My bath runneth over
This 10 litre bottle is something you should never be without in Kiev.
This week the water stopped working, as usual. First a couple of days without cold water. Out comes the trusty 10 litre for flushing the loo; water for drinking needs to be cooled then filtered; bathing requires a hot bath to be run and cooled. In a brilliant stroke of irony, the thought occurred to me as I was reading comments on my last post about cooling one’s bath that in fact my bath had been filling for sometime and was probably about the flood the bathroom. Crisis narrowly averted. Today, in a sly maneuver, the hot water stops and cold water resumes. Now the toilet is flushing as normal but I need to boil a kettle for washing dishes and bathing is off the menu. All the while our central heating system temporarily activates, and then stops again, on the first day above 10 degrees in a week.
Like a beautiful, orchestral symphony I hear you saying. But I believe I may now hold some insight. In amongst my many worries it occurred to me that the continuous pounding and drilling noises downstairs I had been the listening to the last few days was probably a phenomenon commonly known as renovation. In addition, I was yet to notice any reasonable way of discontinuing the water supply to one’s apartment, which led me to one obvious conclusion. The theory is that any time some Tom, Dick or Vladimir wants a new tiled bathroom it probably means water-out for the rest of us. Crazy, yes. Without reason, I don’t think so.
And now for my hypothesis on how this situation came to be.
Welcome to the soviet housing planning committee meeting, sometime during the cold war. The popular consensus is that water be centrally controlled on a per building basis, but then, in a rare show show of personal initiative, someone makes a daring assertion, “… how about we put a water mains shut-off valve in each apartment?”. The ensuing silence is broken by a murmur of flatulent indifference; the other overfed planning officials, wishing they’d thought of this first, pass the new motion without too much ado. Two years later, after repeated attacks of bureaucratic paralysis and a small incident involving an office clerk and a paper shredder, the buildings finally go up. Naturally the contracted plumber decides that if he cuts the extra few feet of piping from each floor he should be able to plumb his house, his friend’s house and two floors of the next complex. Which brings us to the present day and a Ukrainian DIY TV show that is causing an Australian one floor above to spend far too much time writing about his bath.