Disasters at Willseden Gardens

The scene of the disaster, commode tastefully obscured by vintage screens

As our readers are no doubt aware, until the Delightful Miss E completes her intercultural work (and sideline in modelling!) in rural Japan, I am forced to live alone in London. To this end I have secured a small retreat, Willesden Gardens, in North West London. It is not quite up to our usual extravagant means, having only 8 bathrooms and 8 bedrooms, but I find I only use a tiny portion of it - the Western half of the middle floor, to be precise - on account of my busy lifestyle and lack of accoutrements (one does try to live a little more frugally in this era of global warming). It hardly feels like home these days, as it is a temporary letting whose furnishings came supplied. As one can see from the illustration, it is a little gaudily middle eastern for my taste, but it has been designed to fit into the area, which apparently has a rather strong middle eastern influence. The worst thing of course is that it has no ballroom, so I have not been able to properly enter into society; but I am sure these problems will be assuaged once the Delightful Miss E returns to my side, and upon her entry into society I am sure she will do more than her fair share of Entertaining.

However, I digress. The purpose of this diary entry, dear reader, is to comment upon the nature of lettings for the poor put-upon traveller in these hard times. For I had a small disaster in the Southern Bathroom two nights ago, upon which I deign to comment. I had just returned home from a hard days' work, a little run down from a hard day's Inquiry, sick with a budding cold, and was eating my supper when what should I hear but a strange crackling resounding through the spacious confines of the Southern Bathroom. Being of unflappable constitution, I finished my course (a delicious tuna, olive and mint tagine) before I wandered down to the bathroom myself to investigate (one cannot trust the Help with these things - imagine if it had been a party of the Hun, alert to our secret plans and launching an advance raid to secure information?) Fortunately there were no frightening security breaches, but I did discover a veritable torrent of water, flowing through my veneer ceiling panels, between the steam vent and all over my (rather vulgarly modernist) chandelier. Imagine my shock! Whats more, this house is quite modern inside, and is connected to the new City Energy, so the chandelier is powered by Electrocentripetal Energy (as I said, my chandelier is rather overly modernist - modernism is all the rage in Britain these days). The flow of water was so strong as to be a real shower, and I was rather worried at the combination of water and Electrocentripetal power. I immediately unwound the dynamo, as it were, so as to prevent any accidental catastrophe, but before I plunged the room into darkness I could see the scope of the disaster before me.

As one can tell from the photograph above, the Southern Bathroom is floored not with parquet or wood, but with an interlocking mesh of priceless Persian rugs. The water had fallen all over these rugs, destroying them and making them smell like a zoo (lord knows what was in the damn things). Suspecting a leak from some guests upstairs I ran up to investigate their bathrooms, but no evidence of anything serious there... and upon returning, I discovered that the water running over my chandelier was of sufficient impurity as to cause the Electrocentripetal forces to activate themselves, making the chandelier glow by some ghostly inner light. Imagine my surprise! (And imagine the fire risk!) The flow soon abated, however, leaving me with a darkened bathroom and a pile of stinking, worthless rugs of impmrobable cost... imagine my disappointment at this end to my day!

Yesterday I called Mdms Snotworth and Snide, the Real Estate agents in charge of this establishment, and alerted them to the problem. They have sent around a man, who is currently repairing the various broken faucets; but nothing can be done about the priceless rugs, which are to be thrown out and replaced with worthless British carpet tiles. Oh, how I look forward to being reunited with the Delightful Miss E, and moving somewhere a little more salubrious and spacious!