Bathrooms, Showers, Toilets and Ewww Part 4: The Mixer Tap

The above is a mixer tap.

The above is NOT a mixer tap.

I bet you didn't know that a lack of mixer taps are proof of everything from how backwards the English are to the idiocy of the UK's failure to join the Euro to the lack of technologial savey of the countries young people, to what huge (insert series of expletives here) the English are. It's not true. I'll explain at the bottom, with citations. 

Behold: a mixer tap combines hot and cold water, shoots it out one tap, and creates warm water. Can't you just feel the controversy brewing? Aren't you just dying to know why it matters? I thought not.

Any gathering of immigrants to the UK usually results in discussions of things we don't understand about the UK. While having a moan is typically English, the purpose of these discussions is rarely just moaning. It does happen that one person will ask a question, in the form of a complaint, and another person will say, "I just found out why that is." Here is an example:

Me: I still can't get past the lack of mixer taps. Why, if you're fitting a new bathroom at the department store, would you then fail to install mixer taps.
My Friend: Mixer taps have an interesting history here. They're hard to fit into old style plumbing systems. Department Store was refitting not replumbing. There was also a period after they were introduced when there were concerns about hygiene given the way mixer taps in the UK originally worked. {Note: Hygiene is often cited for skipping over new bathroom introductions. Remember the idea of bathing was once horrifying}.

See, perfectly reasonable. Replumbing a building is much more difficult and expensive than simply putting in new taps and new basins. And honestly, I was glad to see that they had fitted watersaving toilets. If you're desperate, you can see the current in-pipes in the picture above.

Me to my friend: I hate scalding my hands while trying to wash them.
Woman next to us: Fill the sink with hot and cold water. Use that.

So actually not really a problem. It feels like a waste of water, but I've experimented and discovered that I use more water when I wash my hands under running water. {She washed her hands with scalding water}.

Do not, I mean it, fail to recognize the signs around sinks that warn of very hot water. They're not kidding. You will, trolling through comments on such stories, see that folks claim a lack of mixer taps are the reason for so many scaldings in the UK. It's important to remember that hot water can be turned on without cold water thus resulting in hot water, even in a mixer tap.

The issue of mixer taps, which are largely used throughout the continent, comes up now and again in the news. It is rare, even from UK sources, to see any sort of in-depth research into the topic. And usually the reason given is that non-mixer taps are traditional. It's lazy journalism. It's hard to see indoor plumbing as traditional. Most certainly the reasons are tied to money, old plumbing rules, habit, and ancient plumbing. Remember that my kitchen drain was attached to a Victorian down pipe.  

Sine those news stories are inevitably fluff, they tend to carry with them pages and pages of comments. Go on and read them. You'll discover as I did that mixer taps are proof of the alleged failings of the mostly the English but sometimes the UK as well. A few points of view are linked below.

Other Places Mentioning Mixer Taps
BBC All 2gether Now Project
The Guardian's Nicolas Blincoe 
The Offensive to Everyone, WSJ via Warwick University Blogs
And for good measure a message board with some useful if not entirely correct information

Other Parts of the Bathrooms, Showers, Toilets and Ewww series
Why English Toilets Don't Clog
How to Descale Your Shower Head
Electric Showers and Yet No Electricity.

Bathrooms, Showers, Toilets and Ewww Part 2: How to Descale Your Shower Head

One of the first places I lived in Bath was a shared house. We all had separate agreements with the landlord, but we shared a kitchen, a bathroom, a toilet, and a washing machine. The kettle was covered in limescale. In fact, it was virtually impossible to boil. Moreover the silver of the shower head had turned completely white. There is very little water pressure on most of this island. That shower literally dripped while spraying water out its sides. I asked one of my flatmates about both the kettle and the shower, he shrugged and told me it was a function of rentals in Britain. And we had a man who needed an attitude adjustment. In fact, it was a function of poor housekeeping. I can hear you laughing. I know you've seen all the dust in my photos.

So in today's installment of  Bathrooms, Showers, Toilets and Ewwww, I bring you: How to Descale Your Shower Head.

Step 1: Boil your kettle and make yourself a cup of tea. Then refill your kettle to the top most fill line. Reboil. And follow the directions on your descaler of choice. (Descalers can be bought at the local hardware store, scalers, and most grocery stores). I know that you'd never assume that all chemicals work the same way, aren't dangerous, or that I know everything.

Make cup of tea, boil kettle, go to step two

Step 2: Put boiled water into giant bucket. Make sure giant bucket is clear of other cleaners. Bleach and everything don't mix, and I like you and your lungs. Detol and most everything don't mix, and I like your soft skin. (The boil portion of this step may be completely unnecessary depending on the product you're using. The not mixing chemicals portion of this step is absolutely necessary.)

Step 2: Put water into bucket that has no other chemical residue in it.

Step 3: Open bathroom window. Place bucket into your bathtub. Make sure you are wearing any protective equipment called for by your descaler box. Add descaler. It is very important that you do not put your bucket on your bathroom floor. There is always some chance of overspill from the chemical reaction you may be creating. Add descaler. Did I mention that you should follow the directions on your descaler? I mean that.

The white bumps are limescale. It also builds up inside the grey bits.

Step 4: Remove shower head from shower head pipe (or hose for you Americans). Put it gently into your mixture. Get out of the bathroom until enough time has elapsed. Most descaler makes one heck of a smell and makes the lungs a wee bit ouchy. I'm really not kidding about the whole follow directions on the bottle thing.

Note: My model is not wearing gloves. Do not follow her example.

Step 5: Poor bucket down the drain and rinse everything with cold water before reattaching to the shower. I always run the shower for a few minutes after descaling. If scale is still present it helps to brush with an old toothbrush (clearly marked as descaling toothbrush) after you've rinsed away the descaler.

Shiny. Note: I did not put hose into the descaler

Step Six: Consider something friendlier. Vinegar and water will descale your shower head just as well as more caustic store bought mixtures. Your shower head will have to soak much longer (I do ours overnight). You will probably have to use some elbow grease. But if you keep up with your descaling (once a month at least), it isn't so bad.

Iota mentioned that toilets rarely back up in the UK. This is true. I do not own a toilet plunger. I'll let you know why that is on Monday. If you click the Facebook Like button on the right-hand sidebar, you'll be able to see more of Bath's flower boxes.

You can read Part 1 of this series here: Fabulous Things About England #33: Baths

The first batch of sourdough failed miserably. The second is gooood.

Brightly Colored Veg: Learning to Live with Five a Day

When I was growing up, my mother made cucumber and carrot sticks, she broke off cauliflower and broccoli florets, and she cut stars into the tops of radishes before throwing the lot into old margarine tubs and covering with them with water. Mom would place these on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator, allowing my sister and I to graze our ways through the day.

It isn't a terribly practical plan here. My butter containers would fit just about two carrots. Refrigerators are small, and unlike the US, freezers tend to be on the bottom. I've tried over the years to emulate my mother, but vegetables tended to get eaten before they made it to the tubs or forgotten all together. Here I share the the refrigerator with my housemate, and she'll be the first to tell you that I forget about the food I cannot see when first glancing below the counter and into the fridge. Food was rarely wasted, just eaten well into the floppy but edible stage.

I'm terrible about making complete meals for one. I plan them, buy the food stuffs, then eat the ingredients one by one. This usually results in a lot of uncooked pasta and rice. It isn't that I don't have the time, but that I generally eat when I reach the point of starving or when I'm trying to sit down to write. I generally cook when someone might thank me for doing so. The question is one of degree. While I am happier when I am fed, I am happier still when I have fed someone else.

Years ago I stopped getting hungry. Until the point at which my eyes rang the migraine alarm bells or I simply fell over, my body gave me no reminders to eat. I wouldn't have eaten at all at University had the other women in my hall not knocked on my door and asked me when I was going to dinner, to breakfast. Mostly, I forgot lunch until after the dining hall had closed because there was no one to remind me to put food into my stomach between classes and work. When I tried to explain, men and women alike envied me my stick figure.
I still rarely get hungry; though, I have lost the stick figure.

Friends will tell you that I am never so grateful as when someone feeds me a meal they have cooked. They'll say that I eat ravenously. They may even say that they have heard me utter the words: I'm hungry. My friends are reasonably smart people. They know what I mean is that I want to break bread in their company. They know that I have likely forgotten to stop for a moment for lunch. They know I have looked toward my own kitchen and figured I'd go and make something soon. Soon is rather like the rest of the future; it rarely arrives when we most expect it to.

The night before we buried my grandmother, my sister made a roast for my brother-in-law, my father, my stepmother, and I. We ate slowly, taking our time over the thick slices of pork.  We didn't talk about what the next morning would bring; though, my father slowly articulated our families life in that far off place we call a long time ago. For one short moment, we forgot the forks in our hands, the dishes to be done, the years in between that make the distances between us so necessary. There in the rental house, I sat with my father and one of my sisters, and we ate a home cooked meal as a family--something that hasn't happened in sixteen whispering years.

I am trying to learn to eat food cooked for one. It has become, rather suddenly, a necessity. After that dinner in Denver, we sent my sister and her husband on a date. My stepmother began to do the washing up, and Dad prepared for bed. I opened my laptop, typed my password, and discovered that the job that made up the bulk of my income no longer existed. Nor did the job of anyone else who was working from outside of the state in which the university's buildings sit.

And I am lucky. I have a second job with good people who are throwing as many hours as they can afford in my direction. I have friends who have been out of work for two years, who at thirty-three are living with their parents who themselves cannot afford to retire. I have friends who have been told to go back to university to retrain, despite their PhDs and decades worth of student loan debt. I have friends who dole out calories to their children, skimping on their own, in hopes that children who feel hungry are still well enough fed. But I also know how thin the line between underemployed and unemployed is. I know that the electric bill is going to be much higher than the amount the housemate and I toss into the savings account each month. I know that I may or may not have enough hours next month to make up the difference. I know that what I write as melancholy is really fear. So while I search for another job that may well be forthcoming, I'm buying what's left at the end of the day at the veg stall to avoid paying rent with the emergency plane ticket. And I am grateful that it is, for now, more than enough.

A Walk in The Woods

Last week, I met up with an old friend and her two boys. We went on a walk to find a wood. We were looking for a particular wood, but we only knew it existed because my friend had accidentally found it while lost a few summers ago. This time we had to find it while not-lost. So we went in search of the wood that we knew existed somewhere near enough to walk but far enough away to have once lost our way. It was a rather perfect day for a journey with two small people, two big people, a packed lunch, and a pushchair (stroller). Pushchairs, by the by, can be lifted over kissing gates.

Like this one, many built-up areas in this part of the UK, have protected green space for wildlife, socializing, and long walks. We did manage to find the wood by looking up high for a copse of trees and walking toward them. We sat on this log and had our sandwiches. This cat followed us in and rather begged to be photographed. The floor (ground) of the wood is covered in bluebell plants. They should spring out sometime this month.

We saw the many places the Wiltshire Wildlife Trust had begun to make habitat for birds and hedgehogs and children inclined to playing house. The wood is rather small, if you consider that I used to live in Alaska, but like all planned wilderness in England, it has been perfectly formed to make long walks possible. The trees have been coppiced. It's a rather brilliant way of cutting back trees almost to the ground to create quick and thick regrowth and assures more wood for future use. One of the things people will tell you here is that island nations learned early the necessity of renewing resources--even if they are now having to remember that heritage. Coppicing and copses have a long history in the UK, and the British are particularly fond of their woods.The human need for a bit of nature seems a foregone conclusion to them.

I suppose that is rather obvious as so many of us grew up with the stories of Pooh and Tiger who lived in a wood. I have it on good authority that this is Piglet's house. Piglet, of course, couldn't climb the tree. His door had to be down and close to the ground. We did knock, but he wasn't in. I suspect we should have rung first, rather than just calling in. Surely then he would have been expecting us.

I can imagine spending a rather perfect childhood here. Doesn't it seem that this path leads to a long journey to just about anywhere? There is no poison oak or ivy here, and if you stand quietly enough, you can imagine noise from the motor way is simply a nearby ocean.

Even perfect days have to end. I've tried objecting and running alongside a small boy on a bicycle and sitting quietly reading books, but those things only extend the joy before dusk settles in. These are early spring flowers. I've been seeing them on people's lapels recently. What are they? What do they symbolize?

5. Gas, Wind, and Petrol

In England, the stuff that you fill your car with is petrol. Gas generally refers to natural gas, which is entirely fair as it's a gas. And the bloating you get after Thanksgiving dinner is called wind. When it won't move, it's called trapped wind.