Premier Jour

Wow. A lot happened today. I’m gonna need to be diligent with this blog if I want to keep up with it all. But on the other hand, things will slow down after the first week or maybe even the first few days, so I won’t always need to keep up this pace. However, I know from past experience that if I leave the writing till later it won’t get done.

One thing I didn’t mention about our arrival was that we didn’t just find our rooms and conk out. As we came to our floor we heard voices speaking English, glorious anglais! I hadn’t realised it would be that much of a relief. After dropping off our bags we came back to the room we’d heard it from and introduced ourselves. It was three Americans, two girls and one guy, from Utah, who’d just arrived the previous day. So we weren’t alone. After talking for a while (commiseration makes for great conversation), we decided to go to registration, orientation, and shopping together the next day.

That night was not ideal – clothing as a pillow is never as soft as clothing as clothing – but I have those nights every once in a while. It cooled down quite a bit during the night as well, but thankfully the shower was hot and high-pressure. That makes such a difference. I can take on the world after a good shower.

We five met and went downstairs to the ‘Administration’, where the day’s troubles began. Already at 8:30 there were students queueing for this, though I didn’t know what it was for, only that we had to do it and internet was one thing we would get. Our turn finally came, and we went in. The woman looked at us. We looked at her. I had absolutely no idea what to say. I had been hoping all the students would’ve been about the same business so that by the time it rolled around to us she would just push forms at us, or something of the like. Clearly something in that thought process was flawed. She exclaimed something to her colleague which, though I couldn’t make out any of it, had the distinct vibe of “why come to this country when you don’t even speak a word of the language!” Fair point, but chill…s’il vous plait (I am representing her unfairly. I believe she is a very nice lady and very gracious to be dealing with such inept foreigners as us, but not being able to converse with her properly, I couldn’t tell you with complete certainty. Another thing is probably that French exclaim more than the English or Japanese, so though they’re not upset, they sound it to the uncomprehending ear).

Thankfully, the Americans were dealing with the other woman behind the counter, and though the two girls don’t speak much French, the guy does, in fact he’s doing the all-classes-in-French course and has been a godsend in all of this, as I’m sure you’ll agree after reading all our ordeals. Somehow, we finally got that form pushed at us – what else would we have been there for? We managed to fill it out, and returned it with two identity photos (which I swear is a mantra for the French).

Then she demanded rent and a deposit. Oh. I guess I should’ve been ready for this, seeing as it had been in the correspondence, but the fact was I only brought about a hundred euros in cash, and that was to be spent on vital furnishments and sustenance. It was nowhere near enough anyway. I thought about arguing; well, stalling at least. The only other option I had was credit card, and I’m terrified of international transaction charges. Plus, the credit card in question had never been used nor even validated by phone, as I’d just received it in the mail. I went for it anyway.

It put up no problems (I suppose the sometimes-convenient, usually-lethal truth is that banks and credit cards seldom resist expenditure) and required only a signature, not even the PIN, which I now know, contrary to my infamous Turkey experience of last summer. But I was worried about the repercussions of a €471 international, foreign-currency payment.

They told us some other cryptic information, some other blasted hoop to jump through, and nothing about the internet. Some of us went to the ‘Accueil’, the meaning of which I’m still not solid on, though I see it everywhere, to get the ‘etat de lieu‘ (state of the place) form that the Americans had warned us about the night before. These were supposed to be filled out upon arrival and then compared to the state when we left, to ensure we didn’t leave any damages uncompensated for (obviously the key being to not rate the room too highly at the beginning). This form was a monster. Something like eight pages, basically requiring an assessment of every individual thread of the carpet, among every other aspect of the room. Seriously. They listed the features of the room – the table, the other table; this shelf, that shelf, the shelf you didn’t even know was a shelf; the skirting board, the wardrobe, the TV plug-in I didn’t know I had and had no way of testing, and then had us tick ‘new’, ‘good’ (‘bon etat‘, the one that all the items inevitably fell into, except the lavabo (sink), which leaked), ‘used’, or ‘poor’. Needless to say, the French-English dictionary got some exercise. We postulated that their intent was to make it so long that tenants would soon become exasperated and just bon-etat everything, which is of course what befell us. One piece of good news was that most of the pages were the kind that register what’s written on the page above, for the purpose of producing copies. What they need so many copies for, I have no idea, but it was a relief to only have to fill out about three pages, which were nevertheless meticulous and painful. You would never guess from the length of that form how small our rooms are (not that I’m complaining, I like small, and every inch of space is used maximumly efficiently. Or it would be, if I had stuff to fill it with).

(I didn’t write this as chronologically as you are now reading it, so I will interject here that, though somewhere further down you will find me complaining that the French get nothing done immediately and that the accommodation provided next to no amenities for us, these two outbursts are unjustified. My leaky sink was repaired within one working day, and they did furnish the room with a mini-fridge and a lamp, not to mention a desk, a chair, a bed, a mattress, a window, a radiator, a shower, a toilet, a sink, carpet, one orange wall, various plug-ins, and copious shelving. Count my blessings, I must.)

We submitted these monstrosities and headed to the orientation, where supposedly ‘all would be revealed’. Thankfully (you’ll notice that word coming up a lot in these accounts; that and ‘infuriatingly’ constitute, I feel, an apt description of my first few days in Toulouse) the Americans knew where it was and we had no problems en route. Honestly it was nice walking into that room and seeing how many other foreign students there were. It was a little less nice finding out that over three-quarters of them spoke French seemingly fluently, but, you know, silver linings and clouds and all that.

A man spoke first, all in French, and that didn’t bode well. A few others spoke, and only one was a native English speaker. His voice was like a gushing shower of cool water in a hot parched desert, though I probably wouldn’t say that to his face. I guess it was his language more than his voice, just so there’s no confusion. And I don’t want to make it sound like I hate the French language and think that English is the best language in the world. I love- well, quite like how French sounds, and desperately wish I were more fluent in it – that’s half the point of this year. As for English, well, I am fond of it (okay, I do delight in it), but modern English does often feel rather functional, simplified, mongrelised, vulgar. Perhaps it’s worth adding that Japanese is more square, traditional, weighty – such that when it is colloquialised and used tersely or even offensively, it is far more striking. Isn’t it amazing how intertwined language and culture are?

Anyhow, the product of that morning orientation was some questions answered, other questions formed, two other English girls met, and of course, more forms to fill out. We made an appointment with the bank HSBC, which is quite big over here as well, it seems (not as big as BNP Paribas, however). Pity it couldn’t have been Lloyds. Oh well. I think I will go ahead and open a French account with HSBC, just because it tends to make things easier. And who knows, I might eventually be able to make some money over here. Working at a Japanese restaurant, perhaps. Heh. I’ve seen a few already, which is more than can be said for Bradford. What I wouldn’t do for a Punjab Sweet House curry right now, though.

Oh, we also met up with the third member of Team Bradford, who was wonderfully able to show us where to go for the cryptic errand the housing administration sent us on (I can hear you thinking it, if I treated all these requirements like a video game, it would be so much more palatable. Trust me, while video games must run on the logic of the programming, the same cannot be said for French bureaucracy). We got there, knowing we never would’ve found it on our own, and sure enough, we needed our Sciences Po Toulouse acceptance letters, which I had not been able to find since arriving in France. Having brought every piece of official and unofficial paper I could ever possibly need, and more, the only explanation I could think of was that the French consulate must’ve kept it when I applied for my visa. I tried to find something equivalent in my inbox on computers they were gracious enough to allow us to use, but to no avail. I was however able to shoot off a quick email to my parents saying I was fine, which was one weight off my mind.

Sitting outside thinking I would just have to get another letter from the uni and come back, I decided to have one more look through the several folders in my backpack. For some reason which I will never know, this third search was when the letter chose to display itself. Gah. I took it in and went through the relatively quick process of making this organisation my guarantor for lodging in France.

(Again, I realise you may not be interested in this level of detail, but perhaps there’s someone out there who’s preparing to undertake exactly what I am doing now, in which case I should think this will be helpful. Beyond that, I feel that, since I’m complaining so much about the circus-level number of hoops to jump through, I have to justify my negativity with the play-by-play.)

Before that short trip was, I forgot to mention, the long-anticipated picnic (pique-nique?), my first proper meal since Sunday breakfast. Naturalement, there were pieces of baguette, cheese, and meat. All delicious, but the nectarines were by far the hit. YUM.

I knew that was the time to be socialising, meeting people, putting down roots, but the other part of me was tired. Tired of working so hard to communicate, tired of being out of my comfort zone, tired of thinking. As I a few days later overheard a female foreign student say (and she was fluent in French, which was a comfort to me), “Je suis fatiguer de penser“. I must admit that if I were at, say, Bradford, and I heard an international student say something like this, I wouldn’t have had much pity on them. They chose to do this. But now…well, my empathy XP is rising, which is one thing I need and have been praying for.

So I stuck with my English-speaking crew, and we sat on the side. It wasn’t miserable, though, it was a good time. After a while we snuck off to do the housing guarantor thing.

We got back a bit after two o’clock (quatorze-heures, the time that France, or maybe just south France, generally restarts from its lunch break), time to get help filling out the four-page blue forms they’d given us with which to procure our student cards. This, this, this was an experience.

They put the French speakers on one side of the room, and imbeciles on the other. I assume the French speakers went through it rather normally with occasional help from the international office woman at the front (though I did hear later that their process resembled ours far more than I would’ve thought). We on the other hand needed to be coddled through it line by line – as in, “Box 1, tick ‘Oui’. In the blank, write the name of your university. In the next box, write the name of your university.” And so on. I felt sorry for our helper, who seemed to be less proficient in English than the woman handling the French speakers, but I’m not one to quibble. Some boxes were easier than others, some we could skip, others were complicated enough that she decided they weren’t actually that important. All in all the entire process took about two hours. It was taxing, to say the least, and repetitive. I mean, I’m sure all the boxes said different things, but there was one part where we wrote the name of our university at least four times in a row, and to us, it seemed like the form was saying, ‘What is the name of your university? Precisely what is the name of your university? Are you sure this is the name of your university? Why don’t you write it just one more time to make sure you haven’t misspelled anything the previous three times?’ What an awful time to realise you’d been writing the wrong university the whole time.

Heh, no, I’m kidding, I didn’t do that. Come on.

(I made a joke along these lines in situ (no, that’s not French, that’s Latin for ya) but I feel it wasn’t properly received by certain lacklustre senses of humour around me at the time – I have full faith in you, esteemed readers.)

They also told we would need several other items to receive our student cards, which, we’d heard from others, were somehow connected to our ability to get internet in our rooms. Perhaps part of the problem is how active the grapevine is these days among those who speak French less than adequately. We hear, distort, and believe all sorts of things. ‘If you take your passport, two photos, this rainbow-coloured form, and a spare kidney into this shady back-alley office, you can get your whole year taken care of!’ …Tempting, I have to say, even though I just made that particular offer up.

What they actually told us we’d need in addition to the blue form and passport was, yes, you guessed it, deux photos d’identitie, and something else that we couldn’t understand and they couldn’t explain. Something to do with insurance, and having to pay. And it was in relation to this that something beautiful took place, but seeing as we couldn’t submit them until the following day, I’ll wait to go into that.

Team Bradford handed over the sheets we needed signed and sent back home to release our ERASMUS funds, then we were outta there. The Americans had to stay behind to fight for their right to not pay for another form of insurance, a battle which I later heard they won. Good on them (Oh, but just so you don’t take this as another confirmation of common American stereotypes, I believe it was actually the French international office woman stepping up to the plate for them that made the difference). Shopping time for us.

It didn’t take long to see that Toulouse is a shopping city; at least l’abord de l’université. I’ll try to get some pictures up soon, but certain streets remind me of…hmm, Tokyo, I suppose. Like Ginza. Man, I even miss Ginza. I don’t even like Ginza. Huh. Oh, where was I? Yeah, Toulouse shopping. One wide, nice street in particular just lined with clothes shops. H&M was about the only one I recognised. Unfortunately, the type of shopping we had in mind was more of the bedding and toilet paper variety. A place called Monoprix was our best find, as it sold both food and home goods, and I came away with groceries, a pillow, and a sheet that, upon opening in my room, turned out to be fitted. Which I needed, and the pillow made a world of difference, but it was again a cold night with nothing on top of me (took until the third night to get fully kitted, especially as I forgot to pick up soap and shampoo. Why is it my hair looks better when only washed with water? Doesn’t feel better though).

Okay, just one more tale from today before I conclude Full Day 1 of this self-absorbed, self-aggrandising, self-pitying, self-congratulatory series (which is probably thus because I’m backloading emotion from later days onto these early entries, for which I apologise). That evening I went knocking on doors (of people I knew) to see if they wanted to do something, like go for a drink. The American guy wasn’t in his room (or didn’t answer, although I did meet several Irish guys in the process) so I ended up just talking to the American girls. At one point, they asked something like whether my home was close to Bradford. ‘No, not close at all’ ‘So…outside England?’ ‘Yeah, take a guess.’

“Tokyo.”

Just like that. Completely random guess.

Mais oui, je suis de Tokyo.

Or was it?

Like I said, I won’t be writing up every day like in this long-winded fashion, or even any fashion. This will likely be my longest single-day entry. So much happened. More than what I’ve written. But that’s enough.

Arrivée à Toulouse

[If you happen to have the good fortune of being one of the people portrayed in the following accounts, please don’t take offence at anything written here. Just mention it to me, and I’ll in most cases happily amend it. For example, I’ve decided to avoid using names, just in case any of you happen to be on the run from the law, but I would completely understand if you wanted to get your name out there (or link it to your YouTube channel, or something). Not that I think terribly many are reading this now, but in the future, who knows? You might one day be famous – again, not that that would result from me or anything I write; just saying, I have complete confidence in you.

Disclaimer no. 2: I make no claims as to the veracity of the French interspersed throughout this writing, nor, for that matter, the English. Corrections would however be appreciated.]

We made it. I can’t take long writing this because I don’t have a power converter to be able to plug it in, and actually I won’t be able to upload this because I don’t have wifi access yet, but I thought I should quickly jot down some notes to capture the feeling of right now.

I’m sitting in what I assume will be my room for this year, in Cité Universitaire de L’Arsenal B. Something like that. It’s a neat room – small, but amazingly economic in its use of space. I’ll probably take pictures or make a video before too long, but basically you enter and have the toilet/sink/shower on your left in a room not much more than a metre square. You squeeze past the wardrobe and have about three metres by three metres with the desk in front of you facing the window and some shelves to either side. No bed. I walked in, my first thought was, neat-o (because I think thoughts like that); my second thought was, hang on, surely we’re missing something crucial here. At first I thought it was the white thing against the wall to my left, which, provided it folded down like an ironing board and then unfolded into twice its width, would offer something almost bed-size. No. It was only the radiator. Then I looked up. Ohh. There it is. Above the desk. Except…there’s only about a foot between the bed and the ceiling.

[Here’s a video tour of my new room, if the thousand words haven’t been enough.]

Obviously now it all makes sense – you pull the bed down about a metre on its track to sleep in it, then push it back up in the morning. It’s great. Of course it will be even greater once I have sheets and a pillow, but that will not be before tonight. But I figured that would be the case.

In fact I figured on doing without a lot of things this first night, like shower gel, shampoo, a large towel, and electricity (well, the ability to plug my devices in, at least). I was packed to the max already.

In hindsight there were probably things I brought that I could’ve done without – well, plenty, if you’re truly ruthless. I didn’t want to be quite that ruthless; after all, my clothing is no use to me if it’s not with me, and I definitely want to go snowboarding this year. But I’m the type of person that, told I can check-in a suitcase of 22 kg, will bring a 22.2 kg, with a 12 kg carry-on that’s only supposed to be 10. I made it through, but as I was thinking on the way, you can’t put a price on peace of mind – better to leave some leeway, even if it costs a bit more (that’s my sensible side speaking, not the side I tend to listen to). So I’m trying to move away from the push-it-to-the-very-edge, take-as-much-as-you-possibly-can mentality. Still a long way to go.

At least this time I didn’t do most of my packing through the night before I left. Since I moved from my massive mansion (that I shared with six other guys during the year but had to myself for a month at the beginning of the summer) to my pastor’s house at the beginning of July, all my England belongings were already packed and, having attempted to pack shrewdly, a lot of it I could put straight into storage and not bother with for the rest of the summer. I also had to move about a week before leaving Bradford, this time from a bigger bedroom in the house to the smaller bedroom, the smallest bedroom I have ever seen. The accommodation I’m in now, here in Toulouse, is a presidential suite compared to that room. That room was twice the size of the bed, tops. Not that I’ve ever seen a presidential suite (that is a thing, though, right?).

But that bedroom (and nothing-else-room) was completely fine for my final few days, and helpful to force me to do most of my packing in advance of my departure date. There was still a lot in the run-up, especially as I was desperately trying to fit in too much, but it wasn’t as bad as other times have been.

I apologise if you were expecting a quick run-down of my journey to Toulouse. That’s not how I tend to write. But you can skip over the reminiscings and philosophical abstractions if you must.

It was an interesting run-up; even though, like I said, I did a lot in advance, I still left a lot until the final day or two, almost as if I didn’t want to think about it, or wanted to pretend that I still had loads of time to waste (because that’s what a lot of my summer has been, unfortunately). When I was studying French or corresponding about my arrival, I would get excited – yes, excited, even – about the coming year. Other times, especially that last day, I didn’t want to leave, mostly because I didn’t want the accompanying stress and necessary planning. But I always feel that: when I have no plans of leaving, I can only think about being elsewhere, and when the time comes to leave, I want to be lazy and stay, and it’s only recently that I’ve really started to try to fight those feelings, because they’re completely unhelpful.

But leave I did. Sunday was suddenly upon me and I was scurrying around in the two hours before church, skimming off the top of my baggage, throwing some things away, weighing, worrying, wondering.

I had to take my suitcase and backpack (yes, ladies and gentlemen, that is all I brought for my new life in France; well, one year – 32.2 kg. Which I think is quite good, despite my earlier confessions) to church because I was leaving straight from there. I wasn’t too keen on that because it would mean a lot of good-byes right as I’m trying to leave, which I’ve had bad experiences with, but it turned out alright. It was actually great that I was there that last time because I got to see some people coming back for this year that I hadn’t seen in a while. The good-byes didn’t take too long, and I was soon trundling off from the Midland Hotel to Bradford Interchange.

There I encountered my first problem (ah, the ever-elusive perfect run was not to be had this time!). The ticket machine was broken (yes, THE ticket machine; ridiculous isn’t it), and it was the only place I could print out my prepaid tickets. The woman at the counter wouldn’t do it. The man trying to fix the machine told me I’d have to buy it at my first transfer station, Huddersfield. I was dubious about this – what would I tell the ticket collector on the first train, what if I could only print my tickets at the station I’d indicated online…but I continued onto the platform.

Thankfully, thankfully, I returned about ten minutes later, just to check; found the machine in totally proper working order, printed out my tickets, and boarded my train. Unlike in Japan, you and your well-being are not the primary concern of most British employees. You gotta fight for love, like Gabriella.

The rest of the train journey was uneventful. The trains came into the platforms I expected them to, and I made both my connections with time to spare. I suppose one thing of note was that between Huddersfield and Manchester I could overhear a large group of northern ladies, probably late twenties or early thirties, talking very loudly. I got a catch-up on their lives, which seemed to generally consist of clubbing and getting drunk, reminiscing about past times of clubbing and getting drunk, and discussing whether or not the others peed in the shower. I believe the general consensus was that it was acceptable. No comment. Actually, yes comment; that was essentially my last English experience before leaving the country – but I’ll leave it to you to decide whether that was a fairly representative experience to remind me what I’d be missing, or a wacky one-off to send me away with confidence (another comment might be that in my place now I’m not faced with that decision as the toilet juts into the shower space).

Pulled into the airport, took my heavy suitcase on several escalators I wasn’t supposed to, found the queue for Jet2 check-in. That was where I met up with one of the two girls from Bradford Peace Studies doing the same exchange to Toulouse, with whom I fortuitously had the same flight. Though my suitcase was slightly overweight, as I said, the guy let it through, and even my carry-on wasn’t even inspected, though it was packed full of dubious materials like paper clips, drum sticks, and hair wax. I wonder if budget airlines are more lax? Although I think everyone went through the same place, not just the budget people.

Not much to tell about the flight; it was the usual parade of hawkers from start to finish, trying to get us to pay even more small fees for drinks, snacks, charity scratchcards, and duty-free items, that budget flights always are. No thank you. No screaming babies this time, though, thankfully. One thing that was very strange was that even though it was only about a two-hour flight, we landed half an hour early! How does that work? How could you possibly be that wrong in your prediction or make up that much time? A pilot could probably tell me. I certainly wasn’t complaining, though, as it meant even more daylight in which to find our accommodation, and we were successful in that. With the bus drivers I settled for key words rather than trying to formulate full sentences; felt like a bit of a cop-out but, on the other hand, I can probably count on (that) one hand the number of full French sentences I can formulate. We made it to Compans Caffarelli which I was pronouncing very wrongly, and even found our accommodation without too much trouble.

That was where some fun began. There was a girl at reception, and after some stutter-starts on our part, she asked us if we spoke Spanish. Well, I thought, if she speaks Spanish, she must speak English, especially seeing as she asked us the question in English. Nah. Not even a bit. She ended up calling a woman and we passed the phone back and forth several times. Classic foreign language country experience. Thankfully the woman on the other end (I still have no idea who she was) spoke brilliant English and took us through everything. Our names were on some list, and though I didn’t have the contract sheet I was supposed to (e-mail fail?), my travel buddy did, and we got our keys.

But before I can bring you to where we started, the description of the room as I found it, we first had to lug our luggage up the stairs to the fourth floor, which in my language is the fifth floor. No lift. This would prove to be a pattern with the French buildings, at least the ones on campus. Not only do the French seem to eschew lifts, they rejoice in stairs, putting a down case and an up case where a walkway straight across would suffice. But quirks are what make the foreign foreign, I suppose – that and the incomprehensibility of the language.

That’s half the reason I’m doing this, though. Not only do I want to learn French, I want to live – well, be forced to survive – in a country where I don’t speak the official language, something I’ve never done before despite having lived in quite a few different locations. It will be character-building, and empathy-building. To all those new missionaries, summer workers, and other foreigners who came across my path in Japan, I feel your pain. I didn’t when I was with you; mostly I enjoyed your pain, but now I feel it.

For the first time in all my travelling and studying abroad I feel like a real international student. Oh boy.

Plunging A Drain Works!

[I guess I like to write about bathroom stuff, judging from the subject matter of many of my past notes. Maybe I’m overly fond of toilet humour. Maybe I need to get my brain out of the drain, my mind out of the grime (that’s not actually an expression, I’m just hoping you’ll be impressed by the rhyme and not realise). But there’s a lot that can be said about bathrooms; toilets especially. Not only are they different the world round, they offer insight into that particular culture, that particular house, that particular owner (not to mention user – and I promise I won’t end every sentence in this note with a parenthetical aside). Or perhaps it’s simply that, seeing as most of my brilliant ideas come to me when I’m in the shower, those ideas are in fact directly tied to the environment in which they are conceived. Whatever it is, this is another piece about bathrooms; well, home waste disposal systems anyway, as you probably gathered from the title, and it is, IMHO (the ‘H’ in this case standing for ‘honest’, rather than ‘humble’) quite a good piece at that. If at the end you want to protest that it’s in fact as much about words as it is about drains, well, 1) that’s what the comment function is for; 2) that’s kind of what I’m all about.]

I live in a big house. I mean very big. Big as in you look at the front and you think, wow, that’s a big house, and then you go round the side and you realise that what you thought was the front was actually the side and the real front is at least as long. And even though it’s what you might call a duplex, meaning we don’t have access to the entire house and sometimes hear strange noises coming from the half we aren’t in, the part we do have access to is plenty massive. Basement, ground floor, first floor (which I’m used to calling the second floor), and attic – three kitchens, three toilets, two showers, seven bedrooms, one living room. It’s huge.

Right now I have all of that to myself, because my six housemates have all gone home for the summer. I chose not to make the expensive flight back to Japan and instead look for hopefully-peace-studies-related work here in Bradford. Happily I’ve found some work; sadly, it doesn’t pay, so I’ll need to look elsewhere for dosh -perhaps Youtube. And while my house contract expires at the end of this month and I’ll be moving in with a friend, for the next to weeks I am the king of this mansion, king and pretty much every other title except landlord.

Mansion is a nice word, isn’t it? At least for me, it conjures up images of a grand old manor with many rooms, elegant architecture, and most of all, history. Stories. Perhaps an elderly man in a robe wandering the property to tell them. But the old in this image is the good ‘old’, not the bad ‘old’. My house could be called a mansion, I suppose; after all, it is grand, it has many rooms, it’s made of Yorkshire stone which I hear back in the day was a pretty penny (oh, and I might mention that it’s not one of those rowhouses you see elsewhere in Bradford – one house that looks like a giant caterpillar of about six houses – mine is a double at most, proportionate, and situated at the end of the street. Cobbled street, mind you.) If I take the role of the elderly man minus the robe, and yes, I am about to tell you some stories, my house could rest quite comfortably in the mansion-class lounge at the airport. Or wherever else mansions go to hobnob. However, the ‘old’ of my house is most definitely the bad ‘old’.

All the kitchens and toilets make for a lot of potential drainage problems, and the datedness of the building makes it not even worth including the word ‘potential’. We’ve had cloggage issues all year long. I’ve learnt a valuable lesson about mopping up the excess grease in the frying pan with a paper towel and throwing this away rather than pouring all the grease in the sink for it to congeal around the U-bend. But I’d like to think I haven’t been the primary source of these problems. Barring a detailed analysis of the contents removed from these pipes I guess we’ll never know, and for that task, my hand isn’t raised.

During the year, when something would stop up, someone would call the landlord and he would get someone in to fix it. I was certainly doubting the proficiency of this particular plumber as, this month, everything seemed to be once again clogging up around me, but that lack of faith wasn’t the reason I didn’t want to phone the landlord.

I wouldn’t necessarily call myself a manly man. I generally don’t watch sports on TV unless I have some other reason to be in the room. I often carry a man-purse or murse or manbag or whatever you want to call it. I really don’t need to be the one ‘manning’ the barbecue grill, even though I seem to end up with that responsibility when the others get bored. I don’t mind clothes shopping, and sometimes I catch myself making shockingly effeminate hand gestures while speaking, like Chris Bosh-level effeminate (does the name-dropping and clip redeem me from my statement about sports?). I can’t – and this is the worst, probably – drive stick. Most of this doesn’t bother me terribly, although I do plan to someday learn how to charm a manual transmission. But I hate being helpless. I hate not knowing how to fix stuff that I use. I don’t have a car but if I get one I want to at least know how to make simple repairs on it. Changing a tire is a test of manliness, and if my memory of driver’s ed serves me correctly I believe that I could pass that test, should the need arise. I want to be able to do basic troubleshooting on a computer, though in some respects increasing computerisation is at odds with traditional measures of manliness. In light of this development it is even more crucial that I, as a man, be able to handle elementary mechanical difficulties. And what’s more, when an appliance refuses to cooperate, I take it personal (not ‘personally’, seeing as I also get more American when my authority as an operator is challenged).

In other words, to call the landlord is to admit defeat, and I hate admitting defeat. The more something matters to me, or the more I think I should be able to do it, the more I hate admitting defeat. It’s like using a cheat in a video game, or referring to a walkthrough someone’s put online. In the video game of Bradley the Travelling MK and Budding Man versus the World, specifically in Chapter 22: 1 Melbourne Place – Level 31: The Clogged Shower Drain, I was not about to admit defeat.

The shower was the worst, at least in terms of usage impediment and added disgustingness. When the ground floor kitchen sink got clogged I just started taking my dishes back upstairs to wash them in my kitchen (I’ve had to cook downstairs for the past few months due to my stove not working – I don’t consider the inability to repair gas wiring an affront to my manliness) or else I would use the clogged sink anyway and then just exit the scene and leave it to drain at a snail’s pace. The latter option increased in frequency when the upstairs kitchen sink clogged as well. However with the shower, I had to deal with several inches of soapy scummy water sloshing around as I cleaned myself, and though I could employ the ever-useful exit-the-scene recourse there as well, the next morning I would have an abundance of hairs and scum decorating the shower floor, staring back at me. Yes, I have a lot of body hair. I used to be more self-conscious about it, but now it only really bothers me when I see it in places other than on my body. I’ll be grateful for my pelt density when all my peers are going bald, and as I established above I don’t have enough manliness points accumulated to sacrifice them to chest-shaving or waxing or whatever the cooligans are doing these days. At any rate this was the drain’s problem, not mine.

I don’t know what made this morning THE morning. Maybe I’d just reached my breaking point. Maybe it was the fact that I gave it a thorough clean with a sponge and spray and then realised all the scum would come to rest exactly where it had been because the drain was refusing flat-out to take it. Whatever it was, I went looking for something to stick down it, something like a wire clothes hanger.

This wasn’t the first time I’d attempted to solve that problem myself. About a week earlier I’d read online that baking soda and vinegar worked well for dislodging drain blockages. Unfortunately, all I had was baking powder and wine vinegar, so all that gave me was a wisp of smoke and some froth. I found some bona fide drain unstopper in the middle (ground floor) kitchen and even though the website containing the baking soda/vinegar combo had propounded the evils of unnatural solutions (pun intended – isn’t it annoying when people say that just to highlight their cleverness that they’re certain you’re too dumb to catch without blinking neon signs pointing to it?), after a few days of being intimidated by the ‘For professional and trade use only’ warning, the annoyance grew larger than my preference to be ‘natural’ and I poured this self-assured 95 per cent sulphuric acid down that shower drain. It smoked more than the baking soda. It smelled like rotten eggs (or at least what I assume rotten eggs smell like, having never actually smelled rotten eggs). It too proved ineffective.

Back to the present. The website had also talked about fishing the clogging substances out with a wire clothes hanger, of which I had none, not having been able to collect any in this particular chapter of the Bradley game. It or anything like it was nowhere to be found in my inventory, you might say. I tried sticking a knife down the drain, as that had been useful in Level 30 – unclogging the sink drain in my kitchen – when combined with unscrewing some piping below, but the knife was to wide for the shower drain. The only other similarly-shaped object I could find was a pen, but upon approaching the drain wielding it, I thought better of that tactic. I would’ve dropped it in, most def.

All this time I knew I could use the basement shower, but enough was enough. However, I was out of ideas. I got into the shower (as that intent was what had triggered all this activity this morning, which explains for you why I was naked this entire time – I wasn’t kidding when I said ‘minus the robe’, you know!) and was just about to turn on the water for another scummy jab at my manliness when my eye fell upon none other than the plunger.

Ah, the plunger. I am no stranger to that most oddly-built of implements, I must admit, though thankfully I had not previously required this particular plunger in its traditional capacity, our middle toilet – cracked though it may be – repeatedly proving itself quite up to the task of digesting my excrement. Other toilets in my life have been less satisfactory; American ones especially, which is odd considering they serve a clientele of much larger average body size than their high-tech multifunction Japanese counterparts. But you can read more about that in another of my articles. Suffice it to say that I have honed my plunger skill over the years (as well as, in lieu of a plunger, the strategic use of the exit-the-scene course of action) but had never applied it to a non-toilet drain. Considering someone had mentioned it in the comments on the natural solutions website, I thought it at least worth a shot.

In my early plunging days, when I was but an amateur, I used to go for large pulls, hoping to time it for precisely when the pressure from the rising water level was at its highest. This method was unreliable and inefficient, as it limited plunging to once per flush which meant waiting until the water slowly drained to where I could flush again. In the worst cases, when the water level was virtually at a standstill, it was useless, and worst of all, it sometimes led to disastrous splash-back. Ugh. Fortunately over the years my technique matured, notably following the discovery of the push-pull maneuvre in which the user gently pushes the plunger into full suction and then executes a series of rapid pulls and pushes up and down, without breaking the seal, which creates what I imagine to be the equivalent of an underwater earthquake in the general vicinity of the U-bend and, in my experience, effectively unclogs the toilet 100 per cent of the time with minimal risk of splash-back. Oh the elation of seeing the murky water swirl down the hole with a glorious glug-glug-glug!

And so armed with this plunger (a conventional red; cup, not flange, well-suited to this task, I later learned) and the wisdom of many years of plunging, I approached this boss-level blocked shower drain and applied the suction. It was a foreign application of a familiar operation and I was dubious as to its chances, but nevertheless entered the push-pull phase.

There were a few moments when nothing seemed to happen. Then, with a quietness incommensurate to so momentous an occasion, a hole appeared in the water above the drain and the rest flowed over the rounded sides into the narrow abyss. I couldn’t believe it! In so little time and with so little effort it seemed my troubles were at their end! It took the rest of my shower for me to really believe it, but the drain clarity held and I finished my cleansing ritual swimmingly, which in this case ironically meant without swimming. It had been a long time since I’d seen the shower floor at the end of a shower (and it was perhaps my preoccupation with this while towelling off that caused my elbow to knock one of the three soap/shampoo racks off its screw; however, this far along in the game I was well-accustomed to dealing with such petty foes, catching it in midair and returning it to its place without fuss).

Jubilant at this victory (on a par with the Queen at her 60-year celebration, I daresay), the much-awaited clearance of Level 31, I proceeded to (yes, i know that phrase is over-used, but I wasn’t the one to over-use it and I quite feel that it’s justified in this case) the middle kitchen with plunger in hand. Would it work on a sink as well?

I turned the tap on drizzle and watched the sink fill slowly – disappointing specimen – then assumed the position and began. But this opponent was equipped with a defence mechanism; my first vigorous thrust was returned in kind with water shooting back at me from the overflow hole! I retreated to regroup. Should I try something else? Having nothing else to try (I’d already previously unscrewed the piping below and scraped it out, which hadn’t worked like it had upstairs; rather, it’d left the piping clogged AND leaking) I closed in once more. Holding my hands above the level of the overflow hole eliminated that threat, but it did mean that I needed to stagger my thrusts to keep the drain flooded and therefore pressurised. It took longer than the shower, but in time this adversary did too acquiesce. And this time, it rewarded me with the fading, defeated cry of ‘Glug, glug, glug…’.

And so ends this particular episode in Chapter 22 of Bradley versus the World. I sense the finale of this chapter drawing near, and fear that this was not actually its big-boss level. What will that be? The skies are growing darker.

However this clearance was glorious and I intend to savour it gladly. I hope you’ve enjoyed this walkthrough; though Bradley is still in beta-testing and not yet available to the public, you may be able to find applications for these techniques in other games. Myself, I’m thinking that perhaps ‘master plunger’ would be a skill worth adding to my CV in Level 28: Getting a Job, yet uncleared. Is there anywhere I can get certified for that sort of thing, I wonder?

To conclude, here’s a brief overview of some of the other levels I’ve cleared in this chapter.

Level 6: Insufficient Clothes-Drying Devices

Level 7: The Lack of Sink-side Towel Rack

Level 8: The Uncooperative Toilet Seat

Level 11: The Frictionless Showerhead Holder

Level 14: Attack of the Flies

Level 21: Save the House from Burning Down was a harrowing ordeal. I still don’t know how I managed to clear that one; certainly wouldn’t have without the assistance of the other characters in my party. I won’t give away everything but I will hint that you need to make sure that by this point in the game you’ve acquired the power to call in a fire department strike.

Bonus Level: Clean the Garden, which I haven’t completed but did have a go at the other day.

Till next time, this is Bradley the Travelling MK and Budding Man, signing off. If the next mission is what I think it is, it will be a doozy for which I must seriously prepare.