Two wrongs and a right

I spoke to our solicitor yesterday. She told me our buyer's legal beagle has only raised a couple of issues with the sale of our house, one of which she's already resolved. The other was an invitation to take out an indemnity insurance policy.

How kind.

"OK..." I said, expecting it to be the same one we were told about a few weeks ago. But no. This was not a policy to cover the missing piece of paper approving the beam that separates our living and dining room. Nor was it a policy to cover the danger of the Church of England tapping our buyers for repairs to a pre-reformation church somewhere hereabouts.

This was a policy to cover the apparent fact that our access to the path running behind our house has no legal somethingorother. The council could, at some stage hereuntowhatever, take the assumed right to use this path away, and the value of the house could, in some way, be affected. (In Brighton?) But look at how much we're being asked to pay: £220.

Bastards!

That's my first wrong: Bullshit insurance policies.

Needful to say, we declined the invitation.

My second wrong is this: Taps without washers.

Our bathroom tap's been dripping for a few days. In an attack of Practical Eco-Manliness, I unscrewed, unscrewed, took off, unclipped, unscrewed, unscrewed and replaced the washer with one of the several that have been floating around the bottom of the Really Useful Drawer in the kitchen these past few years. Prompted partly, it must be said, by the need to prove the shiny new socket-and-spanner set I bought recently was not a waste of cash.

Ten-minute job. No more drip. Didn't even cut myself.

Then I remembered, those washers were originally bought to fix a dripping kitchen tap. But when I prized off and unscrewed (clearly an easier operation to this point), instead of a washer, I found a Modern Ceramic Piece Of Shit That Was Singularly Failing To Do Its Job Despite Being Only A Few Months Old.

Job for a plumber. No more drip. £40. Which hurt a lot.

Here's the right: Right in the middle of my manly fixing, glass artist David Watson turned up with the medieval-style goblets he offered to make from some of the champagne bottles emptied during our party in Stanmer Park on Sunday. Two of them now look like this:



With the rest of the bottles, he's going to make some doorknobs for the doors Mark just finished (see below). Which is about as right as you can get.

And at the very least deserves a link to his website.