I don’t know what the cause is, but lately my shower has been distinctly reluctant to get rid of the water deposited in its base having gushed forth from the spout above and bathed my baby skin in warm droplets of freshness (and chlorine probably).

Ok, so on the face of it this is perfectly understandable, I mean, who or what wouldn’t want to cling onto any substance that has been in contact with my naked flesh? It’s perfectly reasonable, I can hear you all nodding your heads in audible agreement. I mean, we’ve all seen that famous Alpine photo have we not. Oh, maybe not, that’s on the Special Edition DVD yet to be released.

Er, where was I?

Oh yes, my BL**DY SHOWER!! I really don’t enjoy standing in a puddle of luke-warm dirty soapy water, and having to turn what is a mighty powerful shower down to it’s 1-drip-per-minute setting in order to let the water drain away.

Thus, this evening I spent a whole hour carrying out an investigation into my drainage system. What fun, I just love slime, mould, and all that stuff. Yum Yum scrape it out the drain and have it with my yoghurt for breakfast.

Ok, so reverse the above and you have how I feel about drains generally. You see, despite what most people think I am actually normal. At least when it comes to drains. (The less said about life-size inflatable dolls the better.)

To cut a long story short, my shower does not have a normal U-bend drain arrangement to catch hair etc. No, it has some bizzare entrapment set up which makes it utterly impossible to clean. It was only after I had broken my prize pair of scissors and a coathanger that I realised this (the former actually snapped at the hinge thing when trying to cut the plastic latter).

Having found that physical coat-hanger style manipulation was not going to work, I decided to go for the high-pressure water method. Now, as mentioned above my shower is actually very very powerful, coming straight from the immersion heater and all that. Thus, when one turns it on full blast it is strong enough to create a sizeable indent in one’s cheek (should one choose to wash one’s face in that manner). Problem was, the head of the shower was bigger than the drain, thus, I had to come up with some way of funneling the flow into the smaller hole, making sure it was watertight (otherwise the water would simply pop back up into the shower tray).

Enter THE CONTRAPTION.

 

This astonishing device was constructed from a shower head, a shampoo bottle and a Japanese contact-lens fluid bottle, which had been skilfully carved into an appropriate shape. The whole gubbins was then wrapped in waterproof parcel tape.

Well, it sort of worked, in that it was watertight (i.e the drain recieved the full power of the shower).

There was one tiny problem though, in that after treatment had been brought to a close the wretched drain was just as blocked as it had been before I started attacking it with contact-lens cleaning fluid bottles.

GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

Tomorrow I am going to that cleaning specialist up the road to get some nasty eat-everything liquid, despite this being against my better environmental judgement. If that fails, I will have to report the problem to Maintenance, who will then have to deconstruct my whole bathroom (it’s all sealed in). Thing is, I really don’t want to do that because they might wonder why I have a double futon in my strictly single accomodation. Oh, and they may be a bit surprised to find that the cause of the blockage is hair, black hair that is about 30cm longer than mine…