THE power of life to imitate art is frightening. As if reading a book about "adventures in the world of human waste" – work, not pleasure – were not enough excitement I began to notice signs of unwanted activity round the manhole, to which all things flow, at the back door.
Hard to tell at first because about an inch an hour of rain was falling, average for the past few weeks, and we've become used to patches of gravel disappearing briefly under water.
But I didn't get where I am today without being able to recognise
the bubbling side-effects of a blocked drain. There was even a time when the Ian Wallace song about sewers – "There's a different kind of smell, dahn below" – was still funny and I would sort out our own drainage problems.
Or try to. The average farm cesspit is not a thing of beauty whatever way you look at it, especially from the inside while trying to clear a blocked inlet when all attempts to clear it with rods from the outside have failed.
Two things occur to you in that position. One is the speed at which a blockage can clear. The second is how much liquid and added extras can be found in one blocked pipe.
Checking levels later there had been no genuine danger, but at the time I was mighty pleased to feel the big hand of my brother Angus, a man of instant decision, on my collar as he rattled me up the iron steps and through the manhole as the flood rose.
Immersion in sewerage, no matter how briefly, widens your circle of friends immediately. Buying a new pair of Wellingtons helped, as did binning the jeans and socks, but it was several baths later before I felt I was back in the bosom of the family.
Odd in a way because hints of other farmyard essences, such as those of pig, cattle, sheep and silage, seldom troubled them. Not odd at all when you consider that, with the possible exception of cat faeces, human excrement is what we least like having anything to do with.
In terms of human evolution that dislike has happened quickly. A century ago night-soil was a valuable fertiliser, as it still is in China. Any memoir of pre-war tenement childhood mentions what was often found on the stairs.
Forty years ago one of my grandad's weekly chores was still to bury the contents of their Elsan closet and, according to the book I was reading when I noticed the blocked drain, four out of 10 of the world's population now would like to have the access he had to a toilet of any kind.
A sobering thought, but not of immediate interest as the rain continued to fall and the overflow increase. On the mercifully few occasions drain clearing has been necessary since my successful, but ill-judged, efforts years ago I have called in the professionals. I jogged to the phone.
Most pros called in have been cheerful chaps with an interest in their work, keen to explain what's going on down there, and I wasn't disappointed. Service was prompt and clearance took about an hour – money well spent to be reminded that we take so much for granted and that happiness is a drain flowing freely.
The full article contains 575 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
