If you think about it, a household's most useful device is in fact its toilet.
What would you chuck out before that if push came to shove?
Legendarily, though not in fact, invented by Thomas Crapper, the modern WC has become the great seen-but-unnoticed feature of modern life.
How many houses, I ask you in all seriousness, have two kitchen sinks, two stoves, two bath tubs?
OK, a few, but not as many as have two bogs.
Domestic harmony in most homes these days is purely a function of the fact that there's double the chance of a vacancy when it's time to send a bronzed friend off to the sea.
The thing is a little gem, solving as it does, the long-standing (or sitting) debate between epicureans and pragmatists about the fundamental human drive towards culture.
Epicureans think that inessential frippery is the first mark of culture, dragging us beyond the mere necessity of the beasts, while pragmatists hold culture to be primarily utilitarian and only secondarily, say, decorative.
The humble loo is a wonderful balance.
It fills several basic utter necessities and yet, at the same time, there are much more down-to-earth ways of disposing of the various forms of abjection it neatly and quickly removes from our sight.
A luxurious necessity, a pragmatic inessential.
Almost the duck-rabbit of our lives.
That is, until it ceases to function.Which happened to me this morning.
Something -- too hideous for even my normally scatologically robust consciousness to conjur -- had become lodged in its "Weir" (see diagram).
Suddenly, as with Heidegger and the broken hammer, we are forced to cogitate upon its thing-like status as a presence-in-the-world, rather than mundanely knowing it via its direct readiness-to-bottom (Zurektumheit).
Enough philosophising, I thought, I have nothing to go on: a call to our friendly Minjup plumber, Jack, is more to the point.
Jack, sometimes seen in the pub looking (as all Australian master tradesmen tend to) just like one of the workers, actually gets a new BMW every year, sends his kids to boarding school and electrocution lessons and has a yacht.
A long time, I suspect, since he's shoved any of his own tools of the trade down a dunny.
So Jack says his team's booked up for months but that he can send his apprentice round at a reduced rate.
Not being one to miss a bargain in these straitened times, I agreed right away.
An hour or so later, there's a knock on the door and there's this cute chick in a green overall replete with plunger and related gear.
You could have knocked me over with a pick-axe.
(Cute, I say, but not as cute as that Amanada-Lyn who hasn't been in sight for ages either because of the rain or because she got a whiff of my car deodorant.)
So, says the plumbette, whose name turned out to be Cher, quick as a flash: "Mister Trovatore? You got a shithouse that doesn't work?"
All I could think of to say was: "I am a shithouse that doesn't work".
Unfazed, she sets to in the smallest room, all the time humming 60s and 70s songs to herself in what has to be described as a rather tuneful, if not quite mellifluous, voice.
But a few short decades ago, this could have been the girl for me: own income at tradeswoman's rates, great voice, and certainly my line of work (when I still had one).
We could have formed a Sledge and Cher tribute band with a sideline in Dylan covers.
All the rage then.
Now what's that song from Another Side of Bob Dylan?
Ah yes, here it is:
"All I really wanna do
Is baby free bends with you".
Sledge
