Here come the cavalry

Alternate years, The Boy braves St George's Channel to bring his family home for Christmas. There was a big yellow warning storm at sea over the weekend prior with ferry cancellations and delays but they lucked out and arrived on time late on Monday 23rd Dec. We had fired up the oil-fired central heating for the first time this year on the Solstice. The first floor of the house felt like the tropical rain-forest exhibit at the Botanic Gardens as the rads drove the damp out of the granite walls. I was surprised (and relieved) that the boiler actually fired up because we've been eking out a tank of oil that might be our last before moving to a more sustainable way of heating our home.

Then, at lunchtime on Christmas Day, the boiler [R] went phut and we had to subsist on the residual heat in the walls. It was fortunately super mild - and dry - so it wasn't too much effort to revive freezing wet G.daus when they returned from outdoor adventures. And we always have wood and the Waterford 104 stove to burn it; so one room in the house can keep frost-daemons at bay. Shortly after 0900hrs on Stephen's Day, I called the number on the front of the boiler. The ansafone at O'Byrne Services in Kilkenny shared a mobile number for emergencies and breakdowns. I wished Conor O'Byrne a cautious Happy Christmas and explained the symptoms, adding that nobody was going to die if the boiler wasn't fixed. But he took my Eircode and said he'd try to get out later.

. . . and he did.  And like the best trades-folk, he listened a bit, poked a bit and announced "It's the oil pump". Like the best trades-folk, he had a spare pump in the the Aladdin's Cave of his van and he swapped out the tired old broken for a shiny new replacement . . . which worked. It's like science: you have some data, which you match with experience, to float a hypothesis, which you test. Sometimes, the first, most likely explanation, is wrong and you have to dig deeper through the mind-archive for the answer.

After the fix and the payment, which seemed proper reasonable, and my sincere thanks for Being There for strangers we chewed the fat for a bit. Lamenting that Millennials floated through adolescence on the back of the Celtic Tiger, awash with money, so they never had to get their hands dirty fixing tractors or laying bricks. I lamented that The Institute had lost its place in the scheme of things with its pathetic aspirations in rebranding to a second rate university. In the before times, The Institute had been a first rate regional technical college: training up youngsters to be a Good Pair of Hands who could implement the ideas of desk-bound, live-in-m'head, intellectuals like me.

And its not only scientists who are detached from the Real World. We just had a general election which returned a safe centre-right coalition. But all the political parties were talking large about how many houses they were going to build. Mr O'Byrne asked, with dead-pan rhetoric, "build houses with which blocks-layers, sparkies, chippies, plumbers and central heating installers??" Because he sure-as-heck couldn't find enough Effectives to drive a van loaded with spanners and spares and fulfill the demands of Seán Poblacht for new and upgraded central heating kit. Our 28 y.o. cast iron boiler is a) fundamentally inefficient b) approaching its end-of-life.