The 50s Mouse Reaction

My brother asked me a thing a couple of nights ago on Skype.
"You're not doing things now just to have something to blog about, are you?"

Now...no. Certainly though, I'm not above that kind of literary whorishness - I did Zumba and Spin classes, let's not forget. If anything, now, I'm not-doing things to have something to write about. I do find myself, perhaps, overegging my actual, in-the-moment reactions a bit just in order to find, perhaps, the comedy edge to report in this blog though. That whole Man-Flu thing, for instance. Most of the time, I can't be bothered doing the whole "I'm ill, sympathise with me" thing. Just occasionally though, if something really gets me, my inner Camille comes out and I retire to my bed in wisps of chiffon and write my own epitaph, bequeathing bits of my DVD collection to various friends. So when the Man-Flu hit, I went completely over-the-top with the "Unclean! Unclean!" stuff, mainly to be able to go over-the-top on this blog and maybe give some people a laugh.
Last night though, there was an instance where I was genuinely, in the Real World, entirely as pathetic as I am now about to make out to you.

Call us fortunate, decadent Weterners, but we have a kitchen. It's not a big kitchen, but it's a kitchen - washer-dryer, dishwasher, sink, cooker et al.
We've been having issues with the sink not draining away the water poured into it. We've also been having issues - entirely separate issues - with the cooker hood/extractor fan. In particular, the issue there is its distressing tendency to go snap, crackle, pop and, more often than not...urkle.

I'll be honest - I couldn't give a fuck about the extractor fan. The most complicated meal I generally prepare is cereal WITH banana. Or, if I'm really pushing out the culinary boat, toast WITH a tin of something cold upended on it. Such is the fate of a bloke of limited skill who's married to someone who not only loves to cook, but is ridiculously good at it, given that she's only had the one lifetime so far to learn. So - as I say, couldn't actually give a flying fuck about the extractor fan for myself, but d, being the generally willing chef de cuisine of this establishment, really missed it. Being, as I'm sure I may have mentioned before, notsomuch skilled in the Manly Arts as skilled in Getting A Real Man In, I'd arranged for a bloke to come and have a look at the fan last night.

As is happened, I was also up against a deadline - bit of a mad day all round yesterday, but the fan man was coming at 5. At 6.30 I had to get on a bus to go and pick d up from a late shift at work, because a) the buses are a bit dodgy, b) it was bloody freezing, c) it was also dark and creepy where she works and she's a woman on her own, and d) Ma was in a meeting with her car.
At about 5.30, fan man arrived and we exchanged pleasantries about how "wretched bastard freezing" it was outside. he set to work changing the fuse in the fan, and I...being, as it were, "worse-than-fuck-useless" as an electrician's mate, went back to work in the living room. About six minutes later he called through.
"Ohhhh! You know you've got a water leak in here?"
Yeah. Sure. Cos that's what I do when we have a water leak - go back to work in the living room...
I came to see what he was talking about.
Ah.
He was talking about the slew of dirty water escaping from the inactive washing machine, and flooding the kitchen floor.
"Fuck," I said, rather conversationally.
"Yeah," he said, still fiddling with electrics as the water lapped around his ankles.
"Fan's fixed," he announced.
"What the Hell is THAT?!" I said, pointing to the sink.
"That's a sink," he said without looking round. Sarky bastard - I liked him.
"Nono, I mean that," I said, pointing to the dirty water that was filling the sink. It was rising. "Fuck," I said again. He looked round.
"Blimey," he said.
"Ya-huh!" I agreed. It was 5.50 by this point. I had to be on the 6.30 bus.
"Right," he said, taking charge. "Got a saucepan?"
I blinked. I looked at the rising water, and bit back the obvious answer - "No, this is a no-saucepan kitchen..." Instead, I nodded and grabbed one.
"Bale!" he instructed. I baled, taking saucepan after saucepan of warm and dirty water out onto the balcony and pouring them down the communal drain. I managed to empty the sink, and he turned off the water to the washing machine, so I baled that out too.
"Yaaaaaargh!" he said.
"What?!"
"Stabbed myself!" he explained.
"Stop doing that," I muttered.
"Yaaaaaaargh..." he said again, nodding and wrapping his thumb in a tea towel. Apparently, he'd stepped back and jabbed his digit onto the blade of a Stanley knife. I looked at the clock. 6.08.
"What the Hell?" I asked, searching for an explanation of the Poltergeisty upwardly-mobile water-flow that we'd just about managed to arrest. We threw towels down to mop up the flood.
There was a snap and a crackle and a pop and and a determined urkle. He turned around to the fan and frowned at it. It didn't care, it was dead. 6.15.
"S'ok," he lied. "I know how to fix this."
"In five minutes or less?"
He paused.
"Aye, probably..." he nodded.

Oddly enough, he was right. I got to the bus with about a minute and a half to go and collected d from work.

Thing is...I was due to do an UberCommute today. An UberCommute for a Christmas lunch with my officemates. But we couldn't let it be - if it could spontaneously fill and flood yesterday, what was to stop it doing the same again today, when neither of us were there to bale it out?

So I cancelled the London trip. If I tell you that throughout the day, I've been visited by no fewer than five different plumbers, you'll get the sense that this was no ordinary problem. The last bunch, at 10.30 tonight, came and said that basically, the only way to solve it was to get a crew up on the roof, and shove rods down the waste pipe between us and next door...
...but that that was probably impossible without scaffolding.

Scaffolding. Platforms and so on. By daylight. Tomorrow.

So I'm still not letting the damn thing out of my sight, frankly.

So what's the 50s Mouse Reaction?

Laying in bed last night, d said "Gosh, I'm so glad you were here to bale out, baby."
I shrugged. "Pah. Honey, I'm just glad there was a Real Man there. Without the electrician, I'd have been like a screaming woman in a 50s movie, standing on a table when a mouse ran through."
d laughed.
"That's my guy..." she murmured as sleep threatened to take us both.
That's your Disappearing Man, folks. Utterly without Man-Skills even in a crisis, but gimme a saucepan and I can run along a balcony till the cows come home.