The poppies of Bowbridge Lane

...growing outside the front garden!

This is just round the corner from where I live. Stroud Womble will recognise them, too. This morning's close weather gave way to heavy showers, but no thunder as forecast.

Our downstairs loo has been out of action for a few days, so I left CleanSteve fixing it, and went to work. Hours later, he called to say that my first massage client of the afternoon had cancelled and the loo cistern had leaked! I decided to stay at work a little longer. Came home, saw my second client, Steve used a bit of muscle and WD40 and got the stuck part unstuck, and said he'd do a bit more tomorrow.

I should explain at this point that I don't like wonky toilets! My mother's house had a very dodgy flush on one of the loos for years. As family members, we knew how to deal with it, but matters reached a head the night we had the after-party for my sister TMLHereandThere's wedding. As one of the teenagers was vomiting down a hatch from the attic into the corridor, someone in the bathroom attempted to fix the flush and put the ballcock/float valve on upside down. Whoops! In the general pandemonium, the flood that followed was not noticed until several hours later. Some soggy carpets were eventually taken up, but by this time the action had shifted to a fight that had broken out in the garden, where the wedding usher was being hurled into the burn (a drop of several feet into a concrete channel) by a drunken uncle, who was mistakenly attempting to defend the honour of one of the bridesmaids....

In the early 90s, my mother's toilet cistern was finally repaired. It had only taken 15 years to find the plumber who said he COULD do it! In 1991, my flat in London was flooded by a flushing toilet with a defective cistern in the flat above mine. It did £1, 500's worth of damage. Sod's law that the one night in six months that I spent away from home was the day of the flood! I came home the next day to see my carpets hanging out of the window, and a note on my door saying that the council had obtained a warrant to break in.( Of course, if that situation had arisen in the mobile era, my neighbour Rabia would have just given me a call or sent a text. Maybe Rabia and I only became friends later, though, united in our common mission to clear the hallway of obscene graffiti).

Anyway, it's still raining, and we're off to Devon tomorrow. Yippee! Astonishingly, it's fourteen hours since I got up and I and I haven't been back to bed yet. Not once. I must be recovering.