The handkerchief

I would describe myself as a happy cynic who approaches life with a great deal of humour and a certain degree of pessimism. But I also harbour a limitless amount of naivety, which occasionally suddenly erupts, leaving me longing for the earth to open up – or even for the skull of my opposite number to split, which would, admittedly, entail a great deal of cleaning up. That’s why I prefer the first option. One day our toilet went on strike. That was OK for a while. I could observe my work with a nod of approval. All the same, I eventually needed to do something when the bowl got so full that I could no longer close the lid without leaving traces on it. And as I have already stated, I am no big fan of cleaning sessions prompted by body parts or their excretions. I had no choice but to call in a plumber. He was quick to diagnose that the floater wasn’t working. In my mind’s eye, I could see a tiny man squeezing his hairy body into his speedos, protecting his ever-diminishing tuft of hair with a bathing cap and swimming the crawl against the current. The exertion required in the prevailing heat caused his diving goggles to steam up. But as he had been in charge of the upkeep of this toilet for close on 25 years, he could happily retire and make way for a newbie.

And since there was a professional in the house, I seized the opportunity to ask him how to get rid of stubborn lime scale. (The tiresome topic of cleaning kept cropping up.) Given that both the floater and the entire toilet were old, his advice was simply to throw something in. I thought his intention was to prove to me that the toilet was still working fine. So, with a frown on my face, I chucked the handkerchief into the toilet bowl with an incredible show of elegance and dedication.

The look on the plumber’s face suggested that I must have misunderstood something. The penny dropped and my cheeks got redder. Right from the word go, my childlike naivety prevented me from comprehending what he was alluding to. A handkerchief was, apparently, not the right choice to justify submitting an insurance claim for our toilet.

The plumber did at least have the decency to wait until he was outside before laughing.