Four Candles

I am in the new house in Penryn, well I say new, it's actually a Grade 2 Listed Eighteenth Century cottage, a fact which particularly enrages a specific London-based producer who believes such things should be out of my price bracket, so I like to mention it as often as possible.

GRADE 2 LISTED EIGHTEENTH CENTURY COTTAGE.

It is, of course, in a right two and eight (state). Our plumber, a nice man called Steve, calls round to drain the system and plumb in the cooker and fiddle with the oomph-thing and go hmmm at some pipes.

'Interesting,' said Steve. 'Your taps seem to be argle bargle fnorrrr haflump.' Or something like that. 'Also the cooker should have come with a hose, but didn't'.

Steve phones the plumbers' merchants, and I agree to walk over and pick up the necessary cooker hose. Last time I lived in Penryn, I was still in my goth phase, and so had swishy hair, combat trousers, velvet shirts, lots of earrings and the occasional bit of eyeliner. Now I have jeans, a white t-shirt, trainers and short spiky hair, all of which are spattered with paint. This is my opportunity to pass as a member of the proletariat. Soon the word will go round that a man who once wrote a Shaun The Sheep episode has moved into town, and the unstoppable glamour will weave itself around me like a shroud of destiny, keeping me apart from the common herd and making it illegal to look me in the eye on the street, ideally. But for now, I can mingle.

After going completely the wrong way, I finally turn up at the plumbers' merchants and wander in through the big open door. Someone looks at me oddly, and I tell them loudly that Steve has called, and I'm picking up some 'parts' for him. 'Parts', you see, I know all the lingo, a more foppish type would have asked for 'thingummy's' or 'bits', but not me. 'Parts', that what I'm asking for. While I wait for the 'parts', I look around at the shelves, full of plastic tubes, and more plastic tubes, and some copper tubes. If I ever want some tubes, I think to myself, this is certainly the place to come. It is well tubey.

'Actually', says a plumbing man, 'Could you go round into the proper customer bit? Health and Safety sort of thing.'

I sit quietly in the proper customer bit, until a different plumbing man finally finds a cooker hose.

'Did Steve want one with a bayonet socket?' he asks. I scream.
'Well what did the hose on the cooker look like,' he asks patiently. I scream again.

When I finally get back to Steve, it's the wrong kind of tube anyway.