Spouting Nonsense

You’d like my kitchen. It’s sort of big and rather old, with real beams that actually do support the floor above, fortunately, and an inglenook with a crackling, glowing wood-burner, which is very much needed in this part of the frozen north. Especially this week, where it was minus 8 outside, aka 17 Fahrenheit. That’s reasonably brr. At the other end, beyond the farmhouse table (this being indeed a farmhouse), is the inevitable Aga. You know, that hulking Swedish thing that Brits adore, the one that keeps your bum warm and dries Barbours and magically irons clothes left on the hot plate lid, but is otherwise useless. Especially at cooking. It’s a machine with the reliability of a Trabant and the design sophistication of a tank, a ‘cooker’ to which Brits are addicted, even though it tends to give up the ghost half way through Christmas lunch, bringing new meaning to cold turkey. It may be a design thoroughbred, but it falls at the first hurdle in the culinary stakes; as a cooker, the Aga Khan’t. When it does (occasionally) work, it has an impressive ability to burn things to several crisps behind its lumbering metal doors. Mary Berry once wrote ‘everyone who has ever owned an Aga has at some point opened the top oven and said ‘I wonder what that was’.  To which I would add, ’I wonder why I got one’.

But my focus this past week has been none of this bucolic splendour, nor even the culinary frustration. It’s been the tap, to the right of the Aga. The one that goes drip.

It is tall and graceful, arching like a swan over the sink, with levers that would say Czech and Speake if the labels had not fallen off years ago. It arrived when we ‘did’ the kitchen over a decade ago, spending so much money I didn’t really notice the price tag for this particular feature. I mean, it’s just a tap, right? What do taps cost? Sixty quid?

Apparently not, as I was about to discover.

When the drip started, spreading an oozing film of cold water that rose imperiously from the neck, dribbling down the no-longer flawless brushed chrome, landing surreptitiously on the granite, I sort of ignored it. One of those jobs I’ll get to at some point, after the other hundred or so, the ones that stare at me accusingly every time I go for a walk. Or sit down. Or breathe. Big old properties have big old maintenance lists. But six months later, in a kind of water torture, with the granite going white and the dribble no longer remotely constrained by the dish cloths I had optimistically wrapped around the shaft, I decided to do something.

So first, I called the manufacturers. “Good morning, this is Czech and Speake, how may I be of assistance?” asked the lady with the impeccable vowels and the RADA cadence. I explained the problem. “Gosh, I am so very sorry to hear of that. May I connect you with a colleague to assist you?”. But of course, I replied, a warm glow spreading through my body, just knowing they would be able to help in a trice. And so nicely spoken. It was an aural massage, albeit lacking a happy ending, as I was about to discover.

“Oh I am awfully sorry, but I am afraid we no longer carry spares for that particular model” I was told, in equally soothing, velvety tones. “However we would instead be delighted to provide you with a whole new tap. That will be nine hundred and forty-nine pounds and seventeen pence. Plus VAT”.

I demurred, and got out my toolbox.

Four hours later, everything was in bits, foaming at the spout, soaked in vinegar and bicarbonate of soda. The acrid smell brought back happy memories of distant chemistry lessons where we would light the gas tap intended for a Bunsen burner and watch the flame jet horizontally across the wooden bench, melting the varnish. Then we’d drop some acid, but only literally, to add further thrilling danger. Five bottles of vinegar and a pack of bicarb later, my home chemistry experiment was over, everything was no longer green, and I could liberate the offending bit – the drippy cartridge. Aha. Looked pretty standard to me. eBay offered a multiplicity of choice, for about fourteen pounds a pair. But which to choose? How many splines?

I tried C&S again, asking for the spares department, figuring that if I spoke to someone a bit less posh, we might circumvent the sales-promoting rip-off. Sure enough, said Nick, the technical manager, “we have those cartridges in stock. I’ll send you a pro forma”. So I didn’t need a new tap after all. Aha.

The invoice arrived. One hundred and eighty three pounds and sixty pence. Though that included delivery.

I enquired why their cartridges cost over ten times as much as the same thing on eBay, to be told “ours are engineered by a company that solely makes cartridges using quality materials. They cost a bit more for this reason”. He’s right; ten times is indeed a bit more. Clearly those RADA vowels and that peerless corporate self-confidence bestow added value, for which clients must be expected to pay. Cheque and speake posh.

Or perhaps their customers like it, feeling grateful to be faux-cosseted en plein rip-off, finding comfort in things which are ‘reassuringly expensive’, as the Stella Artois adverts used to say. It brought to mind that wonderful Harry Enfield character, running a shop selling utter tat at exorbitant prices to ignorantly grateful ladies in Notting Hill, taking their financial eyes out, then bidding them a fond farewell with “I saw you coming”. Continuing the egregious greed, the ‘do you not know who we are?’ arrogance, British Airways, once ‘the world’s favourite airline’ according only to itself, whose motto used to be ‘to fly, to serve’, no longer serves …. lunch, at lunchtime. In Business Class. Its new motto should be ‘to be fly, to swerve’. Or perhaps ‘less is more ... expensive’.

Not that exorbitant pricing is confined to the Brits. One of my favourite places in New York is the Centurion Club, towering over Manhattan next to Grand Central, where the Chrysler Building looks close enough to touch when you get out of the lift on the fifty-fifth floor. It is discreet, and discrete, selectively available only to those of us ‘invited’ to pay for an Amex black card; the privileged foolish. The place is self-consciously lovely, the people who check you in, universally beautiful, and the guests, padding round in reverie, exchange knowing glances, as if attendees at a particularly upmarket sex club. The wraparound view smacks you in the eye, exactly like the costs; a glass of bog standard Sauvignon Blanc is thirty-eight dollars. That’s what you get at such an altitude; high prices.

My father used to say “a fool and his money are soon parted”. It’s strange how some people seem actively to enjoy that experience, to relish the rip off, trading a desire to be cosseted for absurd price gouging. Me? I don’t mind paying through the nose for a glass of wine when my eyes can see forever in all directions, but ten times the real price for a ceramic cartridge, a little inoffensive thing the size of my thumb? Which will dribble again in ten years, no matter how much it costs today? I thanked Nick for his help, got out the magnifying glass, counted the splines, and bought some on eBay. The drip is gone, without a splurge. Like my kitchen, I’m beaming.

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