all fingers and thumbs

here you can see young dave and i carefully arranged in a tasteful manner ready for herself to take a photo. i thought this was a particularly inspired pose, what with the light and the sofas and the general greyness of it all. i feel that it is a comment on modern life. quite what it says about modern life i don't know but since herself popped into the national gallery at the weekend she has been all arty farty with her pictures. young dave, in contrast, is simply farty.

all was calmness and relaxation. a man is in the process of fitting a boiler for the peeps so herself was laptopping in the living-room in order to keep young dave out of the man's tool box. the new boiler is being paid for by way of a grant because of himself's dodgy kidneys. just as well as the old boiler hasn't worked since we moved into this house and himself will need to be kept warm after his op. luckily the shower is electric or the peeps would be getting a bit high even for me.

anyway, the man was busy cutting pipes and chatting to herself about the joys of macs as against pcs, a subject upon which herself could bore for britain. suddenly he went quiet.

"could you turn off the water at the stopcock?" he asked in a rather strained voice, "only these pipes shouldn't have water in them after i drained the system but they have." the peeps bought the house from some blokes who fancied themselves as plumbers. but they had missed out on various crucial bits of the 'how to plumb up your house' course. the old boiler met its end because they had put the wrong pipes into the wrong end which caused it to overheat every time it fired up.

anyway, herself disappeared into the cupboard under the stairs to try to turn off the water. but the stopcock was jammed.

"you come and put your thumbs over these pipes and i'll turn it off!" said the man. the boiler is situated in a smallish cupboard which normally houses the camping gear. herself squeezed past the man, who was already inside the cupboard, and took up her position ready to slide her thumbs over the pipes. young dave decided to pick this moment to see what fun was going on in the cupboard. the man climbed over dave and rushed out to his van to get the thing for turning off the water under the pavement. what he hadn't bargained for was that herself has smaller thumbs than your average heating engineer. so while his thumbs were perfectly adequate to do the job, hers were not. water came squirting out with some force. due to the positioning of the thumbs it was diverted into herself's face. within seconds she was soaked to the skin. eventually the man came back and instructed herself to slowly remove her thumbs. a further bucketful of water came out, more slowly this time, and then the flow stopped. herself climbed out of the cupboard and squelched upstairs. the man started to show her the pipes in the airing cupboard and tried to explain where they should go as against where they actually go.

"er, can i just get changed first?" she whimpered.

as she climbed out of the shapeless t-shirt that says "my other t-shirt is clever" and into the shapeless t-shirt that says "geek" i thanked the plumbing gods for this wonderful piece of blog-fodder...