never locks. The water keeps flowing. This is what happens when the thread has sheared. The pipe will remain open forever. Leaking.
It’s 29 March. The UK has been in lockdown for six days.
I grab an armful of towels, not the nice ones obviously, and shove them behind and around the pipes to catch the leak. I wonder whether emergency plumbers will add a special coronavirus surcharge to their emergency call-out charge, and their minimum flat rate, plus all hours worked and parts supplied to replace the £2.75 isolator valve behind my sink. I wouldn’t blame them. There isn’t much enthusiasm among the rest of the household to invite someone from Out There into our home at present though, and I don’t blame them either. But if they could all hide away for the duration, I can disinfect things before and after, let the plumber in and out, keep my distance for however long it takes, and pay them online. There’s always a way.
Except there isn’t a way when the plumbers say yours isn’t an emergency. A dripping pipe? That’s it? Too risky mate, just for that. Gotta protect myself too. You’ll need to get some old towels, wrap them round the pipes round the back to catch the leak. Change them every other day or so and you should have no problem. Give us another call in a few weeks and I’ll see if it’s okay to come out. You keep safe too mate.
The nice towels were, eventually, needed
Well, the weather’s nice, and a towel-rotation regime soon takes shape in the clockless timetable of each day. It’s not every other day or so though, it’s every day, and then several times a day, and I’m using three hand towels at a time. The bathroom routine has had several new stages added: flush, wash hands for at least twenty seconds, dry hands, check towels behind sink, replace towels if wet, take wet towels to washing line, wash hands again, log back into Zoom. Then the condition ‘if wet’ becomes redundant, because they are always wet, until I’m changing the towels on my incontinent bathroom sink constantly. I wonder if my leak has yet passed over my plumber’s ‘emergency’ threshold. I decide that another rejection would be too humiliating to bear so I just count up my towels and calculate how many cycles they will serve to keep the kitchen ceiling from falling in.
For the past six weeks I’ve been learning how I might win against this leak. It’s a fiendish adversary: it won’t be put off by any highly predictable towel changing routine. The kitchen ceiling hasn’t leaked for weeks, which is a win, but the bathroom floor tiles seem to be shielding a shallow reservoir with its own tidal pattern. Which is a massive lose. First thing in the morning, there is not a drop of water in sight, until you step onto a tile near the sink so that froth fizzes up through the grout around it. God knows how much water lives down there for it to do that, penetrating the grain of the floorboards under the tiles, eroding the grout granule by granule. Eating wood. One day I’ll think I’m winning, there is no squelch, the towels drip in the sunshine for a few hours and I imagine the water in the floorboards evaporating harmlessly, joyfully, to join the clouds in the contrail-free blue skies above my head. Another day, the same routine with the towels, except the floor tiles belch up so much foam from around the edges when I step on them I’m barely confident they’ll support my weight. It’s like stepping onto a frozen lake – you can only get to see one side to judge if it’s safe.
I have become a diligent, patient carer of my sink. But it’s like keeping a baby clean really: just check regularly, don’t let it get too bad before changing, change it calmly and with love and patience, so that it hardly knows its progress has been checked for the two minutes it takes. Smile and maintain eye contact, of course. Some gentle words spoken softly may help the mood. But then there are times when you seem to be clearing up after an explosive, unpredictable tantrum, so that it’s strictly damage limitation only. The cycle continues.
And all the while I’ve been social distancing, and as little of that as possible. Other people in Sainsbury’s have become decidedly radioactive if they lean in a bit too close to get the cheese, or hover in the middle of an aisle creating narrow channels either side, nonchalantly checking off their lists. Social distancing makes very good sense, of course: if you can put a good barrier between the Bad Thing and the thing you want to keep safe – me, in this case – the thing you want to keep safe might stand a chance. Two metres is a hell of a way to jump if you’re only one eighth of a micron in diameter. I feel comfortable with a great empty space of air between me and that couple over there IT’S SUPPOSED TO BE ONE ADULT ONLY YOU KNOW! Buffer zones are the best.
But we were talking about my sink. It took a while for me to realize but I think now I’ve worked out how to tame it. The leak. I didn’t mind changing towels regularly, frequently, spin drying and hanging out the drenched ones, ensuring it went to bed clean and dry each night. But I wanted to work out a way of ensuring that this wouldn’t lead unpredictably to squelchy days. I think social distancing taught me the answer. Social distancing, contact monitoring, all that stuff.
I had been dutifully changing three towels with three towels, goodness knows how many times a day, the same routine. Squelch. And then I thought about social distancing and decided instead that my aim should be to keep one there all the time – but always, if possible, dry. The one furthest from the leak. There would still be three towels but changeover would not be all three each time but just the top two, with the aim of keeping all the water in them and away from the bottom towel. It’s a bit more frequent (don’t ask, I lost count) but it’s no more towels to rotate in total. The top one gathers a tonne of water but if a little gets into the middle one, well, they’re both whisked off into isolation and two more take their place. The top towel really suffers, the middle one gets only mild symptoms, but the bottom one stays safe for much longer. Only occasionally does gravity send so much its way that it needs replacing. Which I hope means my poor bathroom floorboards are finally dehydrating as well. Because honestly, I didn’t really care about that bottom towel at all. It was all about the floor.
So lockdown taught me something. My Journey to Basic Common Sense in Six Weeks. Of course I expect any engineers reading this had worked out the towel solution the moment they spotted the leaking pipe. Virologists and epidemiologists maybe, too. It does illustrate, though, the great gap us laypeople have between a problem and its solution advised by experts in the field. It’s all common sense as soon as someone more knowledgeable shows you how obvious it is. We all knew the importance of social distancing and constant handwashing and stockpiling two decades’ worth of yeast before now, didn’t we? Well, maybe not the yeast. Anyway, the point is perhaps that nothing quite beats having people on the case whose metier is to be good at solving other people’s problems, whatever they are. You’ll find absolutely loads of them in universities. Listen to those people. You’d think that last bit of advice was obvious too, but some surprisingly powerful people struggle with it. C’est la vie.
In any case, if I’d been an engineer I might have just repaired the plumbing myself there and then.
