January 15 2007

I've come up with an innovative way to become more aware of how much water you waste every day - try waking up on a Sunday morning with a shower where your living room used to be.

Of course it had to be Sunday, the only day I tend to get any kind of lie-in, that I was woken early by my other half telling me there's a leak coming through the ceiling. "Do I look like a plumber?" I mumbled, it didn't go down well. Sunday also happened to be the day we had 10 people coming round for lunch.

You can cook for 10 people without water right?

Out come the assorted screwdrivers and wrenches I've acquired over the years, off comes the bath panel and, yep, there's a leak. I look into my 'tool box', look at the leak and realise there's not a thing I can do about it.

I know the washer's gone. I know it's a simple job to fix. I know I don't have the tools or the know-how to do it. I rummage in the tool box just to be sure. Three screwdrivers of assorted sizes. Two adjustable wrenches of different colours and more rawl plugs, tacks and misshapen screws than you can shake a stick at. Oh, and a stick.

I could rush down to Focus, buy the right kit, come home, spend time trying to fix it when I should be trying to fix the roast beef, make it worse than before then call a plumber. I choose to skip to the last stage.

More on that later, first, back to my original point.

After realising I couldn't fix the leak my first course of action was to switch off the water at the stopcock. Instantly you realise how much water you use every day. Suddenly we can't shower, wash in the sink, use the toilet or brush our teeth. The dishwasher with the dishes we need for lunch has to switched off half way through the cycle. We can't even fill the sink to wash up.

The heating has to be switched off at the boiler. We can't clean the house.

Then it comes to lunch. No water to wash the veg, none to keep them in once they're prepared, none to cook them in. None to make gravy. I dash down to the 24-hour garage at the end of the road and buy?four litres. As the dinner preparation goes on, it all disappears.

When the guests turn up we have to politely inform them there are no toilet or handwashing facilities. That's okay when your guests include five children, right?

When we start asking what drinks they want, we try to persuade the kids to stick to dry sherry and?shiraz instead of squash and water. After dinner, spills mopped up with wet-wipes, we offer coffee and tea all round, using the best Derren Brown tactics to try to persuade people to say 'no thanks'.

But, at the end of the day, we survived our six-hour drought.

We realised we could get by without leaving the tap running for teeth brushing. You don't have to flush the toilet every time you use it. You can get away with much less water even when cooking three kinds of veg and 'real gravy'. Okay, it was only a few hours, but it was a real eye-opener as to how?little water we can actually get away with using when we are?pushed into it.

Not as much of an eye-opener, however, as entering into the world of trying to find a plumber. I quickly realise that this is a 'world', entirely seperate from the world in which we live, with its own reality and its own time continuum.

In the ordinary world in which we live, no call-out charge, one-hour response, means they won't charge you just to come to your house, and they'll be there in an hour. In PlumberWorld it means ?120 call-out charge and we'll be there 9am Tuesday.

And this isn't just the 'cowboys' I'm talking about. My first instinct when opening the Yell, the online Yellow Pages, was to go for the big shiny companies and the names I recognised. British Gas may say no call-out, for example, but they wanted to charge a call-out and they also wanted me to sign up to a monthly scheme before they would turn up. Oh, and they don't do taps. "What!?!" I garbled down the phone at the end of a lengthy conversation with a British Gas woman, the fourth I had been passed to in my quest for a dry lounge. "We don't do taps." She said. I couldn't think of a reply, so I just put the phone down. Drain Doctor and Dyno thingy were similar stories.

I tried a few more of the big names. The story was the still same. At least if this world has its own reality, everyone living in it sticks to the same rules. I appreciate that, a solid internal narrative is important if they want the punter to maintain suspension of disbelief.?I tried a few local plumbers. No chance, they laughed. So I tried a big ad, name I didn't recognise, but it looked like they'd spent a lot of money to advertise. Has to be legitimate right?

First impressions were good. They said someone would be there in 90 minutes. Yes, they were going to charge me ?120 an hour. But it was?a washer, it would only take even the most inept of plumbers 10 minutes to fix.

90 minutes later, as I was basting the organic roast beef from a Ruby Red herd in Exeter, the phone went. So begins the first of a series of calls making excuses as to why the plumber wasn't at my house, getting me back my water.

And so it went on, every 90 minutes through the day, more excuses, 'we'll be there in 90 minutes'.

Eventually I give up waiting for that 90 minute call, slow and inevitable as Chinese water torture, and I call them, to be told my appointment is actually for 9am Monday. Now, anger isn't my thing, but let's just say the hot water tap in my bathroom wasn't the only thing exploding at that particular point.

"But you said..."

"I know what we said, now we're saying 9am Monday"

"But..."

"We'll see you tomorrow at 9am."

"I can't go without water until tomorrow morning I've..."

"We'll you're going to have to, see you tomorrow."

Down goes the phone, in I dive to Yell, pick another large and shiny add, talk to a very nice lady who assures me someone will be with me within the hour.

Five minutes later my phone rings, "Hello Mr Shaw, I've got some good news for you."

"Oh yes," I reply, my voice cheery and hopeful for the first time in hours, even through the parched throat "Yes, you've just double booked us. We'll see you at 9am tomorrow."

"But..." I now approach a similar state of emotion to that which would have been displayed by my gas boiler if I hand't turned it off "...so what do you want me to do, what do I have to do to get a plumber out here now?" I gush.

"Nothing you can do," the man in a Birmingham call centre chuckles, "Most of the ads in the Yellow Pages will come through to us. See you at 9am."

And down goes the phone. I was about to detonate a blast that would have left half of my neighbourhood uninhabitable for 100 years when in comes the wife. She who couldn't fix the problem at 9.30am without waking me up has now, after six hours of raising my blood pressure to something higher than the pressure of water in a street main, has decided to take action. One of our guests has pointed out that a plumber lives three doors up from us. She's been to see him, he's on his way.

Let's just say I delighted in calling back Mr Birmingham again, "Look I've told you Mr Shaw..." he starts, I interupt, "Just cancel the order thanks, I won't see you at 9am tomorrow."

As predicted it took just five minutes. Simon Reddy, a fully-qualified plumber and lecturer in plumbing for 16 years studying education and preparing for a four-year doctorate in education, fixed my washer. He is as disappointed as I am in the state of the plumbing industry in this country, and bemoans the fact youths are pouring into the industry lured by the thought of ?125 an hour. With just 12 weeks training, in a classroom, they can set themselves up with no accreditation or affiliation and set about annoying the general public.

Mr Reddy has a plan, he wants to use his doctorate to become a vocational educational consultant and set about teaching people how to really teach plumbers.

He wants to see all vocational education done in the field, back to the old apprenticeship scheme, with classroom teaching the exception rather than the norm.

Before my conversation with Mr Reddy I was contemplating educating all plumbers using my selection of adjustable wrenches and the application of unneccesary force to their skulls. But as?he took a quick tour of my house giving free estimates and advice on work I could get done if I want, slipping now and again into Latin to fully explain the odd point, he soothed my savage breast.

Can I give you any advice from my Sunday in purgatory? Well, no. The best I can say is, if you have a good plumber hang on to them. If you are a plumber, try dealing with your customers with a little honesty and respect. Online or offline when it comes to finding any tradesman don't rely on a big name or a big advert, there is no guarantee the service will be better. With any online interaction, always make sure you know where the person you are dealing with is operating from, and if you can get that service locally, even if you do the research and contact online, so much the better.

Also, try cutting down on your water consumption, maybe even turn off your stopcock for a few hours to try it out.

Oh, and never deal with a plumber based in Birmingham.

January 5 2007

Happy New Year! Apologies for the delay in updating this blog. I had meant to write nearer to Christmas but was rather distracted by one of my presents. A violent stomach bug kindly given by my two-year-old nephew.

Generous to a fault, he gave the same gift to the entirety of three different families over the festive season. On the downside it meant I ate and drank nothing for three days, spent two more days restricted to toast and water and couldn't play with my new sonic screwdriver for the best part of a week.
On the upside I lost a stone even before the New Year's Resolutions kicked in.
So that's my diet tip for the year, find a small, sick child and rub them all over yourself.
But, before the illness, we did manage to enjoy a virtually organic Christmas.
Much of the food for the feast was ordered online, many of the recipes were researched online and much of the complex calculation required to cook a Christmas meal for 13 were done online, using NASA's latest supercomputer.
"Computer, I'd like to cook a giant turkey with three kinds of stuffing, four different vegetables, roast parsnips in maple syrup, real gravy and Nigella's goosefat roast potatos without getting up before 8am, and have it on the table for 12.30pm."
"Im afraid I can't let you do that Dave."
You get the gist.
The turkey itself, a 12lb beast, was ordered online weeks in advance from Well Hung Meat in Buckfasteligh and led an idyllic, organic life in the fields of Fowey before arriving at my door plucked and chilled on December 23.
I avoided online shopping for most of the vegetables, knowing that Tesco has a strange habit of throwing in the most bizarre of substitutes if they run out of the thing you ask for. You could order organic parsnips, organic brussels and organic cranberry sauce and instead end up with a small Mongolian tribesman pondering the meaning of faith in the 21st century. Or a bottle of Cif.
So shopping was done in 'the real world' at two supermarkets and a farm shop, but some of the trickier ingredients did involve online shopping and research.
I was determined to ensure all ingredients of every element were organic, which involved ordering the icing sugar for the Christmas cake from a mill shop in the north of England.
You will find, if you ever develop the desire to eat organically to an obsessive compulsive level, that the internet is the only way to track down all the ingredients you need.
And then back to the net for recipes. I tracked down several different versions of sausagemeat stuffing online so I could modify my dad's recipe to cater for my other-half's dad's tomato allergy. Is there no end to what you can do with the world wide web? Did Tim Berners-Lee ever envisage this is what his invention would be used for? Why would you put tomato in sausagemeat stuffing anyway?
And finally various websites allowed me to convert pounds to kilos, farenheit to celsius and perform various other complex calculations to ensure the meal hit the table just an hour later than planned with potatos slightly overdone and brussels just half-cooked. The under-cooking was, by the way, deliberate and thanks to the net. Just tap sulphur and sprouts into Google for the reasoning, but to cut a long story short it means the only smells in your lounge after Christmas lunch are pine needles, chestnuts roasting on an open fire and children regurgitating too much chocolate while bouncing around on moon shoes.
So in the post-25/12 world it is time to start making your resolutions, and going organic is one you could consider.
Check out the benefits at whyorganic. Personally, we ignore the tree-hugging hippy stuff about organic farming being better for producers and the environment. The only reason we're happy to pay twice the price for a bag of carrots is to avoid the kilos of fungicides, insecticides, herbicides, chemical fertilisers, genetically modified organisms, radioactive elements and chemical colourings, flavourings and preservatives we would otherwise eat each year.
Yes, the Government says these chemicals aren't dangerous in the levels you find them in food. Yes, they also said that about DDT, Thalidomide and the Teletubbies.
Truth be told, some of the chemicals are dangerous at any level, the legally permitted herbicide Atrazine, for example, has been found even at levels of one part per billion, to cause male frogs to turn into female frogs and start producing eggs.
So yes, my apples are more expensive than your apples, but at least I won't have to spend my money on college education for a thousand tadpoles.
Interest in organic food is growing rapidly in the UK. By January 2005, 686,100 hectares of land was managed to organic standards. Organic food sales increased from just over £100 million in 1993/94 to £1.21 billion in 2004 (an 11 per cent increase on 2003).
The movement isn't new, in fact the principles go back to the start of industrial agriculture. And while all the study and research on whether pesticides are good or bad is conflicting, the Guardian (aaagh, I'm reading the Guardian and eating organic food, break out the emergency Big Macs) summed it up beatifully in an article last June weighing up the benefits of organic and dangers of pesticide. Journalist Leo Hickman found that the chairman of the Advisory Committee on Pesticides, which is the committee that advises the Government on pesticides, Professor Jon Ayres, eats organic.
If you intend to make it a resolution to join the revolution (and no, you don't have to move to a hippy haven like Totnes to do it) check out The Soil Association and Wikipedia for more information and The Guardian website for places to buy organic.