I’m not sure how to describe the last week. I could start at the end I suppose and tell you that I’m sitting in my father-in-law’s kitchen, work laptop out, trying to cope with the tiny screen while my wife sleeps in the next room.
Trouble is, I’m not even sure that’s even the end of the story. In fact, it had really better not be.
Or I could start at the beginning, when Sammy ran upstairs in a panic to tell me that the sink wasn’t draining, and, worryingly, that when I flushed the loo, brown-grey water bubbled up in that sinkful, with bits in it. That was bad. What it turned into has been thoroughly horrible.
At the heart of it as a blockage, probably of decades of limescale and other gunk in a pipe that’s right under our house. Thanks to some bang-up planning from previous owners, the builders built an extension over the only access point to the drain, meaning that underneath our nice shiny kitchen tiles is a manhole that is inaccessible. And that fact has led almost inexorably along a chain of events to a drain engineer ripping a hole in our kitchen wall, drilling into the soil pipe, and flooding our kitchen with sewage.
He couldn’t remove the blockage, and so now, more contractors are going to have to pull apart our cupboards, drill more holes, create more mess, and then replace and clean everything as much as possible - which has left us houseless, and, kipping with family, again.
And that’s just the physical toll. The emotional impact of all of this has been incalculably difficult. I tend to cocoon; Sammy needs to process out loud. Decisions have to be made while one of us implodes and the other explodes.
It’s intensely hard to manage, not to mention the day-to-day reality of having to work and live, and call insurance companies, contractors, and whoever else might need to know what’s going on. I lost the plot on one call, and got infuriated with someone just trying to do their job. I told him to have a good long think about us when he went home that night and washed up his cups and plates and snuggled into a warm house.
What I’ve realised is that I like simple. I like a path of few decisions, that leads more or less directly to where I would like to be. I like those decisions to be controllable, and I like to know that even if they’re not, things aren’t going to balloon - I have a plan. When the probabilities start to multiply, when the path to success is a tangle of moving walkways and interconnected obstacles, that is when I just want to curl into my duvet and hide until it’s all over.
I’ve been an adult for longer than I was a child; I ought to know a bit more about growing up, didn’t I? Perhaps the marker between adolescence and independence is a bit more fuzzy than either I or the law of the land imagined.
Anyway, we’re waiting. In theory the pathway is for a sanitisation crew to turn up and decontaminate, then for a man with a van and some proper tools to show up and get digging some solidified sludge out of a pipe that smells like I wouldn’t want to think about. In theory, that happens over the next few days.
I certainly hope that’s the way it goes. I can’t cope with too many more unpredictables.
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