Yesterday was dominated, as you might expect, by my plumbing misadventure when the sink in my en-suite bathroom refused to drain away and despite my best efforts with both a plunger and a drain-cleaning tool (a long piece of wire to insert down the outlet pipe), there was nothing I could do to alleviate things. My local central heating boiler/plumber firm could not come to me for at least a week so I had to consult the web to find someone. I did find a firm which I suspect what actually a franchise although my search term was ‘Blocked sinks in Bromsgrove’. On the phone, I was informed that I would receive a visit later on in the day so I cancelled my other regular commitments and waited in until the firm arrived at 2.30. The plumber who came (who, as it turned out, was ex-army) was incredibly good and allowed me to watch him work whilst he went about his task. What proved to be a life-saver was a wet-dry vacuum with which he sucked all of the non-draining water and the powerful suction of this machine solved the problem completely. Now this would not have occurred to me but the plumber explained that these machines were readily variable at a price starting at £40 and going up to over £100 so a mid-range machine could be got for about £70-£80. Now that I know bout these machines, I am not tempted to actually get one but having read some Amazon reviews, I think I will wait until I ever get another problem and then get one pf these ordered and delivered the next door. The plumber also showed me what he considered his most useful tool and these were drain rods which he used regularly and always with complete success to unblock a toilet. Now these are available for about £15.00 and might be worth having in stock were a toilet to become blocked. Actually, this has happened in the last year or so when one of the are assistants looking after Meg put something inappropriate down the toilet and I think my son and I had to resort to unblocking it by hand. So, as well as paying the fee to get my basin cleared, I feel that I have been a mass of practical advice from a ‘pro’ as it were how to stop problems building up in the first place and the how to cure them when they do go wrong.
Donald Trump has just given a one hour long, confused and confusing tirade at the United Nations Assembly where he was met with smirks. The president, who has clamped down on migrants coming via America’s southern border and ordered immigration raids, warned the UN that immigration and the suicidal energy ideas will be the death of Western Europe if something is not done immediately. He also said Europe was being invaded by a force of illegal aliens like nobody’s ever seen before which made it sound like an invasion from Mars. But most importantly, Trump seems to have completely switched his position on the Ukraine conflict and now thinks that Ukraine could win the war and even win back all of the territory gained by Russia (which most UK military analysts think unlikely by the way) but in his desire to win the Nobel Peace Plan, Trump wants to back a winner and the fact that most of the financial support to the Ukraine is now being provided by the Europeans may have been a decisive factor. We even have Trump, who always vacillates on almost any issue, is now not averse to Russian jets being shot down if they continue with their violations and probing of European air defences. This would not be American jets doing the shooting but the complete change of stance must me very welcome both in Ukraine and Europe as a whole.
The morning turned out not as I would have predicted. Firstly, I got up a little later than usual as the dark mornings mean that I jump out of bed at about 7.0am rather than 6.0am. Today is the day when in the last week or so I have left the house fairly early for a Tai Chi session but I decided to gave this a miss as I knew that my son and his wife were due to call around just after 9.00am which they did. My son gave the fridge a good clean out as the drain screen has a habit of getting blocked so I need to make sure this is regularly maintained. After a long chat with my son and daughter-n-law, I started to walk down into town but bumped first into my Irish friend and then my Italian friend. With the latter I had quite a long talk as she was telling me all about the relationship which she had formed with a fellow bereaved person when they both attended counselling after the death of their respective spouses. This friendship had been going on for at least ten years now but what will happen when my friend moves house to be near her daughter, I cannot say (nor is it any of my business, anyway) but long-established friends often talk about relationships in any case. Then I popped into Waitrose to pick up my newspaper and to buy some ingredients for a meal I am going to cook the next day. On my way back up the hill, my Italian friend was still bobbling about tidying things in her garden and we took the opportunity for another longish chat, carrying on where we had left off about half an hour previously. By the time I did get home, it is way past my usual lunchtime so I made myself my favourite ‘quickie’ lunch which is a tin of tuna with some butter, mayonnaise and Thousand Island dressing all stirred into it and then served on a couple of slices of toast. Idly flicking through the TV channels, I chanced upon the quite famous film of ‘Educating Rita’ which is the story of a working class girl in a not particularly happy marriage who embarks on an Open University course and enters into a relationship with her tutor where in the early stages, they are each struggling to make sense of the other’s worlds. I looked on the web for a summary of the ending and found this. The play deals with the ideas of social class and what it means to be educated. For Rita, education offers an escape from what she considers to be a lacklustre life, but for Frank, it is a rigid system that squelches everyone’s personality. It is up to the reader to decide if Rita was changed for the better by her lessons or if she became exactly what Frank hated about academia. It is also up to the reader to decide if what Frank thinks is truly important. The play is an insightful look into the ways that social class and education can shape who we are. It is also a careful study in the uncertainty of transformation as we go through life wishing for something we do not have.