A few years ago I was talking to a couple of old golfing pals who had just bought villas in Ibiza. The villas were side-by-side on a cliff overlooking a cove. Very tasty properties indeed. We were discussing maintenance issues and one of the guys said the first words of spanish he had learned were "deme dos" (give me two), as whenever he needed to buy anything for the house, he automatically bought two as he knew his pal would need one too.
I do something very similar, but with me (and G it has to be said), it is the expat thing of not knowing when you might see them again, so you buy two (usually food, but also clothes and handbags and Porches). G and I do not often go shopping together these days, but she has reverted to calling me "buy two" when we do go to the supermarket. To me it seems silly to just pick up one jar of tuna or pack of tinned olives. We know what we use on a regular basis and we have the storage space, so what the hell.
This week, however, I took it to a new level as I decided to buy a spare filter for the pool pump. Not in case it broke, but just to make cleaning it easier. The filter is a plastic barrel, perforated to allow water through, but intended to catch larger pool debris just before it reaches the pump. On our pool, it really needs cleaning a couple of times a month (but the ex-poolboy managed to leave it to once every 3 months - or let me do it when it created problems). There is a filter on the "skimmer" which catches most large floating things, but the "sump" drain has nothing "fine" at the pool end, so stuff goes down it. Anyway, I cleaned the pool during the week, but didn´t really have the time or energy to do the filter as it is real pain. The bits it gathers are the usual mix of bits of leaf, grass and unlucky beasts, accompanied by bits of pine tree which are like a thin elasticated chicken wishbone. These damn things get in the filter and do not get out (ok, I know that it is the point of the filter), and when you are trying to clean the filter these things are very difficult to dislodge, even with tapping, hosing or cursing. The reason this becomes an issue is that while the filter is out, the system sucks air in, and it can take 5 or 10 minutes of dry-running from the pump to get it flowing again (not good for the pump). So, I decided it might be a cunning ruse to buy a spare filter which I could put straight into the pump and allow the other to dry out and be cleaned "at leisure". Anyway, put the theory to the test this morning and managed to swap in the new filter in seconds - in fact so fast that the pump didn´t have to do any hunting at all.
Success! - and at only 9€, a snip. (but at some point I do have to clean the other one before the next cleaning session). Some days are diamonds...
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