Busted Flush

Urrgh... things are just getting on top of me right now.

The lawn outside my house has been slowly but surely turning into a set from "I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here" and so on Sunday morning, I decided I really should do something about it. So, as well as the lawnmower, I got my cordless headphones connected up to my Sky+ box so I could listen to the sounds of Gaydar Radio while I indulged in a bit of horticultural genocide out there. Of course, as soon as I got ready to start, light rain started to fall... but it did clear up later in the day and I managed to fill some black bin liners with grass cuttings. Rather a lot of black bin liners. Anyway, you can at least get to my front door without needing a machete and that's the important thing.

To be honest, I feel like calling up a gardening services firm and slipping them some silver every now and again to maintain the lawn for me. I've never really had any interest in doing the job myself and always end up leaving it for far too long. It's not as if I use the garden anyway - if I owned this place I'd probably just concrete over the damn thing and be done with it.

Anyway, no sooner had I got one problem sorted than another reared it's ugly head. The toileting facilites at Zaphod's place have been problematic for a while, and now the flush on the wretched thing has stopped working completely. Toilets are funny things, you tend to take them for granted until something like this happens. Now when you want to flush the toilet after use, you have to fill a bucket with water and pour that down the pan - which, when you think about it, is all a flushing mechanism actually does. However, it's obviously not something I want to keep doing on a regular basis, nor is it something I'd want visitors to have to put up with, so the professionals had to be called in.

I'm going to need the cistern replaced, as the flushing mechanism is pretty much borked, and it's old and they don't make them like that anymore. Which is another hassle. Mind you, it's taught me never to take things like a working toilet for granted again...

JOHN LENNON - NOBODY TOLD ME
(from the album "Milk And Honey", 1984)