Frank Kafka’s back. He’s alive and well and running a company near Newcastle. They sell fuses - reluctantly.
I’ll explain.
One of the great joys of living in the middle of nowhere is the opportunity to have things go wrong, at the wrong time. Since my place includes a wellness retreat, and retreats happen at weekends, this means the sky only ever falls in, at weekends. No catastrophic storm descends on a Monday morning, with five full days to fix the electricity. Nothing breaks on a Tuesday. Calamity only strikes when the place is full of people hugging trees and saying ‘Ommm’.
For example, last weekend.Most of our heating and hot water come from a biomass boiler. I didn’t know what that was, at first. It sounded like something that might burn old cauliflowers, or spare bits of grass, or perhaps lapsed Catholics, when in reality it gobbles up tiny pellets of reconstituted wood, which look like cat litter, but without the interesting smell. They burn at about 98% efficiency, which is good for the planet. Better than oil, anyway. The boiler lives in a shipping container, which is apt because the inside looks like the engine room of the Queen Mary. It’s full of big round things full of water, with pipes coming in and out. (I hope this isn’t too technical for you). It generates enough hot water to warm the shapely bottoms and then cleanse the glowing skin of about twenty yogis. The boiler itself is massive and square and hulking, German of course, with a cute display like a tiny iPad which tells me important things like HPO Pump status and CO2 co-efficient, whatever they may be. Even its name means business: Guntamatic. Presumably invented by someone called Gunter. I like to imagine him sitting with fingertips pressed together, staring into the Bavarian middle distance, trying to think of a creative brand name, then giving up and using the one his six year old suggested.
Usually, Gunter’s product is as reliable as a Volkswagen, without the alluring advertising. But when it falls over … carnage. Like on Sunday, when I turned on a tap and raised a quizzical eyebrow at the lack of warmth in the gushing water. A quick trip to the shipping container revealed not the usual Teutonic hum, but silence and a plaintive flashing on the iPad screen: ‘ERR’. Which I think is German for ‘uh-oh’.
Investigation revealed … (I won’t bore you with the details) … and ‘error message F16’, which I always thought was an American fighter jet. I texted the nice man who comes once in a blue moon to service it. Mark is his name. Pithy is his style. He never sends a four word text if three might do. ‘Fuse 5 blown’ he wrote. So I removed the cover and found about a dozen fuses, none of them labelled. I made an educated guess, twisting the fuse holders, which were reluctant to give up their dead, and finally found a ten amp fuse. According to the manual, Fuse 5 is the only one that big. Progress.
Not really. There were no spares, where the spares should be. Everywhere was closed. Never mind; shivering is good. Very slimming. I’m sure the guests wouldn’t mind. We could start a new global fad; cold yoga.
The next day, after sleeping like Heidi wearing all my clothes at once, I hightailed it to the local electrical shop, where a nice chap told me the fuse was a 5 x 20mm slow blow and no they didn’t have any. But I could go to (he paused portentously, as if about to name the Almighty) – Smithson’s Fuses. Only half an hour’s drive away.
I imagined some kind of Dickensian emporium, where a man in a brown coat called Albert would tread silently, limping slightly from a Boer War wound, lifting boxes of tiny components from a chaotic floor, blowing off the dust, before holding something up to the light, saying ‘May I recommend our Invincible model? It was very popular before The Great Voltage Shift. That will be two shillings’. It was therefore a disappointment to find a sleek modern building on an industrial estate, where multiple signs sternly ordered people to avoid shutter doors and park here not there and visitors go to reception, which turned out not to exist. Eventually, having pressed an intercom button and waited for five minutes, a man came out, looking careworn and anxious, which oddly enough was exactly how I was feeling. I showed him my tiny, sad, broken fuse. He held it to his rather thick glasses and smiled with the quiet contentment of a chap who lives with his mother. Then he disappeared for more long minutes, and told me that yes, they did have said fuse in stock, but no, I couldn’t have one. Because I didn’t have an account.
I asked if I could open one. ‘That would require a credit check’. I asked how much the fuse would cost. ‘Seventy pence’. I was reasonably confident I would pass that credit check. But, he said, it would take ten days. And no, I couldn’t just give him the cash. The system doesn’t allow that.
Suddenly in danger of emulating my boiler and blowing a fuse myself, I reminded him, with as much charm as I could muster, that I had no heating and no hot water and it was forecast to be minus something this week and what could be done?
And then he metamorphosed. He went Full Franz. Komplete Kafka.
I could place an order, he said reluctantly, clearly anxious that the integrity of their processes might be eternally impugned. But to do that, I would have to drive for half an hour back to the electrical retailers where I started. I should pay them, ask them to do the actual ordering bit, get a receipt, then drive for half an hour back to Smithson’s Fuses, where the very same man who was saying all of this to me would finally hand over the goods. That’s the goods that were sitting, at that exact moment, on a shelf just behind his bespectacled head. Oh, and I’d have to buy ten, because they don’t sell them individually. Seven quid in total.
So I did that, sighing.
When I got back to Smithson’s Fuses, they had closed for lunch.
So I waited.
When they re-opened, they hadn’t received the order from the electrical retailer, because they too had closed for lunch, but time-shifted, to add unexpected excitement to my day.
Eventually, five hours after setting out on my bold mission to buy a thing the size of my little fingernail, I held the magic prize in my hand, and rushed home.
I put the fuse in Gunter’s Great Machine.
And it still didn’t work.
Turned out there was nothing wrong with the fuse. Instead, the fault was a button marked STB. Press it with a pencil and everything jumps back into active life. Which, you will immediately spot, it could have done on Sunday, if only Mark had told me. Presumably ‘press the STB button’ would break his text word limit.
So that was my week’s wild fuse chase. It’s been a bit of a trial.
Thank you for reading my whimsy. If you like it, please tell a friend. Especially if they know about boilers, and text expansively. Or ‘subscribe’ to make next week’s epistle zoom with quasi-German efficiency to your Inbox. I thank you, most warmly. But it is the weekend, so …
