`All mouth and no trousers’, but R-Y gets away with it, thanks to Mrs. Doyle…

There’s a spring in our collective step this morning as we welcome a new client into our heaving bosom. Our latest patron is in the plumbing business and the studio has taken on the feel of a classroom, as we all settle in for our ‘Plumbing as a Foreign Language’ course.

R-Y has assumed the role of teacher: ‘repeat after me; ‘delayed action float valve’.
‘Delayed action float valve’, we chime in unison.
‘Very good’, says R-Y. ‘Now, ‘raised float valve chambers’. And so it goes. For at least twenty minutes, we carefully enunciate foreign phrases such as ‘up and over discharge arrangement’, ‘pump hunting and water hammer’; ‘compensating rotating ceramic discs’, ‘non-adjustable operating differential,’ ‘compliance of Air Gap requirements.’

The phrases lie awkwardly and strange upon our tongues but R-Y seems satisfied that we’re fit, ready and even enthusiastic about the mammoth task that lies ahead.

However, the fearless Mrs. Doyle shatters his air of smug satisfaction. Either she is the epitome of courage and indefatigability or she’s not been around for long enough to understand that R-Y is combustible when challenged. As she speaks, though, she crystallizes all of our thoughts. ‘Ah well then’, she says, an edge of menace to her voice, ‘but what does it all mean?”

She may as well have said ‘the king is in the altogether and he’s altogether as naked as the day that he was born.’ There ensued a corporate intake of breath and a pregnant silence as we awaited R-Y’s response.

‘It’s all to do with plumbing, Mrs. Doyle’, he says.
‘Ah well I know that’, she replies, adding, ‘but what does it mean?’
‘It means something to plumbers’, says R-Y icily. There is a collective rolling of the eyes and a wringing of the hands and an implicit urging that Mrs. Doyle desists in this particular line of questioning.

But Mrs. Doyle, it turns out, is bi-lingual, with the English and the Irish at her effortless command. ‘Sure, that’s no answer at all’, she insists. ‘Now if I was to say to you, ‘niall fhios agat cad ata tu ag caint faoi’ , and you asked me what it meant, would it be enough for me to say to you ‘it means something to the Irish’? Would that explain it to you or would you still be all mouth and no trousers?’

‘Mrs Doyle, you don’t know what you’re talking about.’

And just as we were thinking ‘Holy Mary Mother of God’, Mrs. Doyle surprised us all. ‘Ah fer f-f-f Jaysus’ sake, yer man’s a genius right enough’ she said. The rest of us sat around open-mouthed and even R-Y had no idea why he’d been allowed to slip so painlessly off the hook.

‘Will I make you a cup of tea, Mr. R-Y?’ says herself, her face a study of admiration.
‘Not just now thank-you’, he replies sheepishly, in a state of confusion such as that felt by a prisoner, blindfolded and handcuffed before the firing squad, who is inexplicably released even as the bullets are fidgeting in the gun barrels.
‘And are you sure, now?”
‘I am sure.’
‘Ah go on, go on, go on’ says she in her patented style.
‘Oh alright then’ says R-Y irritably. ‘And the rest of you, get back to work.’

And so our journey into the unknown begins and we face the future with optimism and our glass is half full. This time next week, we’ll all be up to speed, and just as Mrs. Doyle is fluent in English, so we will all be effluent in plumbing.

Life! Don’t you just love it?

Explanatory note: ‘niall fhios agat cad ata tu ag caint faoi’ apparently means ‘you don’t know what you’re talking about’ in Irish. What are the odds on that?! And so, it is thanks entirely to a misunderstanding that Armageddon has been postponed for at least another week…

Too young to understand the bit about ‘the king is in the altogether’?
Then you’ll love this…

R-Y leads the plumbing language workshop in the gardens of Bowers' Towers