so Thursday night, after karate, we notice that Water is Not Subsiding Properly in the various parts of the house. This happens from time to time and inevitably sorts itself out. Friday - things not better. Worse. Muggins - that's me; man of the house etc etc - is called on to do ManThings. Unclog drains, kill insects, kill arachnids, move heavy objects, pull out weeds, reaarange furniture (under guidance, of course) etc etc. Insert plumber's mate and plunge like no tomorrow. No diggity. No drainage. Attempt to move blockage with handy air-driven can o' drain unclogger thing. No diggity. Suggest we call on one of my ninja-in-training colleagues, David a.k.a. Big D or Haggis, who is also a plumber-in-training. My mother pleads embarrassedness. I am eventually allowed to call for advice. He insists on coming over. Eventually, again, my mother relents and allows him to come and inspect her plumbing, as it were. He is baffled. There is no inspection eye on any of the pipes. These are handy little screw-cap regions which allow you to see into the pipes to see where blockages and shunt poking objects up and down them to remove any rancid drain debris, and are available in all modern homes. Yeah, our builders were pretty shifty. Or fairly short-sighted. NEvertheless, onward! We localise the clog (we think) to the bath or basin in the bathroom. He says either we can untile the bath and get into the pipe that way, or we can dig for the pipes and get in through there. Tomorrow, though, after he has borrowed his mate's sewer-cam (yup, they do make those) and shunted it up the pipe to see if we can spot the clog before uprooting the garden. Either way, he says, quick-quick operation, 2 hours max. Saturday morning, the sewer-cam arrives, along with some rodding irons, which are the twisty pipes you see plumbers screwing together and shoving down drains to follow the layout. The good news is that the sewer itself is clear - no dead cats or people or tree roots or anything stuck in the drain. The bad news is also that the sewer is clear - the drain was not being blocked by Blackbeard's loot, or the Treasure of the Sierra Madre or anything like that, which would have been a nice find, even if purely for the conversation piece of it. The other bad news... we have to dig to find the pipes in their subterranean splendour and pull them apart to find the clog. We dig. And dig. And dig some more. 8 hours later, we have a big, fuck-off hole in the garden. The pipes are exposed. The bad news - we have found a massive leak in one of the pipes carrying water to the house. This thing is losing close to a small lake every minute. The other bad news - we can't stop the leak. The worse news - we have uncovered the clogged pipes, but we can't open them up - no inspection eyes (again) and they are sealed up like a dolphin's backside - watertight - so we can't pull them apart. We could cut them, but at 9:30pm, we cannot get replacement pipes. The worst news of all, we can't do F.A. about the leaking pipe and so have to cut off water to the house for the night. This leak has probably been there for ages without us knowing; but since it is now exposed and filling up the trench we took so long to build, we have to switch it off. Or hire scuba gear to complete Sunday's planned pipe-cutting and draining operation. So Saturday night we had no running water, either. Sunday morning, I'm up early, buying reducing t-pieces (and it seems whoever built our place used a combination of irrigation pipes, proper water-carrying regulation copper pipes, and plain ol' garden hose to actually get water to the house) and various other mismatched items to get it all sorted out. 5 hours into the operation, we have the leak plugged, the pipes cut open and probed and poked and hardcore chemicals flung through them and suchlike and no clog coming out. But, miraculously, the clog is gone. Water is flowing and draining and everything. Praise be - it's taken us two days, we are bruised, cut, battered, sun-burned, shovel-blistered, and looking and feeling our best, but it all works again. For safety's sake, we leave the hole open, just in case we need to get back in there. About 11:30pm, I flush the toilet and discover that it's not draining. Luckily, we left the hole open. Further exploration yesterday afternoon for a couple hours revealed more about who killed JFK than why my pipes are clogged (Okay, someone say it: I'm full of shit - that's why the pipes are clogged). But again, it all seems to be miraculously working. Just like it was on Sunday. Watch this space... -d- ************************* Update: Claire's Master's degree looks like it will be awarded with distinction! My prject supervisor just heard and told her up in Jo'burg and then the rest of us. How cool is that? She was panicking that she would fail, the silly hot girl!