I’ve been banished to my computer – yes, to it – not from it.

If you have read my About page, you might remember I waxed lyrical about lessive de soude – which is great for unblocking drains. Well, yesterday I put 3 litres of it down the kitchen sink, followed by a whole bottle of washing-up liquid, with a chaser of boiling water; a satisfying  glug from a pipe in the adjoining room made me think the blockage had gone – but that wasn’t the case.
Today it was blocked again.There’s nothing like two inches of greasy water staring up at you to make you feel like a loser.

I should have guessed something was afoot (try explaining that to a French person – not that I needed to, but you can imagine it would cause confusion if you did have to), when my daughter asked me first for a screwdriver, and later for a hammer – which I duly located and fetched respectively.

She managed to remove that receptacle thingy under the sink – only ours doesn’t unscrew, so she had to take off a whole section of the waterworks;she emptied it out, and there were lots of twiggy-looking things in there, as well as other delicacies that came out when she took it outside and washed it through with the  hose. (Hey, don’t y’all call tights hose? We call ’em tights, and we call a hose a hose). But I digress. She managed to put it back together, which saved me from having to say ‘You shouldn’t have touched it’. Got to hand it to her – I had tried to unscrew that thing, but as it had been painted over,and wouldn’t budge, I had given up.

No idea where this is leading – nowhere probably. That’s today’s excitement – apart from I cleaned two village houses this morning; the owners were around, which was a nuisance as it meant I had to mop the floors – well, I didn’t HAVE to, but sometimes you have to trust your instincts.

Remember – you heard it first on Mundane Conversations. More soon!