Opinion

William Scholes: Plumbing the depths of the past

William Scholes

William Scholes

William has worked at The Irish News since 2002. His areas of interest include religion and motoring.

A kitchen sink drama led beyond plumbing to some thoughts on the past
A kitchen sink drama led beyond plumbing to some thoughts on the past A kitchen sink drama led beyond plumbing to some thoughts on the past

If I had to choose to explain to a stranger either the idiosyncrasies of Irish News column deadlines or how, for example, a blockchain works, I wouldn't hesitate.

A blockchain, you see, is the digital voodoo that makes bitcoins work via a distributed, decentralised public ledger that can't be retrospectively altered. Just don't ask me what a bitcoin is.

Today's offering arrived later than my usual deadline thanks to a minor domestic drama.

I knew that all wasn't well as soon as I reached under the sink. Instead of being crisp and dry and ready for action, the kitchen roll was limp and sodden and felt like it had already absorbed the contents of a small flood.

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This was not good news. The water is meant to be in the sink, and not beneath it.

In our house, the kitchen roll shares digs with dishwasher tablets, a bottle of washing up liquid, a stock of those little foam washing pads and some bin bags.

There are also the inevitable smelly candles. You know the sort - they come in big glass jars, all smell the same and have evocative names like 'Irish linen breeze', 'assembly cover-up', 'bog meadow bonfire bouquet' and 'Clonoe daydream'. No man has ever admitted to buying one.

A preliminary investigation determined that there was indeed a leak somewhere in the contentious plug hole/sink interface.

After mopping up the water and salvaging what remained of the candles, I did what every other man in my position would do. I turned to Google.

After a bit of Googling and poking around, I reached the firm conclusion that the Blanco basket strainer plug waste - or a '20-slot '450947' as we call it in the trade - assembly had somehow become a disassembly.

This meant water could weep through a gap between the sink itself and the waste. Or something like that.

It's still not entirely clear to me how this could have happened. Undeterred, and with courage uncharacteristic of my previous DIY escapades, I took the whole thing apart and cleaned it.

Talk of plumbing brings me back to schoolboy Latin and the puerile satisfaction of being able to use the splendid-sounding word 'plumbum' - Latin for 'lead' - without getting into trouble

As I write, the whole collection of pipes and washers is drying off on the worktop before I attempt to put it back together (that's got to be the easy part, right?).

As kitchen sink dramas go, the episode wasn't exactly Ken Loach. But it was a reminder of the severe limitations of my own practical abilities as well as the sheer get-out-of-jail-for-free usefulness of Google (if you know where to look...).

Talk of plumbing brings me back to schoolboy Latin and the puerile satisfaction of being able to use the splendid-sounding word 'plumbum' - Latin for 'lead' - without getting into trouble.

Because the Romans used a lot of it in their water systems, the word plumbing became synonymous with lead.

Lead pipes were long a feature of domestic plumbing systems, though by now they should all have been replaced with copper and plastic.

The connections between my plumbing, plumbum, lead and the Romans nudged my mind in the direction of Primo Levi.

A chemist by profession, he wrote one of the most celebrated science books of them all, The Periodic Table. It's well worth reading and there's even a chapter on lead.

Before that he wrote If This Is A Man. In it Levi, a Jew, tells the extraordinary story of his anti-fascist resistance and his imprisonment in Auschwitz.

Of the Holocaust, he wrote: "If understanding is impossible, knowing is imperative, because what happened could happen again.

"Consciences can be seduced and obscured again - even our consciences. For this reason, it is everyone's duty to reflect on what happened.

"Everybody must know, or remember, that when Hitler and Mussolini spoke in public, they were believed, applauded, admired, adored like gods."

Those observations have something to say to us today - how much do we know, or do our children know, about the Troubles?