This is gross. If you don’t like gross then click away to something soothing now.
At forty-five I never thought I’d be lurching out of bed at 0511h to sprint to my bathroom for a big technicolour yawning session. However, as any fule kno, four pints of beer and countless bottles of red wine will do that to you. Especially if you were necking it with the enthusiasm of an 18 year old fresher.
The worst bit wasn’t being sick in the sink but failing to be sick in the lavatory, a.k.a. the Porcelain Telephone. Schoolboy error as I plugged the sink and it backed up with a most hideous mixture. It turns out that even with vigorous and attentive chewing onion rings don’t digest that fast and, if you recall your school days in science class, they have a membranous quality that defies the best efforts of digestive enzymes. The floaty bits in the red soupy mess seemed to be mostly very thin onion membranes and it was doubtless one of these that had sealed off the drainage apparatus somewhere. The end result was that plunging various long-handled kitchen implements down the plughole had no effect. It being very early, me still being very pissed and a very incompetent plumber ,I rinsed out mouth and nasal passages (it gets everywhere when you are sick) and returned to my pit with a cup of tea. As I nodded off I made a silent prayer that it would all drain away slowly whilst I slept off the evil drink and would be gone in the morning.
I finally rose, sweating like a man on death row, about 0900h. As I glided, still quite pissed, out of my room I passed the bathroom door and resolved to look in there after a cup of tea.
But back to the sink. Cup of tea in hand I eased open the bathroom door and fervently hoped that gravity and time had worked their magic to drain the sink. No chance. God was definitely punishing me. The aroma was appalling and the sight was of a red soupy mess with some yellow oily scum (from the deep-fried onion rings?). I choked back my urge to add to the general detritus and got busy trying to unblock it. No amount of vigourous probing of the plughole was having any effect so I started bailing. A bit like a sailboat but grosser, much much grosser. I bailed the contents into the loo until the sink was empty. Whilst puzzling on how to fix this situation I had a brainwave; I boiled nearly two litres of water and poured it into the sink to burn its way through. I then discovered three things.
- there was about 2 litres of liquid to start with as it promptly backed up to the brim and gave me a small twinge of panic. Would it ever stop?
- boiling water didn’t punch through whatever was blocking it.
- though the red colour and greasy yellow stuff was mostly gone there was a whole heap more bits down there that floated up. And guess what? Even more onion.
Oh goody goody. Time to ring my ever practical younger brother. I told him I had had a bit of a car-crash of an evening and described my current predicament. When he had recovered his composure he pointed out the bleeding obvious, so I went and unscrewed the trap. Needless to say this is where most of the onion had taken up residence. Problem solved. Another hit of boiling water sorted out the nasty niffs and then the entire day was an utter write-off that involved lots and lots of tea.
I am definitely too old for this shit.
