The Drain Man Cometh

Hello dear reader and welcome to another Sunday in the Yorkshire Wolds. I hope life is treating you reasonably well and the sun is shining in your corner of the world. Our Spring weather has been extremely mixed. We had some beautiful hot and sunny days in April, but May has been very mixed so far. As I write,  heavy rain is falling and I think there are some hailstones mixed in with it. Even the ducks have run for cover. I hope they will go and inspect their winter quarters - their old pond at the edge of the village. With a bit of luck it might have filled up again and they might just go back to where they belong. In my dreams ..!

As you will observe from the title of this piece, we have had a little drain problem. Oh, looking at that sentence, I love the understatement. I think I have been married to Spouse for too long and have adopted his habit for minimising catastrophe.

In fairness, we have not had a catastrophe, but drain problems, yes. Lovely though it is to live in the Yorkshire Wolds, we suffer with very hard water. The dreaded limescale. Every couple of years, Yorkshire Water comes along and flushes through the main pipes to shift the build up of limescale. Yes … I’m sure you want to know all this detail, or maybe not. But, dear reader, it is pertinent to our plight and if you don’t have limescale problems you are very blessed.

I think in other Yorkshire Wolds books I have described Spouse’s many adventures with his drain rods, hence his monika of ‘drain man’. Well, to his great credit, when our outside drains seized up altogether, he deployed his drain rods with great zeal and dexterity in heroic efforts to clear whatever blockages were causing us problems. Dear reader, imagine - our lavatory and shower only just working and then with some difficulty. I did not like the idea of having to stand out in the rain with a bar of soap to keep clean and I don’t suppose the neighbours would enjoy the sight either - they would probably think I had finally lost the plot altogether.

With great reluctance, Spouse admitted defeat. Something had to be done. And that something was our pipes and drains insurance. Hurrah, don’t I bless the day we took it out. Believe me, I do!

“Dave the Drain Main”

Dave, the drain man was duly summoned. Dear reader, you would love Dave. A six foot five inches, cheery giant, as broad as a barn door, huge smile and merry blue eyes. Dave arrived with a van full of mysterious looking equipment and we left him to his investigations

I am not very tekkie I have to say, but I was fascinated by Dave’s array of kit. He had a laptop connected up to a roving camera on the end of one of his drain roads that he put down our drains to locate the source of the problem. And voila, great chunks of limestone were revealed on the screen. Like stalactites and stalagmites, the limestone had built up over time and taken up residence in our pipes.

‘Mmm, job for the warthog’, says Dave. I looked at him askance. ‘A warthog?’ Images of a large wild-pig like creature with massive tusks came to mind. He surely didn’t have one of those lurking in his van. Did he? Tusks to shear the limescale off the walls of the pipes?

‘Aye,’ says Dave. ‘Job for the warthog,’ and went off to his van. Oh my goodness, he means it! Being a bit of a coward, I lurked uneasily in the doorway to the house, ready to bolt indoors at the first sign of trouble. Silly me, dear reader. Of course it wasn’t a real warthog. I could see why it was so named though. You know when they cut though coal faces or giant rocks to make a tunnel through - it was like a mini one of those. Attached to the portable generator in his van, (I wonder what else he had onboard? Microwave oven for his lunch maybe?) Anyway, the warthog made swift work of our limestone, as it drove all before it and happy, happy days, water could flow freely once more.

The warthog is now my favourite animal and Dave my favourite person next to Spouse. I can resume my ablutions with confidence and not frighten the natives with outside bathing. And … dear reader, a new heavy duty water filter is on order to fix on our mains tap. Fond as I am of Dave and his warthog, I hope we don’t need their services again anytime soon.

Goodbye for now and have a lovely day. Here in the Yorkshire Wolds, the rain is still falling and I rejoice in it. Maybe our ducks will depart to their old winter pond. Oh how I live in hope!