My Achievement Today

My Achievement Today ©

By Michael Casey

What did you do today? Our mum or dad would say to each of us today, or any day. I used to have a Social on the top step of the stairs, I’d tell my mum everything I’d done at school that day, then she’d pat my bottom and send me off to bed with a kiss goodnight. 50 years later my smallest daughter always gives me a kiss goodnight, so History is repeating itself.

Now what is my achievement today, as we end May and invade June? Well today I put a new handle on our toilet. So I saved myself the price of a plumber, £30 or even £50. The part was 7 quid in my local Pakistani  Aladdin’s cave, they have everything, all the way from China. So all I had to do way take the lid off the cistern and  then replace the handle. So simple even a simpleton could do it. Only I could not.

You see the original silver coated plastic handle broke off, we don’t enjoy the smell from one particular smelly bum in the family, so lots of flushing goes on. This distorted the handle till eventually it came off. So I had to become an emergency plumber. We had to resort to other measures to flush the toilet,  I did suggest I could drink lots of Stella Artois and then use my own fire hose to flush the toilet, but that was deemed too expensive an idea. It was so simple, and I was prepared to sacrifice myself for my family of girls.

So today when the shops were open after the bank holiday, we were drowned in Birmingham, one month’s rain in one hour, I went and got the new shiny metal toilet handle. I came home triumphant my toilet handle in my hand, my bargain my joy was flooding from me. I knew in seconds the new handle would fit, but the plastic nut that held the old one in place refused to budge. 

I poked the old handle out of the way with the new one, but a large plastic nut was in the still in the way. You have a hole in the cistern which the metal handle bar goes through, and then it is attached with its own nut, then hanging from that is a plastic fitment and a hook that attaches to the plunger that sends the water racing down into the toilet bowl below. The bar has a piece of plastic on it with a screw thread so that a nut can attach the handle firmly to the cistern from the inside, so it does not wobble. Then hey presto you put the cistern lid back on and all the magic is hidden, you  can pooh, flush and go.

Well this is the theory. But what do you do if you have a nut stuck to the inside of the toilet cistern? I could put the new handle and its bar through the existing hole, but I could now screw it firmly because I could not put the new nut on from the inside. Now my mother is called necessity, and I am very inventive. To I stripped the plastic from the new toilet handle bar, so now it would slip through the hole in the toilet cistern, but it wobbled. So then I thought about Plumber’s Tape. This is like ribbon for plumbers, you wrap it around a thread  and put a nut on, thus sealing  things. I did actually have some plumbers tape but I wanted a seal and the ability to move.

Sellotape came to the rescue, by wrapping one end of the bar around the  toilet handle bar I killed two birds with one stone. I bulked up and sealed the hole going into the toilet cistern, and it was slippy so could move in the hole and thus allowing a clean flush. By the way the hole is above the waterline, but it does need sealing, just in case there were to be an overflow, so water inside only goes out the proper overflow pipe.

So once I’d finished and tighten the nut connecting the handle bar inside to  the plastic fitment with the hook in, I stood back and stood on the cat’s tail, Totoro is a very nosey cat after all. She was very noisy as well as nosey when I stood on her tail, so she skipped out of the bathroom window. All  that was left for me to do was to christen my toilet, so I lowered myself and enjoyed a good sit down, before flushed  with success I pushed the new shiny toilet  handle. And guess what it worked.

So I’d saved myself a bit of money. I used to watch our lodger do all the odd jobs so I need to thank him Killybegs for the education, 50 years ago and more. Now should you ask what kind of story is this, and what kind of writer am I then you know already. I write about any old S*&^ but I hope I make it entertaining,  because it’s   the way I tell them as Frank Carson used to say.