How I found a plumber sent from heaven

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/20/plumber-boiler-leak

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Is there a more dreadful sound in winter than water dripping from your central heating boiler? All you can do is shut down the heat, put on another jumper and approach the computer as a supplicant with the search term “plumber”. But the web can be a false friend. Type in ‘‘boiler’’, “leak”, and your area, and prepare to be deluged with tradesmen, all claiming to be honest and “hassle-free” but all advising you that every other plumber is a cowboy. There’s a suspicious emphasis on “friendliness” and “family firms”, as if being part of some salt-of-the-earth clan might protect you against fly-by-nights.So what is the ignorant lay woman to do?

As the temperature in my flat slid, I clicked through a maddening volume of comparison websites and “testimonials” (some even do videos), discarding the ones whose extended family may have provided the feedback. (“Chris did a brilliant job, I would recommend him, for all your 24/7 North London heating needs.”) Phoning was worse – much sighing about my make of boiler and near-unanimity that an expensive new one was all but inevitable. I booked the one with the plainest website, a man of few words other than that he could show up late that evening – and braced myself for financial ruin.

The plumber arrived, I fired up the heating and we peered at the thing, waited for the leaking to recommence. Nothing happened. I made tea as a delaying tactic (convinced there would be a flood the moment he sped off). “No leak here,” he noted patiently, twiddling the pressure gauge and the thermostat.

Over the next hour and a half he carefully examined everything, convincing me I’d be a fool to invest in a new boiler. And then he left. Not only had the leak vanished but reader, he refused to take a penny. Either he had, by then, concluded that I was a fantasist on whom he could only take pity or he was, as one friend suggested, Jesus in disguise. Five days on, the leak remains healed. Truly, the internet works in mysterious ways.

Disney-proof entertainment

I gave my niece, 9, a copy of the Canadian classic Anne of Green Gables for Christmas, and sat back waiting for her to compliment me on an excellent choice. At that age I was enchanted by the red-haired orphan girl sent to live with an elderly farming couple. It wasn’t, to say the least, an immediate hit with the Frozen generation. A succession of slightly irritable questions came back: “What is an orphan asylum?”, and “What is a sorrel mare and a buggy?”; presumably she thinks I have a good recollection of such items from my own childhood.

But LM Montgomerie’s moving tale, first published in 1908, eventually cast its spell, and since then it’s been all Prince Edward Island this and Mrs Rachel Lynde that, and intense chats about whether Anne emotionally blackmails her foster parents.

There’s not much plot in this story beyond girl grows up in rural village. There are enduring themes of course; Margaret Atwood has even put Anne’s appeal down to its “dark underside”.My theory is that the very thing that might appear so offputting to the digital-era child with a shrunken attention span is what sells it: the dense Victorian writing style. The opening sentence is nearly 150 words long. The old-fashioned language (Anne is at one point told she’s made “a fine exhibition of herself”) slows down the story, and is all the more rewarding for it. The great thing is there’s not nearly enough drama for it ever to be given the Disney treatment.

Time heals

Six million Catholics turned out for the pope-in-a-poncho in Manila at the weekend. Back in 1979, similar scenes of devotion – different rock star pope, triumphant arrival in pope-mobile, torrential rain, carnival atmosphere and everyone sloshing around in mud as if at a festival – took place in Ireland. I know, I was there: we got days off school, and it took half a day to get home, such were the crowds. Ireland’s minister for health, Leo Varadkar, has just announced that he is gay. Equal marriage legislation is on the cards. Funny how things change.

@ButlerKatherine