the exploding poo pipe !

Well its been a while since I did my last blog. and so much has been happening here.  I will firstly tell you about the drain situation.

A couple of weeks ago I returned home from work to find 6 dumpy bags of sand and gravel, a pile of drain pipes and a huge stack of black plastic crates in the garden.  Ahh haaa I thought the drain men are going to make a start soon.  I had a phone call from Chris, the drain man, the following day. "We won't be starting until next week" he says "but in the mean time expect a delivery from us"

"Its here already" I told him

"oh good" he said "the driver found you ok then?"

 "well, presumably so" I said "I wasn't here, but the stuffs been delivered and its actually in the correct place.  Not only the correct address, but inside the gates, on the grass by the fir trees.  It must have come on a big lorry with a crane as there are tyre tracks and divots in the grass from the cranes stabilising feet"

The septic tank is being specially made and will be here next week.  So firstly we have to have a huge pit dug with an excavator, line it  with gravel  and then the tank sits on top of that and then gets buried by soil.  15 tons of soil will be dug out to make a hole big enough for this huge poo tank.  Now... seeing as its only his nibs and me that live here... the poo tank is massive!  Its not a normal size 'onion' shape septic tank....Oh No... its 4 metres long by 2 metres wide and 2 meters deep !! Its the size of a caravan. Its big enough to take the waste from a house that has 12-15 occupants. Ridiculous!! Even after a weekend of currys we will never fill it!!  But that's the building regulations. A large house needs a large poo tank. Irrelevant of the fact that only 2 people live in the house. Most septic tanks need to be emptied every year.. I think ours will last 10 years before it requires emptying!

So, I came home one evening last week to find what looked like the Somme in my garden.  Huge trenches had been dug, starting at the side of the house by the Camelia bush, and extending along the side and front, with smaller trenches dug from the drive up to the the walls of the house.  Unfortunately the drain man didn't leave me a note or a message to tell me NOT to use the toilet/ bathroom on the left hand side of the house....Oopps !  I didn't get his phone message on my mobile until the next day, resulting in one of the trenches filling up and not just with the water from the shower I had in the morning. Oh dear, I quickly phoned him to tell them about the 'accident' I had made.

"Oh its OK"  he said "we're used to that, in fact we had a bit of a incident at your place yesterday"

Apparently the old fella who was the digger driver, who incidentally looks just like old man Steptoe, had caught one of the old Victorian clay drain pipes with the claw of the excavator. The pipe was completely blocked and was under pressure and when the pipe fractured  apparently it had erupted like a geezer in Yellow Stone National Park.   The poo fountain must have shot into the air like a massive volcano because we found clods in the grass over 20 feet away !  Soooo glad it rained the following day!!

Jo xxx