sink strainer

cos i know what the algorithm wants

Before we start:

I had a lovely and fun chat with Russell Howard on his podcast Five Brilliant Things.

I had yet another lovely and fun chat while walking my dog with Emily Dean on her podcast Walking The Dog. Shoutout to Raymond who is a dog but looks like a small wig.

I start back on tour from Tuesday. Most of the venues are sold out but there’s limited availability in Glasgow, Canterbury, Newcastle, Belfast and Oxford.

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Look I’ve been online for a while now, I understand what the algorithm requires for it to push my content to a wider audience, and that is: not writing anything for three weeks then writing something about the time I tried to buy a sink strainer.

But it’s either that or spend an hour smashing my fists into the keyboard in a black gloom of despair at the state of every single element of the world. Except the fact that we’ve got this fucking brilliant sink strainer now and yeah that feels like scraping the barrel but if the barrel had a plug then my god you wouldn’t have to scrape anything. Because the sink strainer alleviates this.

Let me explain. Please let me explain about the sink strainer so I don’t have to explain how I feel about OpenAI officially now being used for war, an actual war just being announced on ClassicFM which I put on as a calming distraction, and of course the fact that the world is essentially run by paedophiles who are possibly cannibals but I can’t tell thanks to the fact that news gathering has been fragmented by the fascist right.

But oh my god wait til you hear about the sink strainer!

Okay. You know sink strainers? Imagine this is a standup bit, and I’m a proper standup in the sense that I don’t bombard you with hundreds of powerpoint slides or honk a part of my body like it’s a clown nose (still some tickets left for the tour).

You know sink strainers, right? Little metal things that fit over your kitchen sink plug to stop food going down the pipes and dissolving the metal (I don’t know what happens, I’m not a plumber or a pipe). We live in a Georgian house built in 1785 or something so all the pipes are made of wood, and if any food goes down them we’ll have to get the entire house razed to the ground and re-piped. Again, I don’t know the details but you understand what I’m saying which is: we need a sink strainer.

I bought some silicon ones that have worked wonders (alright, have “worked”) in the shower when protecting against the frankly wild amounts of hair I lose in the winter months, but when deployed in the kitchen, seem to panic and float around every time I turn the tap on. Or, when I figured out I needed to basically hammer the sucker things onto the sink while dry, noticed that they oscillate gently to allow flat foods (tagliatelle! Spinach when flat! Slices of garlic!) to slide underneath and down the plug hole.

Announcing to my partner that I would be in charge of sink strainers (see also: reprogramming the heating, repotting plants, cleaning the bathrooms, changing the bed, mopping and doing errant dishes in the evenings. My partner does the rest and we both do the bins to a song we have invented called ‘Bin Night’) I got a tape measure out rather than guess the diameter of our plug, bought five metal lads and when they arrived they were a full centimetre too small.

Laughing (raging) at my mistake, I bought the correct size. These came in packets of three, and upon arrival didn’t sit flat upon the curvature of the sink floor. Like the sea floor, but for a sink. It then became clear we have a Weird Sink. I knew this because it’s tiny, round, and you can’t wash a normal plate in it without looking like you’ve pissed yourself. But I couldn’t have predicted we’d had to get bespoke sink strainers. Imagine having to search for artisanal plughole accessories? Who has the time and the energy for this?

When I opened the tab on my phone to search for different types of sink strainers beyond 'This Measurement Across And Metal’ something happened to me reminiscent of the afternoon I was supposed to check if my home insurance included boiler cover. I immediately became very tired, incredibly angry, and unable to read. I can look, but I can’t see. Or I can see, but I can’t interpret the information I’m watching. Or maybe my eyes fall out, it’s difficult to tell, but the upshot is the same: I say to my partner ‘Oh my god I can’t do this if I have to do this I will die please can you do this’ while drowning in the millions of incorrect sink strainers I’d already bought and refused to return (eight).

What followed was roughly a week of me saying ‘Have you bought a sink strainer’ and my very busy partner saying ‘Look trust me’ and me thinking about the food slipping down the pipes, the spinach thwapping against the metal until the entire cylinder erodes under its leafy glare (I really don’t know what happens). It’s very difficult being unable to complete boring tasks, but also unable to stop catastrophising about what will happen if said boring tasks aren’t completed.

This is why I cry whenever my accountant calls me: not only can I not understand a single thing he is saying, and not only do my ears stop comprehending words while I watch the meaning of his sentences slide out of reach down an infinite crevasse within my mountainously stupid brain, but what if not understanding leads me to bankruptcy? Or getting burned by a huge bill because I didn’t put aside the correct percentage of tax, VAT and APR? This is a joke please don’t tell me what APR is in the comments, I know it stands for April. This is another joke please don’t tell me what APR stands for in the comments. I don’t know and I don’t want to know.

Back to the kitchen. Every day, while doing the final dishes of the evening, I tried to catch bits of plum tomato with my hands while saying ‘did you get the sink strainer’ in an increasingly unconvincingly casual tone. Every day my partner said ‘Yeah I’m on it’ and I thought oh my god he’s not on it. I’m going to have to kill him.

And then one evening I came home and he pointed to the sink.

Of course. It had taken a few days to arrive because my partner hadn’t, like I had, impatiently and guiltily pressed Buy Now on Amazon. He had done due diligence, proper research, compared prices, and simply bought the perfect strainer. When I saw it I gasped.

How can I describe it?

Picture a hard flat disc of metal encircling a flexible, floppy middle bit of metal that hangs down to fit any plughole. Sort of like knight’s chain mail material. In fact, it looks a bit like if a knight wore a chainmail condom. When you need to empty it, you just shake it over the bin (much like a knight shaking a condom etc etc) and then pop it back in the plug hole. Okay sometimes a bit of the food can get stuck in the chainmail but who cares? It’s flexible, it’s dynamic, and I don’t understand why it isn’t the default for every sink strainer. I’m welling up just thinking about it.

There’s so much pointless tat in the world sold to us as essential that leaves us feeling short-changed and disappointed. To see something so perfectly thought-out and excellently conceived sitting on a humble plughole is a thing of beauty. And yeah, my partner has totally forgotten where he bought it from.

Also, and unbelievably, he deletes emails as he goes. As in, when he doesn’t need an email anymore he just gets rid of it. He literally has no superfluous emails. Not sure how many times I can write the same sentence worded in different ways: the man is on Inbox Zero but that includes emails he’s read. Is this normal or have I married a psychopath? Don’t ask me how many unread emails I have in my inbox, because the answer is 560.

Anyway. I really do hope I managed to put enough of my own spin on this to set it apart from the thousands of other sink strainer thinkpieces on Substack. I know, I’m bored of reading them too, but clout-chasing comes for us all in the end.

In all seriousness, it really is the little things (e.g. sink strainers) getting me through these ridiculously upsetting times.

See also: bought a David Shrigley book, found a duvet that matches the throw my mum got me for Christmas, dyed my hair brown, watched Godzilla Minus One, booked Karaoke tonight with a bunch of friends, used a pumpkin bath bomb even though its not halloween and let’s be honest what the fuck is the point of a bath bomb, re-discovered the band Crowded House and decided to restart therapy after a two year hiatus.

Okay hope you’re all doing well byeeeeeeeeee