THE ICE WALL

Sometimes life conspires to leave me feeling utterly useless.

Take, for example, the recent Saturday morning when I poked my nose out of the door to fetch in the milk. I was still in my night clothes at this point, wearing a dressing gown to keep myself warm and to preserve whatever little remains of my dignity, and it seemed that there had been a hard frost overnight to prepare us for the heavy snowfall to come later on that day. Now, I wouldn’t often risk an “outdoors in my pyjamas” incident. In fact I have been more than vocal in the past about my disappointment about those who perform such activities, but, as I wasn’t heading for any supermarket or cashpoint, had no need to attempt a school run, and actually didn’t even need to step over my threshold to reach the milk bottles, I thought that I was fairly safe. Plus, of course, it was early enough for the only witnesses that there were likely to be to be the neighbour’s cat and a couple of startled blue tits, so I felt pretty secure as I opened the door, even though there was already daylight in the air to make me excessively visible to an unexpected passer-by.

Anyway, having made the leap and opened up the door, I immediately noticed that the bottles had not yet been left by the intrepid milkman who was no doubt out there somewhere battling the ice and frost in an effort to make his living from the diminishing numbers of his once mighty round. Instead, the “empties” from the night before were still standing there all frozen in a pool of ice, and the pavement beyond them is also covered in a sheet of quite treacherous looking ice, too. Against by better judgement, I took a single step out into the outdoors that I really wasn’t suitably dressed for, and immediately felt my foot start to go from under me…

“Uh-oh…!” I thought…

Then I looked at the wall next to the doorway and I noticed that it was covered to a level far above the door itself by a dramatic organic ice sculpture that wouldn’t have shamed Mr H. R. Giger in his “Alien” designing days, all icicles upon icicles, like a frozen waterfall, and inches thick. This, I decided, was probably not a good thing. I bundled myself back inside and grabbed my outdoors clothes and got dressed, put on my thickest winter coat, and headed back outside, carefully crossing my newly formed personal ice-rink, and inspected the damage.

Looking back at the house, the overflow pipe from the central heating boiler was dribbling like crazy and quite obviously had been doing for some considerable time. After all, the heating had been pumping away rather vigorously of late since the mercury had plummeted and the engineer had given us the nod that all was indeed as well as could be expected with our venerable old boiler.

So I spent the next hour or so trying to remove the ice from the wall and the paving stones, trying to ensure that none of my neighbours, or the milkman, or the postie were likely to take an unexpected tumble on the ice. I salted, I scrubbed, I even finally got out the ladder and removed the tree that was growing out of the top of one of the outlet downpipes which I’d meant to deal with last summer but somehow forgotten about. However, after removing it and running the upstairs hot taps for a while, the solid ice that had accumulated around the top of the downpipe, and the solid block of ice within it were all washed away and I could set about unclogging the drain, but all the time the constant dribbling of that wretched overflow pipe remained and it seemed that I could do nothing about that. As it dripped it would hit other pipes and stonework and anything else that randomly got in its way and when it hit these things it splashed and, whilst generally it would add to the ice sculpture, occasionally it would just fall on the ground and add again to the salted paving stones that I was go vigorously - and pointlessly - clearing.

I went back inside and even logged on to the internet to try to find out what that particular part of my heating system actually did, but, apart from a suggestion that I bleed the radiators - which I then went and did once I’d tracked down the key (and which did actually reduce the pressure on the valve somewhere inside the boiler), I couldn’t really find out much else about it, which is when I started to realise how useless I actually was, despite reassurances that I had done everything that I could, I still felt that somehow I really should know much, much more about such things…

So I stood outside in the cold and stared at the dribbling stream, almost as if by willing it to, I could stop it from doing so, but of course it didn’t. I chipped away at the ice sculpture and placed the recycling box under the drip to catch as much of the water as possible, and I chatted to the milkman, when he eventually arrived bearing his bottles, about leaks and he made some comment about not wanting a broken leg as he was about to head off on his holidays which didn’t really make me feel any better, to be perfectly honest with you. Afterwards, I spent much of the day fiddling with the radiators, the taps and the boiler, but it steadfastly remained drip-drip-dripping away, although I did, at least, manage to reduce the amount it was doing so.

This is ultimately the problem when things go wrong and you don’t really know enough about them to put them right. I could, of course, have switched off the entire water supply, but I suspect that that might not have been the wisest option given the freezing temperatures. I did indeed switch off the heating for a while, but as we shivered I noticed that, if anything, the dribbling increased once I did. I began to wonder whether my neighbours were generally likely to be grumbling about the fact that I appeared to be doing nothing to deal with this ongoing potential hazard, but I’ve learned with my increasing years that it is unwise to worry too much about what other people are thinking, even though I still do, of course.

As the day went on, with the heat continuing to churn out, the pressure gauge did drop to a more respectable level, and the dribbling did reduce to an almost nonexistent level, so, somehow, by trial and error, I seem to have done something right.

It still doesn’t stop me from feeling utterly useless, though...