Balcony smells.

It’s the first time I’ve been on it for about six months. My gas meter is here and people keep telling me prices are skyrocketing and that I need to send in an up to date meter reading.
I take my phone out of my favoured left pocket and navigate to the Npower website. I need it ready so the meter doesn’t change between me reading it and typing the number in.
I go to login but it doesn’t work. It says they’ve been bought and so I have a new energy provider. They provide the link to my new guv’nor. I follow it but the same thing happens again.
Unknowingly, in the time since I last checked my meter, I’ve changed gas companies three times. I’m now with “E.ON Next”. I don’t know if that’s the name of my current provider, or if my current provider’s name is already telling me who my next provider will be.
I create an account. It says the password will need resetting every five months and 29 days. Perfect. I don’t need to bother trying to remember it.
I check the meter. The number has barely changed since the last time. It’s gone up by 21, from 8740 to 8761. That’s 0.2%… what’s the big fuss about? Cost of living crisis? Seems to me to be a cost of counting crisis.
I go to type the reading in. It’s logged me out already. Shit. What’s my password?

As my brain starts up to decipher the Enigma code, my sniffer goes into overdrive.
I get a faint whiff of actually awful sewage-type smell (by “actually awful sewage-type smell” I mean “sewage smell”, but that doesn’t do it justice).
It begins by delicately gripping the outer edge of my left nostril, and then pulling itself in headfirst and attaching itself to the back of my eyeball. It dangles a rope back down the way it came so its friends can climb up from the underworld and join it.
I’ve never had a smell which only goes up one nostril. To make certain it’s the nature of the smell and not me, I give my nose a good blow. To my surprise it was me. Something dislodged in my right nostril and, like a vacuum, the smell was sucked into my right blowhole too.

I need to find the source. The balcony is one person deep, and one person walking a few steps long. I’m parked in the middle of it, blocking everyone (except my nose) in. The smell is either coming from the end with nothing in it but a plant pot turned upside down, or the end with the clogged up drain and slow drip.
I bowl down the latter lane first and quickly conclude the smell is coming from the drain.
I’m heading as close as I’ve ever been to that end of the balcony. The gas meter is on the way and I stop to ask for directions, even though I’m fairly certain where to head.

Me “Hello”
Gas meter “8761”
“How far is it to the end?”
“1 more metre”
“Sorry, is that metre as in M-E-T-R-E or M-E-T-E-R?”
“M-E-T-R-E”

I’m pleased it’s the way I thought, but also slightly sad. I got my hopes up a little when I thought he may have said “meter”. I’ve always assumed I should have an electricity meter somewhere too, but I’ve never been able to find her. That case will remain cold, but I won’t let her become just another number.

But then I have a thought, “And you definitely didn’t say MEET HER? As in ‘you will meet her’, ‘her’ being the electricity meter?”
“8762”

I get to the drain and it’s caked in a sludge which flits between mud brown and swamp green, depending on the light. The smell is marginally stronger here. But I know it would unleash itself if I were to breach the surface. And yet breach the surface I must…

I go back into the flat. I repurpose the brain that was warming up earlier to crack passwords into one that can shovel crap. I need to find the right tool. I narrow the shortlist to three:

1. A screwdriver – This is in the right category (DIY) and has some length to it to protect me from contact. But at the business end of the instrument it’s about as useful as an overboiled noodle.
2. A spoon – I’m well aware it should be a nonstarter but unfortunately it’s not. It brings a higher shovel factor than the screwdriver, but I haven’t got the depth in my kitchen drawer, nor the inclination, to be able to bin it after use.
3. Hands – Yep.

I stare into the sun for 10 seconds and start screaming as loudly as I can.

I can’t be distracted by my senses when I have to make a decision as important as this. I need to think clearly. The sun blinds me and the mandraking forces my ear drums to down sticks. My taste and smell are still numb from the balcony smearing sewage along the lining of my throat, and my sense of touch needs no antidote (I’m already dead inside. Which efficiently blocks the signals between my nerve endings and my brain. The emotional impact of an oven breaking was enough to turn me into the bullet lodged Renard from The World is Not Enough).

I want to buy a trowel. Or at least what I think a trowel is, which is a small spade.

Decision made, I head to the shops.
Based on historic performance, I will use this tool once every five years. So I’m not looking to go top-end.
My target shop is one that doesn’t accept card below a certain amount, and my budget is having to use cash in said shop. (To compliment these shops, I still always try to use card anyway, as if to say “I see you and recognise your confidence is just troughing right now”).

I arrive at Bargain Buys. I walk straight past the baskets but then I see a foam party quantity of Carex Blue hand soap on a “5 bottles for £still-can’t-use-card” offer. I go back and get a basket. As I’m filling up the basket I become conscious of a brother in arms next to me. His wife has just gone full Harry Styles and broken off alone to look at shampoo at the other end of the aisle. I was semi-aware of them joking and laughing not long ago. They were certainly in good spirits.
But now the bloke is on his own and gazing up at a towering multicoloured wall of kitchen sponges. It’s like one of those tall buildings that you stare up at and it looks like it’s falling towards you. He spins 180 and now has the nozzles of every Mr. Muscle variation created between 2007 and 2015 pointing straight at him and cocked.
He pleads “You come in here with a plan and then… and then it just swallows you”.
I don’t know if he’s saying it to me or the room. I’m currently crouched on the floor arranging the handwashes in my basket upright and spouts all facing the same way. There’s been no more noise for a while so I feel safe to slowly turn my head towards the guy. I get to about 150 degrees. At this point I’m more owl than man. Like a tank, after rotating enough I then have to adjust vertically. I slowly look up- aaand he’s staring right at me.
He’s weeping. But I don’t judge him. That could just as easily have been me. It’s so easy to go into a discount shop and completely lose sight of why you’re in there. Fortunately I’ve got all my ducks in a row today. I turn the final Carex bottle the right way round and I now have my cute little luminous blue ducklings in a row too.
As I get up he edges towards me. I can now see what’s in his basket and I’m aghast.
He’s got a fluffy duster, some tiny tupperware boxes that you put nuts in, a Fray Bentos Steak & Kidney pie, and a large see through pencil case that can fit a 30cm ruler in it (diagonally).
No wonder he’s crying, he’s completely lost his bearings! We’re both on the first aisle but he’s already got something from each aisle and is now back at the start.
I put my hand on his shoulder and we bow heads. We’re still looking each other in the eye, which is slightly uncomfortable because our eyes are having to roll up and back into our heads to maintain contact.
I console him, “It’s not your fault.”
We stay in this embrace, where I’m allowed to touch him but he can’t touch me, for maybe two seconds before his wife returns.
She’s wearing a bright blue clown’s wig which she’s found on aisle 4 and is dancing up the aisle towards her mentally flailing husband.
His back is turned to her.
I whisper to him “Go.”
He wipes his eyes on his sleeve, puts a big grin on and turns around to dance with his wife.
As I’m walking to aisle 2, I hear her say “Have you been crying?”
“No, no. I just got some Mr. Muscle in my eye”.
I don’t actually know what toxic masculinity is, but I feel like this bloke is both a victim and a perpetrator of it.

I walk the aisles. I can’t find spades.
I ask a member of staff “Do you have spades?”
She’s smug, “Playing cards are on aisle 3”
I’m unimpressed, “Garden spades.”
She turns her nose up at me, despite already standing on one of those little red stools with with wheels that look like a Henry Hoover, “Errrm no… we don’t sell them”
She’s full of glee that I’ve turned up and tried to buy the one thing they don’t sell.
Again I don’t judge her because I’d have done exactly the same, probably worse, in her position.
(I can guarantee that if I’d asked if they sold playing cards they’d have suddenly had garden spades in stock but no cards.)
Well she’s not going to have the last laugh.
I go back to aisle 1 and reverse purchase the Carex Blue from my basket back onto the shelf, but with a petty twist. I alternately put the soap bottles back with spouts facing opposite ways from their neighbours.
I put my basket back on the stack at the front and leave the shop through the entrance door.