(Don’t read whilst eating or if you have a low disgust threshold)
We have just had half term. Up until last August I was head of school at a primary school. Half term was craved, sought-after and desperately needed to recharge, catch up on piles of paperwork and occasionally see your family.
This year, it crept up and surprised me. I didn’t have to work through the holiday, we could do fun things and have quality family time. That was until the sewage explosion. We literally had a s**t half-term.
We moved in November to a lovely house (we headed further north to upsize and down price. There’s no heading back south now!!). What we didn’t know is that the previous tenants had cleverly been flushing wet wipes. We discovered this when the sewage finally backed up to our downstairs toilet. There were many complications regarding whether the blockage was on our land or common land but finally we had a chap in to clear them. Clear them he did with a huge pressure blast. However, it cleared the blockage down to past the next manhole and the force pushed the manhole cover and all the sewage up all over the path and lawn. A poo explosion! Suddenly, our beautiful new house and garden had become a cess pit.
Many years ago, my sister did some psychological research for a masters on disgust thresholds. I was an outlier in her statistics because my tolerance for disgusting things was ridiculously low. You can only imagine how well I coped with the whole sewage issue. The constant anxiety and nausea was not helped by the fact that we have an Otterhound. Otterhounds are absolutely gorgeous dogs but they do like to eat poo. After an incident with an open manhole cover, she was banished to her grandparents for three days to consider her actions.
It was Thursday before the smell subsided and it wasn’t until yesterday that I could bring myself to walk across the lawn even though I know the lovely men from Dyno-Rod (who should be paid vast quantities of money) had disinfected and cleaned everything.
On a positive note, we now have sparkling drains and I think my disgust threshold has risen a little.