In the normal way, I don’t think much about water – hot water, that is. But last week there was no hot water in any tap in the house, and the central heating, which is the main way the house keeps warm, simply wasn’t working.
It should, I suppose, have made me humble and grateful that I’m not normally forced to be freezing and filthy, but it didn’t. It made me furious. Why did the heating machinery wait until it was nearly November to go on the blink; why didn’t it have its trouble in the summer, when cold water would have been fairly acceptable? Why did I have to have heating that depended on water at all?
I tried to pile on more clothes, I tried swinging my arms about, I almost got to the point of muttering the mantra that is supposed to cheer in anything but shipwreck: “I am an Englishwoman, I was born in wedlock, I am standing on dry land.”
Standing? I was jumping up and down swinging my arms about. People used to say that such things “are given us to keep us humble”. I would have thought it was blasphemous to imagine the Lord mucking up the machinery. Now that a huge cheery plumber has replaced the faulty part, I don’t feel particularly humble – just relieved and determined to get an electric fire.
What do you think? Have your say below
