Wednesday 22 October 2014

Conveniences

This weekend I stayed with one of my friends in Guildford. He has a beautifully appointed bathroom with a perfectly useable toilet. I once stayed with him after he had stripped out the old bathroom and before he put in the new one. So that the house was still "habitable" he had left a toilet plumbed in. It was the most dangerous toilet in Surrey. At your knee was an unsupported and temporarily capped gas pipe. At your feet an unterminated live mains cable. The toilet itself wasn’t stable or attached to the fabric of the building, it was resting temporarily on wooden wedges to bring it up to the height where the new floor would eventually be. If you moved it or knocked it over you could have fractured the water pipe and the soil pipe and so flooded the flat with both fresh water and sewage, or electrocuted yourself, or gassed yourself, or exploded the house. I paid close attention to the safety briefing and operator instructions, the two most important points were 1) no smoking, 2) no fidgeting.

Richard "I think I can wait" B

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