Hoots & Havers with James Irvine Robertson May 2005

The tap is called a Solna Sapphire but the net showed no sign of the company’s existence. I was hoping to by a new set of guts for thing and screw them into place but it became clear that a replacement for the whole fitment was needed. So I found a hammer and a crowbar to bash down half the wall to get to the water pipes and, of course, the water had to be turned off. This is a saga in itself and one necessary element is a balloon which goes over an outlet pipe in one part of the system.

With much trepidation I won the first hand of the game by managing to pull things to bits at the business end of the bath without doing too much damage and exposed all the spider webs and the junk that were put into wall cavities to save the original builders from clearing up properly. I achieved access to the pipes and, feeling a bit like the midwife to a ewe, was able to slide my hand in the gap and remove the taps. Then went winging into Perth to buy new ones.

But the bathroom then upped the stakes. The new tap had a shorter fitment than the old one. It took me the best part of an hour to figure out why I could not connect it but I was not beaten & returned to Perth to buy a longer tap. But they’re now standard lengths and I was sneered at by the staff of B&Q & Wickes. So I need to get an extension to the pipes and this is beyond me, particularly since the whole operation has to be performed through a narrow slot by touch alone. The old taps are temporarily back in place and I await the expert.

The bathroom is still hoping that the bath will need to come out. This will require ripping out another wall along with lots of tiny tiles and removing panels and cupboards. And once that has been done, it’d be less hassle to start from scratch and replace the green bits with white ones. But it can sod off. It can wait till I win the Lottery and that may be a wee while since I’ve never bought a ticket.

* * * *

What a very odd election we’ve just had and I hope it is not the template for all elections in the future. It’s been obvious since the demise of Thatcher that the policies of the major parties were virtually identical. The minute differences and adjustments to tax-and-spend between them could be written on the head of a pin.

So we were reduced matters like how often and how thoroughly NHS staff would be told to wash their hands - in England, of course. Scottish hands are controlled by Holyrood. The Iraq war raised its head but that fox was shot when Howard turned out to be more bellicose than Blair and even less inclined to follow the legalities.

I don’t think it was the fault of the politicians. The experts have discovered that the sections of the electorate that matter don’t take on board words and concepts of any complexity. In order to win, which is the prime directive in politics, anything more difficult than the width of Blair’s smile and the length of Howard’s canine teeth was therefore airbrushed out of existence. And both of them had a torrid time since the campaign, perforce, had to reduce itself to personality.

Locally all that caught my attention was a lamentable communication from the Tory addressed to my wife which honked on about better health service, more fuzz, more teachers, castration for yobs etc. In fact almost all the issues mentioned were nothing to do with him or Westminster but entirely within the remit of Holyrood. Nonetheless he chewed his way into the SNP majority and it looks as if we’ll be a marginal next time. That’s a grim prospect because the experts will decide to that we’re worth being fed into their computers and will blitz us with paper. We may even have all the candidates beaming at us from our doorsteps.

There are serious choices to be made on very serious issues - pensions and global warming come to mind. But the solution to the first will greatly increase taxes and the second will demand nuclear power. Neither of these are simple, neither will be popular, neither will attract votes so both were ignored by the politicians. And they could not do otherwise and hope to win. All we can do is vote for the ones we trust to make sensible decisions on matter on which we are never consulted.

And which MPs would you like to go into the jungle with?