Drains sinks and other fascinating things...

Pleeeeease, after you've done the "getting in touch with your feminine side" bit, fit what you have designed, yourself. Not on a workbench or in a controlled environment, but in a few real life situations. Then you will find out for yourself, why fitters the world over, think designers are plonkers! If you can't fit the stuff yourself, how in the name of God do you expect others to fit it? Please THINK before you commit pen to paper.

Is that so hard to do?

Anyway back to what I was about to write before I interrupted myself!

Changing a kitchen tap is fairly straight forward.

This one wasn't quite so straight forward. Plastic pipework, copper pipework, six different types of plastic, brass, and copper connectors, and four of them weeping quite badly. (Badly enough to have already ruined the kitchen sink cupboard). So much goes on under there. Sink, waste disposal, washing machine, dishwasher, all need connecting, and then the water has to be drained away, and all that in a shoebox sized cupboard.

It's no wonder that so many household disasters happen there.

It took the better part of two hours and two cups of tea to sort it all out. Now the new tap is all bright and shiny, the WM & DW connectors and all the pipework have been changed, the expectant mum's world is back in order. In a couple of months I'll probably have to take it all out again to replace the cupboard that is going to fall to bits because of the previous weeps.

Jane is a very good friend of mine. Seventy-five plus, ex-school teacher, warm, charming, and gifted. She, and her husband John, are Quakers. (By the way, so am I) She has one of those voices that you want to listen to, no matter what she's saying. When she reads poetry, verse or prose springs to life in front of your eyes. Despite all that, she still had a blocked up basin waste pipe. Jane can work miracles with the spoken word - but I know how to clear a blocked waste pipe. Clear the trap under the basin, a couple of judicious taps with a hammer along the pipework and the decades of limescale breaks into little pieces and is flushed away to the sea. Moral: We should all specialise in the things that we're good at, and always use the right tool for the job.