For many, January is a month of grim resolve, characterised by abstinence and the crushing weight of unmet expectations. For Guardian columnist Tim Dowling, salvation arrived from the most unlikely of places: the broken flush of a high-level toilet.
The Traditional January Struggles
The month began, as it often does, with a familiar domestic negotiation. Dowling and his wife debated the official start date of Dry January, with him arguing that public holidays and weekends shouldn't count. His son, however, was unequivocal, having begun his abstinence at the stroke of midnight on January 1st.
This set the tone for a period Dowling describes as having a "prodigious capacity to disappoint." The myth of the clean slate quickly evaporated, with the unresolved issues of December simply rolling into the new year. The bin collection schedule changed, as it does every January, and he failed to adapt, missing the pickup. The fridge remained full of questionable food with lapsed sell-by dates, a testament to a household not quite having its act together.
A Crisis in the Cistern
The situation reached a low point when his wife reported a complete failure of the upstairs toilet. The chain-pull mechanism, a feature of a period-style high-mounted cistern, had failed—again. The culprit was a single, worn rivet that held the fulcrum in place, a part that worked loose and fell into the cistern water approximately every 40 days.
Repairs were a dreaded, ladder-based ordeal conducted largely by blind feel. "It would be fair to say that I've spent some of my lowest moments in that position," Dowling admits. Yet, on this cold January day, faced with the alternative of doing his taxes, he fetched the ladder.
The Ladder-Born Revelation
Arm-deep in cold cistern water, fishing for the elusive rivet, Dowling was struck not by a grand philosophical insight, but by a brilliantly practical one. He realised that a piece of stout galvanised wire, of the kind used for garden trellises, could be threaded through the rivet's hole and bent securely at both ends with pliers.
An hour later, standing in the kitchen, he explained the breakthrough to his wife. "This is a permanent solution," he insisted. "Our lives are about to change." The repair was no longer a temporary fix but a definitive victory over a recurring nuisance.
In a month defined by self-imposed hardship and administrative failure, this small, tangible success became a beacon. It was a triumph of ingenuity over inertia, a permanent fix in a transient world of bin day confusion and dietary guilt. For Tim Dowling, conquering the faulty flush provided a disproportionate surge of hope, proving that even in the depths of January, one can still engineer a clean slate—or at least, a reliably flushing toilet.
