Zen and the art of.......

I've always had a grudging admiration for "Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance".  I see where it is coming from, but I once owned an aging BSA C15 250 cc single.  This bike facilitated my 50 mile./day commute for three years and a few ill-advised long distance rides whilst at university.  There is a passage in the book which describes adjusting tappets on something desirable which is parked under a shady Californian palm tree.  This is in marked contrast to placing the cylinder head of the BSA in sterile environment of my mother's oven in an attempt to replace well worn valve guides which were causing oil and petrol consumption to be about equal.  The mobile workshop which was my Belstaff waterproof never lacked a feeler gauge for tappets and points adjustment.  To be fair to the C15, once big-ends had been replaced, the cylinder re-bored and anything that generally needs to be replaced on a motorbike, like chains, clutch pads and oil had been replaced it was reasonably reliable, but I never sat under a palm tree with it feeling at one with the world.

Some decades later, I decided to confront the plumbing in my house.  The object of plumbing is to move water from some ill-defined location to a tap where one use it to clean vegetables or hatch beautiful/creative thoughts whilst languishing in a hot bath.  When the house was built in 1901, it probably did both these things well, but somehow progress got in the way and the bath water cooled and creative thoughts became a thing of the past.

Pipework which is not at one with the world

When the house was built, lead pipes fed a few taps and a gas fired geyser, a simple, functional arrangement albeit with the attendant risks of gas explosion and carbon monoxide poisoning, both of which could be mitigated by opening a window.  The first enhancement was the addition of a back boiler to the cooking range, this would have been OK, had the pipes not been made of iron and by 1949, bath water would have been a trickle of dark red fluid which gave the occupiers the appearance of  fake tan combined with poor personal hygiene.

I'm guessing, but the solution was probably a solid fuel boiler with copper pipes, whilst this was step forward, the only way of moving water around the house was "gravity feed".  The attraction of a gravity feed system is that it is cheap to install, the downside is that it is inefficient.  A pump to move water around the house improves things considerably.  The occupants of the house continued to be cold and dirty.  Sometime in the 1980s a pumped system arrived, but there were three generations of pipework in place, lead, iron and imperial copper.  It was probably cheaper to route the new pipe via London than remove the old stuff and offset the long and winding path with a massive boiler.  Nobody involved had read "Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance".

It's reasonably easy to protest against airport expansion, you just turn up and wave a placard around and maybe make a some new friends.  It's much nobler to tackle one's own plumbing.  Over the past two months I have ripped out a century of pipework and replaced it with short, insulated runs and to my surprise/relief we have reduced our CO2 emissions and enjoyed the luxury of a hot bath.

Sadly, when I sit in the bath, I still do not feel at one with the world, but I still appreciate where "Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance" was coming from.