I’ve just called the plumber. Ballcock trouble. He is coming sometime today. I say “he”; I’ve never met a female plumber, a plumbress, perchance, though doubtless they must exist. I could imagine a billboard for job opportunities featuring a young lady in chic overalls, supine with a spanner beneath a U-pipe, a smudge of grease on a cheek. I hope she comes soon. And I hope my problem can be solved by the tightening, or loosening, of a screw. But I’m not optimistic. There will be some kind of deep pipe thrombosis betwixt my house and the main street, unamenable to catheterisation and requiring open surgery. The road will be up for weeks.
I’ve never been any good at waiting around for tradespeople. I feel as if I’m under house arrest. And I can’t settle to anything. I have a blog to write and I’m preoccupied conjuring dark scenarios about how the bathroom issues might pan out. It was the same when the ball was on the other foot and I was on call in medicine. I could never settle to any substantial task whilst waiting for the phone to ring. I could only stare inanely at the telly, or do another crossword. Incidentally there was a terribly good clue in last week’s Engimatic Variations, something like, Compound fracture set in Birmingham A & E (5).
Ester.
Ester? I hear you ask.
Cryptic crossword clues are made up, by and large, of a definition of the solution, and an alternative means of constructing it, designed to send you down the wrong path. Here, the defining word is “compound”. You are then instructed to “fracture” set, or break up the letters, and place them in Birmingham A & E. Birmingham A & E is “ER”, because it is not Birmingham the terminus, as we now know, of HS2, but Birmingham Alabama. Hence Ester.
I know. I need to get out more. But that’s the point. I can’t. I’m stuck, waiting for the plumbress. It’s all the more galling as it is a lovely day, preternaturally warm for October, and, after the deluge over the weekend, blessedly dry. Still, I can’t complain. I’ve been out and about. Having spent a considerable amount of time in the cloistered realms of Academe, I think of October as the start of the new term, Michaelmas, and it is good to re-establish routines. On Tuesday I went to my first orchestral concert of the new season, given in this case in the Grand Hall of Stirling Castle by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. It is a medieval hall with, under its recreated and highly elaborate wooden ceiling, a fine acoustic. The SCO played a concerto for viola and clarinet. The composer was Max Bruch, the conductor Maxim Emelyanychev, clarinettist Maximiliano Martin, and viola player Max Mandel. We were, as they say in the world of aviation, “max’d out”. I played the concerto last year with the Dunblane Chamber Orchestra – not the solo part, I hasten to add, but within the orchestra’s rank and file. It is a lovely, melodic piece, but already at its first performance in 1912 (the viola player was Bruch’s son Max Felix), Bruch’s musical idiom seemed old-fashioned to the concert-going public. It wasn’t “progressive”. It’s a point of view that still dominates orchestral programming today. All that beautiful music never gets a hearing. There’s just no time, because Mahler 3 is so long.
We had our second German class of the term on Thursday in the Goethe Institut in Glasgow. Viel Spaß. Afterwards I took a walk through Kelvingrove and attended the 1.00 pm organ recital in the Art Galleries. Another routine. The following day I had a beautiful walk with friends around the perimeter of the campus of Stirling University, and even on Saturday, when the heavens opened, I managed a walk around the airts and pairts of Stirling Park and Ride while charging my car up. And on Sunday I walked round Milngavie Reservoir. The cloud base was very low and the jets 1,000 feet above our heads on final approach to Runway 23 at Glasgow were invisible. A tranquil, still, autumn day.
A kettle of small beer. Still, better that than a kettle of stinking fish. I shouldn’t sweat the small stuff. The world is going to hell in a handcart and I’m exercised because I can’t flush the loo. Still no sign of the plumber.
But soft! A text: “The engineer is now on their way to your property.”
Note the choice of pronoun – “they”. The plumber may yet be a plumbress. All will be clear between 12.16 and 12.46.
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jamescalumcampbell 