Bodging it

The start of lockdown, in March last year, saw a modest bit of plumbing repair. While a bit of disturbance today popped one of the same U-bend joints open. Much fiddling about before I worked out how it was supposed to fit together - the various washers being the point of difficulty. To find that the vertical pipe in the snap above was about 2cm short: as far as I could see this morning, there must have been some forcing to get the joint together, and over time it has worked loose.

Failed to repeat the trick, and eventually decided to remove the bracket holding the horizontal pipe onto the wall, a old bracket which turned out to be not quite the right size. But at least the pipe was now free to move up the missing 2cm and the U-bend was put back together again, no longer leaking, at least for the present.

I then decided that I was not going to get the bracket back on in the new position without making a bit of a mess of the tiles and settled for a spot of carpentry, securing the plastic to the copper which was still attached to the wall by the clip visible top right.

Nice substantial bit of timber to fix the pipe to, the only complication being the need to slide the wooden fitting in, behind the copper and underneath the earth bond - a bond which I did not know how to test and which I did not like to remove. Settled for a large screw with a couple of the large washers picked up over the past 18 months on my travels around Epsom and Ewell. Not terribly secure, but it should stop the thing being pulled apart by stumbling over the sink above or some such. Maybe I will think of something better overnight. Maybe I will take it down and paint it white.

It was also a day to add a demonstration loaf to Batch 629 for the benefit of a small visitor - with the result that I got something much more like the small wholemeal loaf I might get from a baker or a supermarket than anything I had made in more than ten years of bread making. Perhaps the slow learning is the price I pay for teach myself without much help from cookbooks - let alone television programmes - with television cooks being one of my hates. Not to mention YouTube cooks. And perhaps the small visitor was more helpful than I gave her credit for.

My own rather larger loaves - flat, round affairs, rather like the Greek Cypriots used to sell at the top of Green Lanes in Harringay - were an experiment with more yeast. Five level teaspoons for three and a half pounds of flour rather than four - a seemingly modest increase which speeded the two rises up significantly. This would be a useful gain, although the larger loaves still look nothing like that above and I have yet to taste them.

PS: satisfactory reports on the bread reached us from a correspondent on the morning after. Hopefully it was cooked, it having been cooked in our top oven at a nominal 200°C, which turned out to be rather cooler than a nominal 200°C in the fan oven below, used for the larger loaves. A difference which resulted in my first guess of the cooking time being well under the actual time. Luckily, I did not lose the rise, something than can happen if you disturb things early on.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/03/cheese-supplies.html.

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