Monday, November 7, 2011
Do we not bleed?
When I was an undergraduate at Manchester a few years ago I belatedly managed to find a room in a shared house – until that point I’d been staying in a youth hostel while combining flat hunting with university study.
On hearing that a friend of friends had dropped out of his anthropology course (it would turn out that he had unwittingly become a real trendsetter) I quickly seized the opportunity to take his room, arriving early in the morning and literally helping him out of bed as I moved my belongings in.Things were great. Yes, the flat was a bit damp. No, we didn’t have a hoover. Yes, the fridge did begin to resemble something from a chemical warfare programme. But, all in all, things were great. At least until the winter…
Because, when winter arrived we found that the place was very, very cold. So cold, in fact, that even doubling on jumpers and wearing long johns wasn’t enough.
Then, after checking the radiators, we realised that they weren’t working properly.
Outraged, we called the landlord, who told us that maybe we ought to bleed the radiators. But what did he mean by “bleed”?
Did he mean that we fill them with our own blood then extract it so that it could be reintroduced to our bodies, creating a kind of intravenous home-heating system or was it simply an arcane and profane way of telling us to deal with it, to suffer?
Truth be told, we were completely baffled so after a great deal of consternation we simply shrugged our frozen shoulders, donned a third jumper and put the kettle on, all the time cursing the landlord for being so unhelpfully cryptic.
But it seems we weren’t alone. A new study has revealed that half of young people in Britain have no idea how to bleed a radiator.
Young drivers unable to change tyres, young people unable to get cheap car insurance because a minority don’t drive safely, young people unable to bleed radiators. What next?
Photo © hoill via Flickr, under Creative Commons Licence
Labels: cheap car insurance, young people
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posted by Fuse @ 1:03 AM 
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