Neptune, whom Wikipedia, the fount of all knowledge, informs me is the God of Water (my classical education's not up to much), has been attacking me repeatedly lately, despite me offering myself to him and his aqueous minions on the barge the other week (almost literally). Not only did the watery deity choose to shut off my shower just when I should've been sprucing up in order to try to snag myself a husband, but he also decided to hit me where it really hurts by breaking my loo.

A day and a night without water you can just about cope with (although when I found there was still no water when I returned, having failed to alter my spinster status, after my evening at the book launch, I was, I confess, reduced to tears of frustration and impotent rage). But a broken loo is really annoying, because it means you have to call out a plumber. Unless it's merely blocked, in which case you can try improvising a plunger with a deconstructed wire coathanger, which is what I once did when I was at uni. The other three girls I lived with squealed with horror, but I saved us the call out charge just by refusing to be totally squeamish, and was feted accordingly.

I suppose I could've dismantled my concealed cistern (turns out that the cistern is in no way as fancy as this suggests - it's just a normal cistern, but with the top taken off it, and a box built round it) and seen if I could fix the loo's flush system myself. But would I know what I was looking for? No, I would not. And of course I don't know any handy men who might know what was wrong with it, and how to fix it without paying £85, either. So, after a tip off from my colleagues that Rated People was the place to find a good plumber, I posted a request and sat back to wait for a Rated Person to contact me. This seemed a better option than phoning any of the frankly rubbish selection of personnel who've done things to my flat so far. (I have to put a cup under the pipework for the shower, as it's still leaking, despite two sets of builders/plumbers telling me it's fixed. The second lot jammed the bath panel back on, probably without even trying to fix the problem thinking that, what, all the water would just flood straight through the floorboards into the flat below, and I'd never find out till I suddenly crashed through the ceiling whilst mid-ablutions, like something out of a Benny Hill sketch?)

By some sort of miracle, having posted the ad on a Friday afternoon, on Saturday morning a man called Dave phoned me to see if he could come over right away (well, after he'd eaten a bacon sarnie his wife had made him - this insight into his domestic arrangements automatically made me like him) to price up the job. Within the hour, there he was, ready to quote. And he could come round on Friday afternoon. I sent a prayer of thanks to the interweb, and resigned myself to chucking buckets of water down the loo for a week. It's not that much of a hardship, but it makes you appreciate sanitation when you can effortlessly flush a loo. In these recessionary times, one should be pleased with any free pleasures, no matter how seemingly small.

Friday afternoon saw Dave arrive, fresh from a job in Blackheath. 'I've just had the most amazing 24 hours of my life', he announced as he tried to connect a fiddly pipe to my gas meter, to ensure I didn't have any leaks. (I'd taken the opportunity of getting him to connect my hob, which has been sitting there, unconnected and gathering dust because ANOTHER BLOODY BUILDER NEGLECTED TO DO WHAT HE SAID HE'D DO AND THEN DISAPPEARED for... well, let's say it's been a significant amount of time). 'Blimey', I thought, 'that's quite a claim'. 'Why, what's happened?' I asked. 'Well', he replied, 'I've got a daughter that I haven't seen since she was eight. And now she's 30. I've been looking for her for years. And I found her last night on Facebook. And I'm going to see her tonight!' Bloody hell! Imagine that! And they say the internet's no good for anything except porn! I somehow felt he should be telling everyone else in his family, and all of his friends, rather than me, a random stranger whose loo he was about to fix.

'Yeah,' he continued, 'I'm feeling a bit all over the place' (good to tell me this, just as he was about to start messing about with gas pipes). 'I've only ever cried four times in my life - once when my mum and dad died, once when my dog died and last night.' People reveal odd stuff to you sometimes, don't they? I kind of wanted to ask loads of questions, but it all felt too personal, so I left it, other than wishing him the best of luck when he left to go off and meet her. He said that she'd been looking for him too, which made me hopeful that the outcome would be positive and that she hadn't thought he'd just abandoned her, didn't care and that she never wanted to see him again. He disappeared in a flurry of winks, and told me he'd come back soon to fix my shower. For free.

Ha! In your face, Neptune.