“Any fool can tell a story. Take a few odds and ends of things that happen to you, dress them up, shuffle them about, add a dash of excitement, a little colour, and there you have it“.
Lloyd Alexander
On many occasions the subjects for these apparently inconsequential ramblings present themselves loud and clear. The trick then is apply just sufficient self-discipline that the jottings remain under some semblance of control – avoiding degeneration into mere protracted purple passages.
At other times scraping together enough mental material to come up with even a medium length post feels like a hopeless task. At such times the best thing to do is usually to seize upon a few short segments – a brief handful of nuggets – and to attempt to polish them up into a coherent totality.
This is one such occasion:
Old and dear friends from the UK are coming to stay with us for a few days, on their way to a road trip to the Rockies. They have not visited Canada before and we will be providing them with a soft-landing so that not everything comes as a complete shock (except, of course, for the sheer size of the country; not much we can do about that).
We were carrying out the necessary preparations for receiving guests (the which is a relatively rare event for us these days) when I detected the unmistakable sound of water trickling from the cistern into the WC in the bathroom. Closer inspection revealed that the flapper valve was quite badly worn in such a way that water could seep out around the margins.
This is not a difficult job for which to effect a fix, so off I trotted to our nearest Home Hardware store (in our village, Saanichton) to purchase a replacement valve.
I didn’t take long to locate a display unit loaded with cistern valves – some of them of the flapper variety. The problem was that – at first glance – I could not see anything that exactly resembled the existing valve (the which I had thoughtfully brought along to act as a guide).
Now, I was not the only chap standing bemused in front of this stack of cistern parts. Another, younger guy – with two small children in tow – was doing the same as me. This, of course, led to the familiar hardware store congestion – the main symptom of which is that some other chap always seems to be standing musing at the exact spot that one needs to be oneself in order that one might get an unimpeded view of the offerings.
After a short ‘chap dance’ a third guy arrived. He too seemed to be fixated on the flapper valves – none of which seemed quite right for him either. I was contemplating going for a stroll around the store – to play for time – when a fourth personage arrived. This time the newbie was a classy looking lady of a certain age, who had – by dint of her superior intelligence – thought to consult the Customer Service desk before locating the plumbing department. As a result she had in tow – a young assistant!
Now, I don’t know what the odds are on four households in a small village such as ours all requiring replacement flapper valves at exactly the same moment – but I didn’t really want to get tied up in the inevitable scrum, so I grabbed a valve whose packaging promised universality of fit and high-tailed it out of the store.
Naturally ‘universal’ turned out not to include our cistern, but fortunately further investigation suggested that Canadian Tire might have a flapper that did…
…as proved to be the case!
