Waiting for Godot’s Plumber

Of course, what I should be doing is writing up the English evaluations I’ve got planned for my class of 7 to 10 year-olds tomorrow morning. Or it the very least I should be scouring the pharmacies, hardware stores and wholesale chemists of Fontenay-le-Comte for a someone who stocks copper (II) sulphate and is willing to sell it to me.

Copper (II) sulphate is a fantastic treatment for keeping swimming pools free of green slime during the winter. Added at a concentration of one gram per thousand litres – one part per million – it is harmless to humans but lethal to algae. So now you know.

The problem is that it is increasingly difficult to buy useful chemicals that also happen to have nefarious uses or be poisonous, though copper (II) sulphate is only grudgingly so. You have to eat a fair amount of the stuff to hurt yourself. France – happily – lags the UK in this respect: I can still buy potassium nitrate for curing meat, sulphuric acid for cleaning steel, hydrochloric acid for correcting the pH of our swimming pools and acetone for solvent use. But stuff is disappearing from the shelves here too.

When I was small, one could (with due cause and upon signing the poison book) buy sodium cyanide for killing out wasps nests and strychnine for dealing with rats (you mix the poison with corn meal and molasses – very quick compared to warfarin and similar poisons that are used these days), but then came the 1972 poisons act and Schedule 1 and Schedule 12 poisons and the world probably became a marginally safer place.

Ironically, although quite a few insidious poisons were effectively and quite sensibly banned from public use, and quite a few acute poisons such as cyanides were replaced with substances that were relatively benign to humans which probably stopped a few silly accidents, many of the substitutes that came along are increasingly suspected of being far more environmentally damaging and quite possibly carcinogenic.

But I digress, and rather more pointlessly than is usual.

The reason that I am not doing any of the things that would more profitably occupy my time is that the plumbers are here, doing the final fixing of a couple of radiators and a shower that will complete their work for our little extension into a previously unused portion of our house.

The work was actually started a year ago, but reached a point were certain tasks needed to be completed by us, not them, before the final fixing could be done.

But events rather overtook us; the premature tryst with eternity undertaken by my younger brother; the holiday season and the imperative to earn a living. Oh, and the pastoral and physical care of three young children.  And – whoosh – the time she fly away.

Still, now it will be finished, though the completion it represents, I confess, leaves me melancholy. A roller coaster year, 2009, and definitely not one of my better ones. Although I am not fool enough to wish my life away, I shall not be sorry to wave this year bye-bye.