British Civilisation and Taps
The British are among the more advanced societies and civilisations on this planet, having given us Shakespeare, Jane Austen, lots of different poets, Faraday and the electric generator, the first steam engine, the discovery of the structure of DNA and the first cloned sheep among other things. Yet, in a few very basic and fundamental areas, the British are woefully lacking and inadequate.
The subject of this particular rant is taps. Where much of the rest of the modern world has moved on to taps with an adjustable flow of both cold and hot water together, the redoubtable British washroom (or toilet in British parlance) continues to have sinks spouting two seperate faucets - hot and cold. And when they are labelled HOT and COLD, they are very serious about it - they are respectively either very hot or very cold.
It was with some surprise and no little pleasure when I found that there was only one faucet in the sink in the kitchen of my flat. That is until I turned the hot and cold knobs and found that the water issuing from that single faucet did not come out in a single stream, but incredibly, fell in two seperate ones (from the same faucet!) - you guessed it, one stream being scaldingly hot and the other ice cold. This, needless to say, left one rather inconvenienced when doing things like washing dishes - you alterned between freezing and scalding your fingers while trying desperately to rinse a pan. A kodak moment missed was surely the expression on my face when I first turned on the taps - it went from pleasurable anticipation, to incredulity, to severe irritation.
A solution was on hand though, and a very Singaporean one at that. Gillian, my housemate, tore a piece of strong thin cloth and secured it to the faucet head with two rubber bands, so that the water emitting from the tap had to go though the cloth and thus emerge in one (vaguely larger) stream. It takes two people from a former colony to solve one of the great things lacking from British Civilisation - single faucets that work.
The subject of this particular rant is taps. Where much of the rest of the modern world has moved on to taps with an adjustable flow of both cold and hot water together, the redoubtable British washroom (or toilet in British parlance) continues to have sinks spouting two seperate faucets - hot and cold. And when they are labelled HOT and COLD, they are very serious about it - they are respectively either very hot or very cold.
It was with some surprise and no little pleasure when I found that there was only one faucet in the sink in the kitchen of my flat. That is until I turned the hot and cold knobs and found that the water issuing from that single faucet did not come out in a single stream, but incredibly, fell in two seperate ones (from the same faucet!) - you guessed it, one stream being scaldingly hot and the other ice cold. This, needless to say, left one rather inconvenienced when doing things like washing dishes - you alterned between freezing and scalding your fingers while trying desperately to rinse a pan. A kodak moment missed was surely the expression on my face when I first turned on the taps - it went from pleasurable anticipation, to incredulity, to severe irritation.
A solution was on hand though, and a very Singaporean one at that. Gillian, my housemate, tore a piece of strong thin cloth and secured it to the faucet head with two rubber bands, so that the water emitting from the tap had to go though the cloth and thus emerge in one (vaguely larger) stream. It takes two people from a former colony to solve one of the great things lacking from British Civilisation - single faucets that work.
posted by Caleb Liu | 10:00 PM
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