Bathrooms

There's a leak in the top bathroom which is dripping through the ceiling onto the landing. Dig got rained on with a plip! plop! plip! when the children pulled the plug on the bath. This is bad news.

We are now in the bizarre and unusual situation of living across three flats and have a total of five toilets, two baths and three showers.

None of the showers work. The one downstairs in the old cellar hasn't worked for ten years. When it was installed, the chief shower tile technician and his oppo put the shower tray tiles on upside down, so the water channelled into the grout, stayed there, and eventually dissolved the grout. After regrouting and resealing the problem and solution remains the same: take out the old tiles and retile with new. Unable to face that task while the rest of the house falls down, the shower got used as a cupboard.

The shower in the office flat is disgusting. The tiles fell off the wall about four years ago. I'm not sure whether Dig's removed them from the shower tray or whether he just stands on a tile pile when he showers. I won't go in there to find out. I stopped going in as a protest about the leak from the shower tray which has knocked the plaster off the wall and destroyed the wooden floor in the flat next door. And the last shower we've got is upstairs in the top flat. And now it leaks.

So it might be that we're all back down to the childrens bathroom again, where there's only a bath and no shower. There's also a revolting toilet which has seen seven years of child use including paint, toothbrushes, bath foam, and a Sindy doll with a bag on her head.

What makes it worse is that in a post-pregnancy fit six years ago I painted a green leafy jungle all over the walls with animals peeping out, so there are zebras and hippos and monkeys staring at anyone who chances a wee in Sindy's paddling pool. I had to whitewash the tiger out because Squirrel got scared. So now there's a strange white misty patch in the green leafy jungle with the chin of a tiger poking through where Shark took a scrubbing brush to the walls.

Oh well, there's always a bucket in the yard. And for me, I might start going back to the gym again every morning. They do a lovely warm towel service with scented shower gel to go with their wonderful high pressure hot showers. And I don't have to take responsibility when they leak.