‘A house?’

‘A house.’

‘A house?’

‘ A house… with an extension.’

She raised her eyebrows at me. I burrowed mine with deadly sincerity. I was horrendously serious; the dead giveaway was the metaphorical dagger I was holding to her throat.

‘A house, though? Are you sure?’

I leaned back and let my eyebrows resume their normal position. The dagger was retracted and fit back rather nicely into my backpack of doom.

‘Well… possibly not. More the size of a handbag, really. Or not. It might just have been regular dog sized, now I come to think about it.’

‘Regular dog sized?’

‘Yes, definitely regular dog sized. Definitely, definitely regular dog sized…’ with which I let out a short breath, ‘well maybe not, actually… it might have been quite small. Or there possibly wasn’t a dog at all. I tend to forget.’

My friend sighed at me and looked straight into my eyes. She hated me just a little bit. It was clearly because of my incredible capacity to be continually humorous.

‘You know the more exaggerations you do, the more likely it is that the Exaggeration Monster will come to your house while you sleep and eat you?’

I laughed. The kind of laugh that would make children’s eyes explode with terror.

‘That’s not true, and even if it were, I have some kind of hamster army as a back-up.’

‘You own one hamster.’

‘And that singular hamster shall lead a large hamster army, the likes of which this world has never seen!’

The cackle which followed might have been slightly over the top. The woman who owned the coffee shop certainly seemed to think so.

My friend and I parted ways, my eyebrows having made the rounds of my face had now ended up on my cheeks, not entirely sure what to do with themselves. My friend left to pursue her dreams of drilling people’s teeth open with instruments of torture, and I returned to my lowly but wonderful life of watching Bullseye on the sofa, on repeat. It was a worthwhile existence, peppered with periods of major excitement at Bully’s Prize Board, and several toilet breaks on account of the copious amount of bleach I had consumed for years, as a result of being seriously misled by an advertisement for brass instruments. I virtually had no stomach left, but I made up for this by watching more Bullseye. But that was another story.

On the way home however, I decided to put this Exaggeration Monster theory to the test. We’d all seen the papers: the blurry photographs of manic chugging of human flesh, always for some reason leaving the feet- probably on account of the toenails- something that is perfectly justifiable in my previous experience of chugging human flesh. With bleach. But then again, you can never believe everything you read: ‘All Pasties are Delicious’, being the obvious exception.

I walked into the Post Office and told the woman with the stamps that I had once consumed 87 hotdogs, and had been crowned ‘Queen of Hotdog Consumption’ at a small village in Mongolia. The woman in the Co-Op was also very surprised to hear that a beanbag had once molested me, and I won a very large compensation sum from Santa. The old Asian man in the sandwich shop was most delighted to hear that his sandwiches were the only reason I continued to exist, and then I called my mother and told her that I sometimes salivated milkshake and provided sustenance for malnourished pensioners.

Overwhelmingly pleased with myself and suffering from Bullseye withdrawal, I finally went home to my mansion made of solid gold and the skin of the cats I might have purposely trapped in the floorboards, and then ate the tastiest pasty I have ever eaten, from a bowl crafted from the finest porcelain, created by eunuchs in China, and sold for a moderate price at ASDA.

As I crawled into my bed of luxury and cheese-flavoured biscuits that night, I closed my eyes with the calm reassurance of safety suckling on my fingers. I knew in my heart that my exaggerations were the finest humorous gifts that had ever graced the face of the Earth, or the ears of the woman at the Post Office, who was coincidentally also the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, complete with a hearing aid and turquoise cardigan. Saggy, wrinkled breasts had always turned me on.

But then as the very last of my consciousness began to slip away, I saw it there, in the corner of my eye. The Exaggeration Monster! Huge, terrifying; my exaggerations spilled out of its orifices and choked me as it grew ever closer, all gangly and slimy. It smelled like Spanish drains and I trembled with fear and begged for my life. It towered above me with hair made from lies and skin weaved from all of the huge silences that had fallen when I had said something hilarious, but nobody had seemed to have quite understood how hard they should have been laughing. I closed my eyes and waited for it to eat my face.

Although it wasn’t all that bad, really. It was actually pretty small.

After the local plumber ‘did his magic’ with his rods and various foul smelling chemicals, life got back to normal for a while…

But then, about a month ago, I was in the shower whilst our washing machine was on. The washing machine emptied… and my feet were suddenly engulfed in soap suds! Obviously the ‘drains fix’ had not been a permanent one.

Well, we could have called the plumber back, but were loath to do so. He had not been cheap and he had not completely fixed the problem. Haggling in Spanish to try to get him to come back and fix it for free was not something we felt would achieve a satisfactory outcome.

When we had had potential problems with our Saluki and had spoken to the ‘translator man’, my husband had also mentioned our ‘drains problem’ and the man said he would help if necessary. So my husband rang him again and the guy rang the local council for us and got us a visit from the sanitations department (or whatever they are called).

But, as these things happen, by the time the sanitations man arrived, the problem had gone away again. The engineer decided that this looked like an outside drains problem rather than one inside our house. We breathed a sigh of relief as this would entail no more cost for us. So, the man and his team had a look down the street drain… and declared ‘no problema’.

Hmmm, what to do now? We just crossed our fingers and hoped ‘el problema’ would not return. Of course it did.

A few days later, the weather turned bad. Torrential rain and high winds buffetted our village. Because of a strange planning arrangement when our house was built, we collect rain water from surrounding houses. It passes along their gutters into a pipe which meets up with our house drains.

In the early hours of the morning, I was doing my night time shift on the computer, when I heard the dreaded bubbling and gurgling noises again. I look in the bathroom with trepidation… and found our bath filled with rain water.

The rain eventually stopped and the water slowly drained away, but we were left with a very blocked drainage system. Time to call out the council engineers again. The next morning, my husband drove down to the local council and asked for their help.

An hour or so later, two engineers arrived, armed with rods and hoses…and a pneumatic drill. One of them proceeded to drill a large hole outside our front door. My husband tried to tell him that it was very unlikely the drains came out there, as the outgoing pipe under our house was about 10 metres to the left of this spot, but the engineer declared that “esta aqui” because that was the spot under the water meter. He carried on drilling.

Pieces of concrete and earth flew everywhere as the guy got into his stride. Our whole house shook and, I guess, so did all the other houses in the street. However, when he was stood almost shoulder deep in the now very wide hole, the engineer admitted defeated. The drain “no esta aqui”. My husband gently pointed to the spot 10 metres away for the second time and the engineer shrugged and said “vale” and moved his drill to the required spot.

About two seconds later, he found the drains access. it was a couple of inches below the road surface. Now the two engineers could begin inspecting and working on the drain with their rods and hose.

To cut a long (and very messy) story short, they managed to fix ‘el problema’. It was internal to our house, but they fixed it for us at no cost. After clearing the drain completely (the previous plumber had just ‘made a hole’ in the blockage), they showed us what had caused the problem in the first place.

When our house was renovated, we had assumed that new pipework would be installed throughout. There had been nothing much wrong with the original pipe running under our living room floor, but it was old and a different circumference to new pipes, so joining the pipes from the new extension would have presented a problem.

However, it appears that ‘new pipework throughout’ had not been the rule when the project was under way. The old pipe had been left and the new drainage pipe from the extension had been joined to it, by placing the smaller (new) pipe some way inside the older one. This had left a ridge where the new pipework ended and this ridge had, over the months, caught stray pieces of toilet paper. These had become wedged, making a larger ridge for more to catch on. You get my drift…

The engineer told us it was “muy mal” that our builders had installed pipes this way. He said we were going to be faced with the same problem again in a few months time, unless we had the old pipe replaced.

To do this would mean digging up our living room floor, not to mention the cost of more building work.

I wonder if you still read this blog Mr Project Manager? If you do, then perhaps you would like to come and install the new pipe work for free? It must have been your decision to install the drainage system like this in the first place. There again, perhaps not, we could well do without further stress.

We still have a very large hole outside our front door. The engineers said they, or someone else, would be back ‘mañana’ to fill it in and lay new concrete. We have learned, however, that ‘mañana’ does not necessarily mean ‘the next day’ so we’ll wait and if no one turns up in another week or so my husband will go to the council and ask them to call again.

In the meantime, he has filled in the hole as best he can and covered the earth with some left over tiles. The neighbours are not particularly impressed as this does tend to ruin the look of the street a little. I guess that council visit should be made sooner rather than later…

But we are not complaining about the engineers’ work. They did it all for free and unblocking internal drains was not their job. We are just so glad they were willing to help.

Of course, at some time soon we will have to think about getting replacement pipes fitted in our house. This is more expense we hadn’t envisaged and certainly cannot afford right now.

Did you hear me say “no me lo puedo creer”? No, I’m afraid not. Having had so many problems with the renovation work before, I can believe that this particular problema has happened only too well…