Practical problems

The changing of the shower hose has now assumed crisis proportions.

What should have been a simple case of unscrewing the end of the hose from the tap attachment and putting the new one on has filled parts of three long days with increasing frustration and hopelessness.

The trouble is that the bit that should have stayed in the tap, didn’t and I cannot (no matter how I try) get the bit that didn’t stay to leave the bit that has to be replaced.  If you see what I mean.

I have tried brute force and liberal applications of penetrating oil.  Well, I say that, but I don’t really know about the ‘penetrating’ bit, its just oil from a spray can – but I do remember hearing about the ‘penetrating’ bit applied to recalcitrant un-screwable things, so I’m hoping for the best.  Wrong tense there, I have tried to separate the two parts and there was absolutely no movement whatsoever, so perhaps I should have said something like, “I had hoped that the oil would have done the trick, but, alas, I was to be unhappy with the lack of outcome” – that seems complicated enough to mirror the problem!

I have used spanners and wrenches and nothing works.  I went to our local Chinese supermarket and bought things.  And they didn’t work either, so I now have yet more tools that will rest unused in a big plastic toolbox for years to come.

There was a moment’s hope when it appeared that the use of an allen key might be able to be inserted into the tap bit and the purchase gained with a set of pliers might do the trick.  None of the allen keys that I possess was bulky enough so, foolishly I bought a hefty set - and not one of those works either.  The two largest are just too big and just too small to be of any use.

I am beginning to despair.  And I’ve probably paid too much for the completely useless tools that I have bought to try and do the job.

As I live in a rented house and as this is Spain - where no landlord appears to pay for anything, no matter what reason or reasonableness is involved, I am determined not to replace the taps to benefit the rapacious landlords’ future tenants. 

 

The concept of things wearing out and needing to be replaced by the people who actually own the house and who, after all, are getting a substantial rent on a monthly basis, does not apply here.  If it breaks, it appears to be the responsibility of the renter – even if such things are usually covered by the insurance of the house owner e.g. fitments like sinks, baths, toilets.  But what I assumed from the UK does not apply here.  Apparently.

So, a fully justified attempt to deny the landlord a lasting benefit is, it appears, going to cost me more than if I had shelled out the cash for a new set of taps in the first place.

I have not given up entirely.  There must be a shop open (even though this is August and NOTHING HAPPENS in August) with a sympathetic person who has more technical nous than I posses who is willing to take pity on me and use some as yet untired tool and achieve separation.

Saturday is probably not the best day to go around with a woefully winsome expression asking for help.  At this time of the year you are far more likely to get some startled student wondering what the hell you are talking about rather than a competent workperson.  But, as always, I live in hope.

And my failure with the bike spokes is just as complete.

My bike seems to have a penchant for snapping back-wheel spokes.  I have never previously owned a bike where the spokes have broken.  But this one has made up for all of those spoke-solid years by ones breaking on a regular basis.  As I have had to take the bike to the shop to have them replaced, it seemed like a sensible idea to have the raw material (as it were) and do the job myself.  After all, how difficult a job can it be?

The answer, as you will have guessed, is impossible.  At least for me.  

I seem to remember my bike person telling me that he had had to cut them to fit.  So I tried cutting them.  I prefer not to think too closely on the ineptitude of my attempts; I am telling myself that the fret saw I used was the wrong sort – it certainly seemed to blunt its teeth almost instantly.  Disturbingly, the broken one appeared to be the same size as the uncut spokes.  But then there is the problem of fitting them inside the rims. 

 

There is at least a workable solution to this problem and that involves swallowing my pride and taking the bike back to shop, tail between my legs and spokes in my hot little hand and pleading for professionalism.

With both my technical problems, I suspect that there must be a simple solution, but I am buggered if I know what it is.  And part of me doesn’t want to know.

I spent the morning in the library of MNAC in Barcelona looking at the books that they have on Elsheimer.  At least one of them looks ideal for what I want to use in my writing, while most of the others are, not unreasonably, in German - but there are some useful illustrations in them, and there is always Google Translate in extremis!

It was odd getting back into an academic library.  And there is that musty smell that comes with opening old books that you are certain have not been consulted for years!  Heady and depressing at the same time.

I am still in the area of ‘finding out’ about my subject matter and I have not settled on the topic that I want to develop.  But, I’m getting there.  Or at least I’m kidding myself that I am becoming clearer about where I am going.

To go from a life in books in the morning, to one in which I get my hands dirty in the afternoon, is not something that I appreciate. 

 

Perhaps I should.

Failure works!

 

I’m not going to MNAC (the Catalan National Museum of Art) because of the shower.

I am not, I am the first to admit, the most mechanically minded person in the world.  Although I take a passing interest in how things work, I prefer to remain in the area of the theoretical than actually getting my hands dirty.  And the (eventual) making of competently constructed IKEA Billy Bookcases remains my signal achievement in full-on construction.

So, the metallic unravelling of the coiled steel flexible surround to the shower hose was a problem that could be easily ignored because, although aesthetically irritating, the water still flowed and was as efficient as when the metal was ravelled.  Until you take into account going to the beach.

No matter how still the day, when you leave the littoral sand will have adhered to your legs, and hairy legs mean that the sand seems to adhere more closely.  And it further little matters how efficiently you shower the leg-sand forms a sort of carapace which shrugs off vertical attempts to clean.  You stand under a shower and the leg-sand stays; you need to unhitch the shower head and direct the water jets directly at the stubborn silica.

And that is where the problem with an unravelled surround begins to play a major part because the cheap, anemic plastic tube that is revealed as the metallic trappings fail becomes susceptible to kinking and stopping the water flow.  It has to be replaced.

Now, I have done this before and I know that it is not really that difficult.  The only problem arises if you lose one of the washers that seal the joints or if its rubber or plastic has perished and only the pressure of its situation keeps it operating.  Opening up the joint sometimes is the last gasp of the washer’s efficiency and the thing has to be replaced as soon as it touches the atmosphere.  This did not deter me as I have a supply of washers.  Where they are I know not of, but I know that they exist.  

 Probably.

I had bought a new tube and it has lain in my bathroom like some sort of fashionable snake for the period of time necessary to galvanize me into eventual action.  And the old one did not unscrew by finger power.

At this point it is probably necessary to inform the reader that the water in Castelldefels is a trifle hard.  And when I say trifle, I am being ironic.  Our water is virtually undrinkable.  Undrinkable, but safe.  

Virtually everyone here buys bottled water to drink.  Water for everything else, e.g. the dishwasher, washing machine etc all need to have an anti-calc tablet added to the cycle.  I do make tea and coffee with tap water, but that was only after a battle royal with Toni who regards tap water as a necessary evil rather than an essential part of everyday life.

The shower head came off quite easily – but that particular part has been replaced on numerous occasions – it was the bath tap connection that was the more problematic.  Even the application of mechanical force via pliers did not budge the thing.  A tentative exploration of the under-tap connection revealed something that felt as though it had been hung in Mother Shipton’s cave for a considerable period of time.  It appeared that the connection was fused on to the tap screw.

After considerable thought stretching into the Nano seconds, I squirted a variety of cleaning materials at the joint and gave it a brisk rub with a scourer.  

 And tried again.   

Nothing.

I then had recourse to a more substantial pair of pliers and what passes for brute strength for me, and, lo and behold! something moved.

When I had finally unscrewed the hose, I discovered that the hose connector and the tap connector had come out as one piece.

Separating those two is something that I could not, and Toni (the reserves had been called in at this point) could not budge.  So, I went to bed.

But just before I hit the sheet (it’s too hot for more!) I attempted to screw the old thing back in again so that I could have a shower in the morning.  And it didn’t work.  So, I went to bed and dreamed uneasy dreams about replacing the old tap with new and the resultant cost and floods that would inevitably ensue.

Once you have got used to showering, the mere idea of washing yourself in a sink is tantamount to pre-Victorian barbarity.  I therefore asked Toni to “have a look at it”, which he did and, of course, managed to get the old hose back on to the tap and I was able to have my customary extended shower.

However, the emotional stress of uneasy dreams together with the ritual humiliation of plaintively asking for help sapped my determination to go into Barcelona and get a parking space before the hordes descended.  Also, I had slipped back to sleep and, once you get anywhere near the 10.00am opening time for MNAC then the chances of finding a parking space anywhere in the (free) car park adjacent to the gallery are non-existent.  So, I gave up and settled for the old routine of typing and a swim to fill the time from here to lunch.

The changing of the hose has just been delayed until the requisite number of spanners can be found to give extra heft to intent.  For somebody other than my good self!

And I have also told myself that my visit to the library of MNAC will be of more use when I have received the first of my Elsheimer books that should start arriving in the next few days.  I will be able to give myself a more thorough grounding in the artist’s life and work and I should also be able to start developing a bibliography that should be give more concrete points of reference for use in an art library.

It is truly wonderful how ineptitude, failure and laziness can all be manipulated into coherent strategy!

Don’t knock it, it’s a way of life!

First, catch your metaphor!

 

The Internet is sometimes like an over eager and terminally earnest student scientist friend who tries to answer seriously and comprehensively a casual question like, “So, how do neutron bombs actually work then?”  And fails to notice the growing hysteria in his listeners as they realize that they are stuck in a comprehensively incomprehensible monologue.  And I speak from experience!

So, I was thinking about my activity in our outside pool.  Our pool is surrounded by trees, including the pine trees that give their name to our district and, although these trees are evergreen they also discard their needles throughout the year – and a fair quantity of them fall into our pool.  We do pay for our community pool to be cleaned and serviced, but the constant rain of pine needles and cones is a problem on a daily basis and our pool persons are not that frequent visitors.

If you are a regular swimmer you will know how unsettlingly irritating a single strand of free-floating hair can be, so imagine the shock of a series of sharp pointed pine needles can be – especially if you have just come from our stretch of the Med where for the past week or so we have been dealing with an outbreak of medusas (jellyfish) that do sting, so the instinctive reaction to anything sharp in water is to fear future pain.

My major swim is in our local pool (medusa free) where I generally swim a metric mile and feel quite smug about it, so our community pool is more relaxed semi-swimming.  And this is where the thoughts at the beginning of this writing come in.

As I dislike being pricked by pine needles, I of course, assume that no one else likes it either.  I have therefore taken, in my community pool swims, to skim the surface collecting the pine needles and throwing them out of the water.

From time to time I perform (what I consider to be) an elegant surface dive to retrieve and discard the seed cases and fractured cones that litter the floor of the pool.  So, in my mind, after the mindless lengths that I do in the swimming pool, I feel that I have a sort of purpose in our community pool.  Just like those fish that are kept in aquaria solely to clean the place up.

And I should have left it at that. 

But no, I decided to examine my image in a little more detail and typed a fateful enquiry into the box and got sucked in to a whole wealth of information in the same way that I did every time I ever ventured to look inside the Guinness Book of Records.  But the digression with the Book of Records is of a different nature to that in the Internet.  I have started off trying to find out the size of the largest uncut diamond ever found and ended up being fascinated by the wing span of birds.  With the Internet you tend to go deeper into the same thing in a profoundly superficial way!

I now know more about sand sifting stars, gobies, Cory doras, freshwater catfish, bluestreak cleaner wrass, grandpa snails, suckermouth catfish and Nerite snails, than is strictly necessary for a quiet life.  I have also discovered an intense community of fish lovers who are truly preoccupied with the problems of aquarium cleaning.  I mean really, truly, preoccupied!

 Think that I have realized a valuable life lesson: metaphors and similes are approximations and, unless you are a Shakespeare, the depth of your metaphor only reaches down a single level of association and the further you research your initial thought the further, like the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella - so to speak.