Thursday, February 02, 2006
Pipes, clogged plumbing and inducements
I Thought I'd give you an update on events a couple of weekends ago (the action takes place on Sunday 22nd February 2006. The location is "somewhere in southern England"). It's taken me till now to get round to writing it up.
I turned up at Dave's place at about 10:00. Where we were it was a bright cold day.I assessed the volume and weight of gear to be transported to "The Barn" I proposed that we used my Zafira in place of his Transit (no contest really; more comfortable, faster than "the white slug" and Dave saves the fuel cost). It didn't take long to get the car loaded. Three or four sets of Gamma pipes made the back of it look like the aftermath of a terrible accident in a steel spaghetti factory!
The journey to "The Barn" was uneventful (M25 etc). It's not a bad place. "Barn" is a bit optimistic. It's more an overgrown, homegrown shed, forming part of one side of a square of shabby wooden agricultural buildings quietly decaying around a small yard. The space itself is filled with a long work-bench, a trike, a pile of flight-cases and the wreckage of several bikes. Power is provided by a mobile generator set (and I didn't to ask what one does about other "facilities" - probably the pub down the road). The view out the back is excellent: rolling hills, trees and grazing farm land. Having swapped the exhausts (and wheels for the trike) for a GT750 engine and a crate of small bits we set off home.
For the journey home we took a detour via Guildford. It was a pleasant spin. It would have been even better on a bike, and lots of others seemed to agree with me.
When we eventually got home to Dave's, unloading went without incident and then things started to go wrong. From time to time Dave had complained about the neighbouring waste gully not draining away properly. I noticed that the level in the offending gulley had risen while we were out. As the only properties which emptied into that gulley were either unoccupied, or we knew the people had been out all day, this was highly suspicious. Water rising in drains is generally considered to be a bad thing! I'm afraid I'm not very good at ignoring problems like that, so we hoisted the man-hole. What we found underneath was the original quatermass - a yellow-brown stinking mass of paper, sewage and goodness knows what else,
sprinkled with sweetcorn. As Dave said "we could see what he had been eating" (sweetcorn). Fortunately, technology has not advanced as far as "smellovision" so you're spared the full multi-media experience!
This part of the tale has a happy (if messy) ending. A couple of hours and a pack of drain-rods later we had managed to unblock the drain. For those of you who have never experienced this particular "pleasure" I have a few bits of advice:
And finally, "inducements". I use a "wiki" to contain the documentation for a small private project of mine (a piece of software development which proceeds at a snail's pace because I never concentrate on it). The nice people at "Peanut Butter Wiki" have offered to double the space they give me if I give them a plug. I'm happy to oblige, and here it is:
Get a free wiki at PBwiki.com.
They say their tagline is “PBwiki makes creating a wiki as easy as making a peanut butter sandwich”. I don't know about that - I struggle to make sandwichs but I made one of their wikis without any difficulty. They say every man has his price. Mine must be very low!
I turned up at Dave's place at about 10:00. Where we were it was a bright cold day.I assessed the volume and weight of gear to be transported to "The Barn" I proposed that we used my Zafira in place of his Transit (no contest really; more comfortable, faster than "the white slug" and Dave saves the fuel cost). It didn't take long to get the car loaded. Three or four sets of Gamma pipes made the back of it look like the aftermath of a terrible accident in a steel spaghetti factory!
The journey to "The Barn" was uneventful (M25 etc). It's not a bad place. "Barn" is a bit optimistic. It's more an overgrown, homegrown shed, forming part of one side of a square of shabby wooden agricultural buildings quietly decaying around a small yard. The space itself is filled with a long work-bench, a trike, a pile of flight-cases and the wreckage of several bikes. Power is provided by a mobile generator set (and I didn't to ask what one does about other "facilities" - probably the pub down the road). The view out the back is excellent: rolling hills, trees and grazing farm land. Having swapped the exhausts (and wheels for the trike) for a GT750 engine and a crate of small bits we set off home.
For the journey home we took a detour via Guildford. It was a pleasant spin. It would have been even better on a bike, and lots of others seemed to agree with me.
When we eventually got home to Dave's, unloading went without incident and then things started to go wrong. From time to time Dave had complained about the neighbouring waste gully not draining away properly. I noticed that the level in the offending gulley had risen while we were out. As the only properties which emptied into that gulley were either unoccupied, or we knew the people had been out all day, this was highly suspicious. Water rising in drains is generally considered to be a bad thing! I'm afraid I'm not very good at ignoring problems like that, so we hoisted the man-hole. What we found underneath was the original quatermass - a yellow-brown stinking mass of paper, sewage and goodness knows what else,
sprinkled with sweetcorn. As Dave said "we could see what he had been eating" (sweetcorn). Fortunately, technology has not advanced as far as "smellovision" so you're spared the full multi-media experience!
This part of the tale has a happy (if messy) ending. A couple of hours and a pack of drain-rods later we had managed to unblock the drain. For those of you who have never experienced this particular "pleasure" I have a few bits of advice:
- However bad it seems plunging sewage in the depths of winter, imaging doing the same thing in high(!) summer.
- Think of how much money you've saved (by doing it yourself)
- Never, ever turn the rods anti-clockwise (or they will come to pieces inside the drain!)
And finally, "inducements". I use a "wiki" to contain the documentation for a small private project of mine (a piece of software development which proceeds at a snail's pace because I never concentrate on it). The nice people at "Peanut Butter Wiki" have offered to double the space they give me if I give them a plug. I'm happy to oblige, and here it is:
Get a free wiki at PBwiki.com.
They say their tagline is “PBwiki makes creating a wiki as easy as making a peanut butter sandwich”. I don't know about that - I struggle to make sandwichs but I made one of their wikis without any difficulty. They say every man has his price. Mine must be very low!
# posted by tom_gillies @ 9:59 AM 
