After my rather functional visit to the gym yesterday (“Come for a dump, stay for a workout”) I got back to the flat expecting to have to spend the next hour or so standing under the leaking waste pipe in a T-shirt and shorts trying to effect a boy scout repair, but in fact got back to find that it had been fixed. My repeated calls to The Baron's various numbers had, against all the odds, done the trick.

A very pleasant surprise for me, but perhaps a bit of an anticlimax as far as the blog is concerned. A Carry On-style scene which ended with me getting a face-full of sewage would probably have been more interesting from a reader's perspective.

However, the whole affair did remind me that last time there was a problem with this pipe, there was an incident which never made it onto this blog, but probably deserved to.

This was back in July, around the time of The Airline Seats and the Juicer, and the same pipe had become dislodged of its own accord (rather than because someone had chucked a big lump of wood at it). Large quantities of water were gushing out into the lightwell and down a small grate designed for much more modest quantities of liquid.

I'd noticed this during the day, but The Baron had been poking around downstairs and had assured me that he was in the process of getting it fixed so I just let him get on with. I worked from home all day but at around 8pm I decided to squeeze in a quick session at the gym. When I left the pipe was still leaking and there was no sign of The Baron but to be honest I wasn't really in the mood for chasing him so I just tried to forget about it.

When I returned a little after 9pm there was a fire engine outside the house. Two firemen were standing outside the front door, which was at that moment being opened from the inside by a third, revealing a fourth coming down the stairs inside my flat.

It turns out that someone had phoned 999 to report a leak (a slight over-reaction I would argue) and the fire brigade had broken into the house via the empty basement and then broken out into the hallway and then back into my flat in their search for the source of all the water.

The firemen were actually pretty good about it all, and The Baron arrived on the scene surprisingly quickly, with promises that it would all be fixed first thing the next day. It turned out he'd recently had some kind of waste pump fitted and this was clearly pumping way more water than necessary out into the main waste pipe.

Anyway, it was only after the firemen had left that I realised the one who'd broken into my flat must have gone into my spare bedroom, where I still had a video camera on a fully extended tripod pointing down at a hand-trimmed toilet seat resting on my B&Q Workmate-alike workbench, which I'd used to take this photo.

On discovering this rather peculiar setup, it would not have been completely unreasonable for this unsuspecting fireman to have assumed that he'd stumbled across the secret set of an amateur scat film. He might have further speculated what such a film might be called — for instance, Potty Training II: Totty on the Potty — but then again, that might just be an excuse for me to think up silly film names.

So continuing an occasional theme of ultra-specific and thus almost certainly useless advice, next time you've set up a video camera to take a photo of toilet seat balanced on a workbench, make sure you dismantle it before the fire brigade break into your house.