DERBLUH-VAY-SAY. Part two. Why did my wife recommend I pay any price to have our French house connected to the main drains? (see Where there's muck there's mind expansion, May 12). In retrospect, the alternative hardly bears thinking about.
Access to the septic tank was via a trapdoor in the bathroom floor. The moment when the concreted cavity reached capacity was unmistakable. Time to contact the emptyist.
He arrived by tractor towing a large barrel on wheels. In turning into the adjacent alley the trailer brushed against the corner of our house causing a vent at the end of the barrel to open. Unspeakably.
A hose had to be passed through the bathroom window but was too wide for the protective bars. Why not, I suggested, widen the bars with the thingummyjig for raising a car? The emptyist's eyes widened. "Ah, un clic!" Which was a first for me.
The bars were bent slightly and the hose lowered into the unspeakability. A pump started up on the tractor. In the bathroom the emptyist's father, staring avidly, watched the level drop, reciting "Impeccable. Impeccable." - each syllable separated as if it were part of a liturgy. My wife was at this time wandering through fields probably a kilometre away.
The connection fee to the sewers was the predicted £2000. Neither of us complained.
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2 comments:
Ah sewage solutions! De rigueur topic od conversation for any who dwell here.
Welcome to blogging; your x-certification is a matter of much curiosity and nonplussedness, my guess is someone with a very small and twisted mind must have flagged you, but why... who knows. The list of people on Blogger who cite firearms as one of their interests is long, no-one seems to see fit to vituperate them.
Anyway, this is most interesting and amusing, and I'm glad you've stepped out from the shadows at Joe's.
And thanks for your original encouragement. Strange how, despite my avowed subject-matter, my posts seem to turn inevitably towards France. It's already happened three or four times in a mere 25 posts and there are more in my imagined pipeline. Belated if indirect tributes to the menuisier, the macon and - especially - that hero-figure M. Chauvel, le plombier, who all did good work and corrected my French so gently.
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