Daas Boat

Keir's reading a book at the moment which is really holding his interest. It's "Captain Underpants and the Attack of the Talking Toilets". The plot in brief - a couple of schoolboys have accidentally created an army of evil, vicious, talking toilets which are intent on taking over the world. Will Captain Underpants save the day? Would it be giving the game away to say there's another three books in the series... Anyway, you're all wondering why I'm telling you this (except anyone who's been a parent of an eight year old boy obviously - they know how compelling toilet jokes are to this group), well the other evening Keir's bathroom was taken over by something as unexpected and frightening as a talking toilet.

It all started so innocently, like these things do. Keir had just had a shower, and I'd gone in to turn off the shower taps, which are pretty stiff. I left Keir in the bathroom drying himself. All was well. Then Keir yelped, and burst out of the bathroom. As the bathroom door opened, I was covered from waist to knees in a moving plume of really quite warm water. Then there was a loud bang, the bathroom went dark, and the water spurted at me again. So I grabbed Keir, put him behind me, closed the bathroom door and called for Rod. Seemed like the best thing to do at the time.

Rod opened the bathroom door, got covered from waist to knees in really quite warm water, and shut the door. He called for a torch. Because we have so many power cuts we have lots of torches, and they've even got live batteries in them. So armed with a torch he opened the door and we tried to find where the water was coming from, while staying out of range of the plume. It wasn't the shower, nor the basin. Eventually we spotted the culprit. One of the pipes into the hot water cylinder had come out of its socket on the wall near the ceiling. Now that we knew where the water was coming from, Rod had to enter the bathroom to try and stop it. Rod said later: "I felt like an actor in one of those disaster movies, when the submarine has been torpedoed and there's water pouring in to the vessel, and the hero has to go in to stop the leak so everyone is saved and I get the girl". Anyway, our hero climbed onto the toilet seat and isolated the water supply to the hot water cylinder and the water stopped gushing. Not quite as glamorous as they do it in the movies, but it worked. Then we had to try to clean up the bathroom. Thankfully Indian bathrooms are designed to get quite wet. Because no Indian maid, reknowned for being very generous with water while cleaning, has ever been quite this generous in a bathroom before. A day later, once the room was dry we had to go in and change all the lightbulbs. They had shattered in the incident. Still waiting for the plumber to come and reconnect the hot water cylinder. Hopefully he'll do a decent job - this is one movie that can do without a sequel.