Home life
Cold comfort
Alice Thomas Ellis
If you really wanted to baffle a Texan or a Japanese or even your mother-in-law, provided she didn't hail from the East End, you could speak as follows: 'I was doing 70 down the frog when the rabbit went in the haddock.' My friend the used-car dealer made this observation the other day and I gazed at him blankly whereupon he elabo- rated. He had been driving at 70 miles an hour down the frog and toad, when the rabbit hutch had failed to function in the haddock and bloater. Got it? For anyone not familiar with rhyming slang, road, clutch and motor are the missing words. He lost me again with a reference to a jolly good cabbage he had recently attended. This turned out to be a party, springing from the phrase 'a cabbage good and hearty'. We all know about the apples and pears, but I am now becoming familiar with more esoteric renderings and very interesting they are. 'A run of luck' speaks for itself but I pondered for some time before I understood that a 'kick in the orchestras' describes a form of GBH. It took me longer than it would have done normally since, I think, my brain has frozen, and this is because the weather is so confoundedly taters*.
Our plumbing problems continue to proliferate. The boiler which serves the central heating has chosen this time to spring a copious leak and surround itself with a tide which rippled in the Force 8 gale sweeping in under the door. The plumber removed the old boiler and sent off for a new one. A new one duly arrived but of the wrong type. (Everyone I have told about this has said: 'But of course they brought the wrong boiler. This is Eng- land.) The man who brought it said he knew it was the wrong one but as they hadn't got the right one he thought we'd rather have the wrong one than none at all and I can't follow his reasoning. Maybe his brain has frozen too. Another boiler has arrived and is sitting there promisingly in its cardboard box — only, now the plum- ber is missing. I rather want to kill him but must remember to restrain myself until he has exercised his craft when I will, at the least, address to him a short homily. The cold is also making me spiteful. A friend was shivering and moaning the other day in the throes of incipient flu and enquiring querulously whether we thought he'd got Aids, and I said it looked to me more like coccidiosis. I'd once seen a chicken looking the way he did and shortly afterwards it had died.
There has just been a reassuring clank- ing of tools heralding the arrival of the plumber, and I am so relieved to see him that I am no longer cross but inclined to embrace him and offer him whisky and half my kingdom. It's the same with children. When they go off for hours leaving no clue as to their whereabouts you promise your- self that when they do reappear you will beat the living daylights out of them. But no; in they bounce and, instead of the good hiding, you make them fatted-calf butties and feebly ask them not to do it again.
The following day: I had to stop writing this because not only my brain but my right hand was frozen stiff. The plumbing situa- tion now is quite intriguing. When the boiler was made fully operational, the plumber developed fears about the feasi- bility of the pump, but after some fiddling pronounced it fit. It isn't. The radiators upstairs are moderately warm but down- * taters in the mould = cold. stairs they are not. Clearly, the pump does not work and the heat, as it will, is rising and is going to stay up there until some mechanical device forces it back to where it's supposed to be. There is also a new puddle sloshing round the base of the new boiler which I find very mysterious and there is no hot water coming out of the taps. The boiler is flaring away and sounds marvellously efficient and I can't think where the heat is going. It can't all be upstairs. I feel limp. Why is it we can put men on the moon but not make the hot water go round? What is it all about?
The only time this week I've felt all right was when we went to see Rosamond Lehmann who is so beautiful and enchant- ing that her mere presence is warming.
Now, I think, I'm going upstairs to hibernate where the heat is, or maybe I'll just have one little tumble in the sink.
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