UTTERMEDIA

It’s not so much a fear, more of an adverse intrigue. And it’s not all types of plughole either. I have no idea when or where it began, all I know is that some plugholes and other similar apertures fill me with questioning and unease.

Sink plugholes I am okay with. Bath plugholes I am not. Not many people sit at the ‘tap end’… for one, the taps don’t feel so great on your back, and the plug chain can interfere with the more sensitive parts of your body. But I can never sit at the tap end, even if I’m sharing a bath with someone. I cannot, under any circumstances, remove the plug before I have left the bath. I cannot let my feet or toes touch the overflow hole just below the taps.

I guess part of it is the cleanliness OCD in me… no matter how much commercial plug cleaning fluid you dump down there, it’s still going to be full of hair, spiders, gunk and spunk. It’s safe down there… it’s not going to back up and flood the bath, unless you’re really unlucky. But then your kind friends nominate you for some naff Channel 4 ‘house cleaning’ show. It could be a fear of the unknown. I know where that pipe goes, but only as far as the end of my front garden. From there on, it’s a rusty labyrinth of muddy twists and turns; dark, damp, smelly, cold. It goes on for miles and miles and miles. Like a London Underground for skin and scabs.

It doesn’t stop there. Swimming pools. I love swimming. I love swimming pools. My parents have a pool, and I swim at my local health club a lot. However, the pool cleaning process involves, again, some pretty unnerving water traps, plugholes, vents and gutters. Subconsciously, I always avoid swimming over a grate, or swimming up to a plastic flap, lapping water back and forward like a dead pigeon flapping in the road.

The above ‘fear’ makes slightly more sense… people die in swimming pools. They shouldn’t, and they don’t mean to, but unfortunately they do. People die in baths too, but that’s usually intentional. With pools however, we’ve all heard about the poor girl who’s long hair is sucked into a floor vent. No one notices she is gone, until someone trips over her and summons a fully unprepared lifeguard. When I was about 10, I went to an incredible water park in Portugal. The day after, a kid my age got his head stuck in a water trap and drowned in seconds. Swimming pools are gradually eating the population alive.

I did take reassurance in the fact that this aversion would never really inconvenienced me. It has always been easy to avoid the ‘tap end’ or to swim away from horrible white plastic death-traps. I wouldn’t scream if I came up for air right in front of a hole. I wouldn’t whimper if a plug suddenly popped out of a nice relaxing bath. That reassurance did disappear for sometime though. I have no idea how I found it, or what got me there. But on a regular day at work, I found this…

Holy mother of God. Surely it’s just a sculpture, right? A seating area with the floor just out of view? A giant sub-woofer? No, it’s a fucking plughole. A great big industrial sized plughole, capable of moving thousands of cubics of water per minute. Where does it go? How long does it go for? Would you die? What amount of pressure would you be put under if you were sucked in? How many are there in the world? Are there any near me?

The above image ruined my entire day. I spent 6 hours Googling and Wikipeding every scrap of information I could find about this glory hole. There are dozens of them all over the world. They are overflows for reservoirs. No human being would ever survive the journey. Yet I found myself WANTING to try it. WHY? I don’t want to die. I don’t want to be sucked into a glory hole at 70MPH, disappearing into a deep, dark, dank cave, tossed and tumbled and finally spat out into a catchment area, my body turned inside out from the sheer force of the water. Yet that morbid intrigue in me wanted to have a little swim and accidentally get caught in the draw of the glory hole. Oh God. How would I shake this feeling?

Their actual name is a “Bell-mouth Spillway”. The one above is one of the highest in the world, at the ‘Hungry Horse Dam’. I wonder why they call it that? A Google image search brings up all kinds of horrors. Climbers and explorers abseil down disused spillways… I can handle that. That calmed me down a little. Some keen bloggers had uploaded photos of a disused spillway. And suddenly, to me, it became a beautiful piece of hidden architecture, no longer a colossal H2O vacuum trap.

I learned that there are no spillways near me, and even if I do visit one, I’ll be quite safe behind a fence, or in a car. So the unease and suicidal tendency soon disappeared, and I returned to my aversion of regular household plugholes. I can’t avoid them, I can’t not use them. I’ll just always have that strange nagging “What’s down there?” question in my head.

Thankfully, I don’t fear the dark, heights, or perhaps even death. Just rusty metal apertures. And plasters. I really hate plasters. You know what? Imagine a gross crumpled used plaster, floating in a manic flapping sucking water trap, in a quiet sterile pool, where YOU are swimming. Sweet Jesus.