Feature OPINION
HAIL THE HUMBLE PLUMBER
Electricians are sparkies, carpenters chippies, but plumbers are just, well, plumbers. Why? Can it be respect? AUTHOR: JOE BENNETT
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lumbum is Latin for lead and it was the plumber’s lead him last week, “on a scale of one to ten?” It’s the question he has to pipes that brought clean water to Rome and took soiled ask a dozen times a day. And how often he must hear the customer water away. Without plumbing, a city the size of Rome scream of 11. How often he must have to mount his charger and set wasn’t possible. Without a city the size of Rome, the empire off straightway to right the world. For water is just so destructive. It wasn’t possible. And without a Roman empire, you and I would shapes landscapes, brings down mountains. A house is nothing to be speaking a different language and obeying different laws. water, is an appetiser. Plumbers created our world. We have an ambiguous relation with Superficially it’s an unappealing water. Millennia back our remotest ...what tradesman is more vital trade. Plumbers are forever on their ancestors crawled out from it and than the plumber, more desperately saw the possibilities of land and air. knees, underneath things, down there summoned, more keenly awaited, Gradually they lost their ability to live with the rot and the rats. Or they’re plunging rods through stuff we don’t more warmly welcomed on arrival? and breathe in water. The stuff became want to know about. Or they’re up inimical, a threat, a thing to be feared. in the roof space, bent double in the heat, taking a wrench to the But the divorce was only partial. They still needed water, were still cylinder while the householder prays below. largely composed of it. They could go nowhere without it. They And yet, what tradesman is more vital than the plumber, more had to live near it. desperately summoned, more keenly awaited, more warmly We people have tried to domesticate water. Instead of going out welcomed on arrival? Chippies don’t save the day. Sparkies to the stream we’ve brought the stream inside, channelled it into don’t ride to the rescue. Plumbers do. They are ruin-averters, our houses to do what we want with it, then channelled it out again catastrophe-stemmers, heroes of the faucet, Lancelots of the leak. taking our grime and our leavings. “How urgent is the problem,” asked the plumber when I rang But we have never tamed the stuff. It is merely subdued, its
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