It’s a Dog’s Life 78

Comedy, they say, is about the timing. But I sense that Tragedy is usually just as much a child of “when”.

The tidal wave that sweeps up the popular tourist beach in off season is a lot less likely to be in the news. Who now remembers the Japanese incendiary baloon campaign of ww2, which arrived in mid winter, and so failed to start any fires (look it up).

As I’ve observed before, I’m sure it’s possible to have a day when you discover that your car is broken, and it’s only a minor inconvenience (possible – not likely!).

However some events are simply just “bad” no matter when they happen:

Asteroid strikes the planet.

Country falls into civil war (or any war#)

Paper Hanky gets left in the washing machine

A sewage pipe you didn’t even know was there, backs up and overflows into the gravel of your garden where the drain cover was buried out of sight.

You get one guess – apart from the paper hanky – which seems to happen a lot .

It took about 36 hours for professional help to arrive, and I can’t fault them for their “handling” of the situation. The blockage (not actually on our property) was resolved, the pipe cleared, and a considerable quantity of…..sewage, transported away. None the less, this still left the question of what to do with the contaminated gravel?

It turns out the answer was; painstaking shoveling it all into piles on the drain and then slucing it down till clean, then shoveling it back.

This barely took an entire day.

(This was solution B. Solution A was to shovel it all away somewhere else and buy new gravel). Then it was necessary to shower several times, then several times more, in fact I may go for another shower…

Happy ending; we finally got everything sorted and cleaned – and the idea that we can still smell anything is only in our minds.

Nex week in IaDL : New computer system in work (Maniacal Cackling to fade…..)

#When ww1(I think) broke out, an English Poet apparently exclaimed that the timing was unfair because her new book was just about to get published and it would (now) get no attention. So possibly war can be ok, provided the dates don’t clash….