When I find my phone where I’d left it, on the bedside table, I see that I have a text from my wife. It reads: “Let me know when you have this message.”
This strikes me as something to ponder. If she meant “when you have seen this message”, then my answer is already overdue. If she meant “when you have understood this message”, then, well, who can say?
It takes me a moment to work out that she is actually referring to a hidden, immediately preceding text. This one reads: “Mike is coming around 10 – I’m stuck in traffic.” I look at the time: it’s 9.48.
Mike is the plumber who has promised to discover the reason for our central heating’s mysterious failure – “I’ll find out what it is,” he said, with a strange and inspiring confidence, “and put it right”. But he couldn’t promise when – he’s busy. The prospect of his near-immediate appearance is a little overwhelming. I feel like tidying up.
My wife and I spent last weekend outside our freezing house, stomping around central London, visiting galleries and eventually securing some discounted matinee theatre tickets. To give you an idea of how often we do this sort of thing: we have never done this sort of thing.
“How do you like it?” my wife said in the interval.
“It’s weird being so close,” I said. “Every time an actor comes downstage, I get distracted by their shoes.”
“Are you complaining about being in the third row?”
“No,” I said. “It’s warm, so I’m good.”
In the end my wife gets home before Mike does. We open the cupboard where the boiler is, remove all the shelves and pull out the false back that conceals the pipework. We do this quickly, and without thinking, as we have done dozens of times since January, when the radiators went cold.
“I’m afraid to hope,” my wife says.
“It’s gonna be OK,” I say. “He’s bringing a new canoe filter.”
The canoe filter – I looked it up – is a little plastic basket that stops larger bits of debris from getting into the boiler’s delicate guts. But the canoe filter can itself get clogged, impeding the flow of water through the system. This is how I want this long and expensive saga to end – with the installation of a nine quid replacement part. But I am also afraid to hope.
Mike arrives with Will, his apprentice. He shows me the canoe filter, still in its packaging.
“I thought it would look more like a canoe,” I say.
“I know,” he says. “When I asked for it at the counter, the guy didn’t know what I was talking about.”
Mike instructs Will to turn off the water supply, and guides him through the draining down of the boiler. When I realise there’s going to be a plumbing lesson involved, I forget about going to my office and sit down with my laptop at the kitchen table.
“Let’s go ahead and remove those screws,” says Mike.
“This is like the end of a Columbo,” I say. But actually, you always found out what happened right at the beginning of Columbo. In this case, the episode would start with a closeup of a gunked up canoe filter.
“Put that O-ring in first, please,” says Mike to Will. I decide sitting here with my laptop is a bit like being in the third row: slightly too close to the action to get an overarching sense of the drama unfolding. And I can’t imagine my presence is helping – it must look as if I am simply typing everything that’s happening, like a stenographer. I go out to my office to wait for someone to come and tell me it was the canoe filter all along.
“It was your diverter valve,” says Mike, referring to a more expensive part that directs the flow of hot water to either your taps or your radiators. It can become stuck, or blocked, or both.
“You’ll never really know, unless you saw the whole thing apart,” says Mike. “But it’s definitely knackered.”
I think: this isn’t like Columbo at all.
“On top of that, the canoe filter was also pretty clogged up,” I tell my wife later. “So it still could have been a contributing factor. Along with some blocked radiators and the faulty pump that got replaced in January.”
“Who cares?” my wife says. “It’s warm.”
“I’m just saying: after all that, there’s no smoking gun.”
“Well, no,” my wife says. “It’s not a play.”
“If it was, it would have a very baggy third act,” I say.
“It’s roasting in here,” she says.
“You’ve still got two jumpers on,” I say.
