I rang Ken our builder on his mobile. It rang and rang and eventually the answerphone kicked in.
I should have insisted that he fixed the taps in the bathroom when he was here last autumn but he was anxious to move on to another job and by mutual consent we agreed the bathroom taps could wait. But now the taps can wait no longer: they have expired. You turn the handle but water flows there none, if you see what I mean. The plastic widget that holds the metal splines of the tap has worn smooth rendering the tap useless. The only thing we can be thankful for is that the tap expired in the off position rather than the on.
Now I don't know whether you've ever had anything to do with taps, but they are a conspiracy on humankind. Not only do the manufacturers contrive continually to change their designs, thus making it quite impossible to replace like with like, but they are hideously expensive to buy. Nor is that all, for you cannot buy the little plastic widget, worth about 3p without buying a whole new tap. I don't call it a conspiracy for nothing.
There are goods that you buy - mobile phones for instance - which make you wonder how anything so complex can be made so cheaply. With taps it is the reverse. We have had taps since Roman times and though they are simple devices involving no complicated technology they still lag behind in the value for money stakes by a mile. Which might be understandable if taps were rare, but most people have at the very least half a dozen in their houses and some many more. Why then are taps so expensive? It's a question to put to the government; it might take their minds off the deficit. Think of all the taps there must be in government offices!
Anyway, there we are, or rather there Ken isn't, so I set off down to the Post Office through the rain and sleet to post a parcel consoling myself that I would pop into Waitrose afterwards for a free regular cappuccino to which my little green loyalty card entitles me daily. Though I have my laptop with me I find - or in this case fail to find - my reading glasses. Luckily I can go over the road to our newly refurbished and ultra-efficient local library and pick up a most excellent pair of reading glasses, gold rimmed, half moon, in a cigar type metal holder for only £4.99, which seems to me to be another piece of incredible value, besides which the purveyors of taps should bow their heads in shame.
So there I am sitting in Waitrose, with my coffee and new reading glasses, and tapping away at the front end of Boraya - which, in case you were wondering, isn't a car but a novel with an overly long introduction from which I have to remove at least 10,000 words of carefully crafted and much sweated over prose. This makes me weep almost as much as the taps. Still it has to be done, but it makes me worried and anxious.
Now Waitrose staff (or Partners as they prefer to be called) are programmed to respond to worried and anxious looking customers and so, before long, Julia makes her smiling appearance beside me. I reassure her that my troubled brow has nothing to do with my inability to choose the right brand of olive oil or a possible absence from the store of Duchy Originals, and that on the contrary I am exceeding content with everything apart from the problem of the front end of my book. Not to waste a conversation with a customer Julia then produces a card and invites me to email a cordial sentence to Waitrose encapsulating my experience in the store that day, for which, she implies, there is a prize of £500.
Now £500 for one sentence isn't bad going. It's about £20 a word. Exeter Writers are running a short story competition with a £500 prize, but for that you have to write 3,000 words, or thereabouts, a mere 20p a word. I intend to enter it. I have a story written. But £500 for one sentence beats this hollow and so when I got home I thought I would compose a particularly soupy paeon of praise to Waitrose customer service in general, and Julia in particular, and I duly ventured into the website to post it. I may have had to wade through a number of survey questions about my grocery shopping, but hopefully my telling observations about customers and staff being one happy partnership have been properly recorded.
In the middle of this I see the answerphone blinking. It is Ken, asking me to ring him back. I do and we make contact. 'I'm in Cornwall,' he says. 'On holiday. I'll ring you next week.' If he's in Cornwall, I think, it will be a bit of a busman's holiday for him what with landslips and houses collapsing. I hope he has taken his tools with him. So, our taps will have to wait. The grandchildren who look forward to splashing in the bath will be seriously put out and we ourselves will have to make do with showers. Meanwhile I live in hope that Ken's bill for installing new taps in the bathroom will be matched by a timely voucher from Waitrose or a cheque from Exeter, but I am not holding my breath.
