Struggling with the ballcock of life

 THE LAST STRAW: I was half-planning a winter break this week in the Canaries, a place I haven't been before. But all the packages got booked early. So instead, as a result of one of those on-the-spot decisions you sometimes regret, I found myself spending New Year's Eve in the attic.

This too is somewhere I hadn't been before, because of a life-long aversion to dark places with bats and mice and God knows what. But my wife had been recommending me to visit it all year.

"It might do you good to get away from the kids for a while," she would say. "And sure, while you're up there, maybe you'd find out what's causing the drip from the water-tank's overflow pipe." The year just gone was a good one for ignoring domestic plumbing problems. It was nearly always raining, so you couldn't hear individual drips; except occasionally at four in the morning, when the one from the overflow pipe would become a metaphor for all your short-comings, and keep you awake.

But on the last day of December, as a deposit on a New Year resolution to become a better person, I bought a torch and headed upstairs with a ladder, as my wife clutched the children to her bosom and promised that, whatever happened, they'd never forget me.

The attic was a disappointment, on the whole: a cramped place with no visible wildlife of any kind. But I quickly located the water-tank, which was exactly where the maps suggested. And with the sort of technical know-how that comes naturally to a guy, I worked out that the overflow could be solved by bending the arm of the ballcock. An earlier attic visitor - clearly a genius like myself - had arrived at the same conclusion, and it just needed a minor adjustment to the existing curve.

Sadly, the elastic properties of metal are limited. And by the time I got downstairs again, holding the ballcock which had snapped off at the base, the drip from the overflow pipe had become a fountain. Falling from a height onto a corrugated plastic roof, it made it sound as if we had Lambeg drummers practising in the shed.

My wife bravely tried to pretend she hadn't lost confidence in me. But after shutting off the water-main, I decided to cut my losses and ring a plumber. Unfortunately, it was New Year's Eve, and the only plumber we know wasn't answering - probably because he was in the Canaries. So with a nervous feeling that I was getting into this thing way too deep, I headed for the hardware shop.

Whenever forced to visit a hardware shop, I sense what it's like to be an asylum-seeker in a land where nobody speaks your language, and the culture is alien. You go to the shop looking for a valve to connect a washing machine to a water pipe, for example. But the assistant invariably responds with questions you can't even understand, let alone answer.

Assistant: "Would that be a half-inch gate valve; a 20-millimetre widget valve; or a bivalve?"

You: "Er, I'll have one of each."

Assistant: "Ha, ha - got you. One of those is an oyster."

In this case, the assistant said I was lucky: he had one ballcock left. Then he handed me a brass implement that, to the untrained eye, lacked something - namely a ball. Not wishing to appear stupid, however, I guessed his reasoning. "I can screw the ball off the old one and onto this, right?" I said, and he nodded.

Congratulating myself on a growing fluency in hardware, I battled home through the New Year's Eve traffic. But after one look at the rusty old ball-cock that I was supposed to screw off, I realised I could probably screw my head off sooner. So after ringing the shop and ascertaining that (a) yes, they had balls, and (b) they closed in 25 minutes, I battled back into town.

I did this despite knowing in my heart there was no chance I could actually fit a new ballcock into the water tank. There would surely be some complication, which required specialist equipment available only to plumbers. But I climbed the ladder again armed with vice-grips, an adjustable spanner, and hope. And after an hour and a half of painful crouching, during which I lost my temper only about six times, I re-emerged covered in cobwebs and sweat, with the job done.

I know this will seem only a small achievement, especially to DIY experts among you; yet for me it was a big breakthrough. And with a feeling that 2003 would be a bright, sunshine-filled new year, I went to my back door after midnight on Tuesday to enjoy the sound of the pipe not dripping. Unfortunately it was raining again, and I couldn't hear a damn thing.