Homelife: The Landlady
The landlady needs back up when it comes to computers and blockages
These days, I tend to use my computer in the kitchen, as I ‘borrow’ the internet from someone who lives up the road and the internet only works in the left hand side of the house.
Fortunately for me, most of my lodgers also live in the left hand side of the house and are therefore blissfully unaware that I haven’t really got broadband. I have worked out that over the past three years, I have saved well over £500 by not paying for a landline or broadband. The only downside to having a computer in the kitchen is that one tends to be a sitting target for the lodgers who are never short of a ridiculous and poorly-pronounced question.
Then there is The Big Daughter, who, if I leave the computer for a split second, glides in silently and, before you can say ‘pop-up’, is thumping away on Facebook at breakneck speed. The Big Daughter also downloads all her own photos onto my laptop and it is now full to bursting point with thousands of photographs of grinning, drunken teenagers in various Brighton hostelries.
“I was precariously perched on the roof four storeys up in the pouring rain trying to unblock the gutter”
Therefore, every time I have to use my computer for anything more perfunctory than typing, it splutters and wheezes away like an asthmatic octogenarian, while telling me that I need to perform a back up. Of course, The Big Son has stolen all my discs, so no back up is likely to be performed in the immediate future.
Anyway, my miserly ways backfired on me last week when, during a rainstorm, I was typing this very column in the kitchen. When I finally went up to my bedroom I was greeted by a torrent of water pouring through the bedroom light fitting. By the state of the carpet, I reckoned that it must have been going for a good 15 minutes.
Since I have lived in the house, I have had a problem with the gutter upstairs, which, due to its strange angles and general inaccessibility, gets blocked and one only knows there’s a blockage when it’s too late.
So, last Tuesday, I was precariously perched on the roof four storeys up in the pouring rain, with a broom handle trying to unblock the gutter, to no avail. I actually made the matter worse by dropping a kebab skewer down the hole to add to whatever else was rotting down there. The following morning, I managed to unblock it with something corrosive from Robert Dyas, which cost the best part of a tenner. You can get a month’s broadband for that…
