Waiting for the hot tap
Turn on the hot tap and the first thing out of it is cold. It isn’t cold water from anywhere in particular. It is hot water that was left in the pipe the last time someone ran the tap, and it has spent the hours since cooling to the temperature of the wall. Before anything hot can reach you, the whole length of pipe between the tap and the cylinder has to empty into the sink. A common household pipe holds a little over a tenth of a litre per metre. Ten metres of it is more than a litre, and at an ordinary flow that takes a quarter of a minute or so to run away.
So every house has its own wait, and the number is set by how far the bathroom is from the cylinder. Nobody chose it. It was decided by whoever put the cylinder in the cupboard on the landing and the kitchen at the other end of the house, maybe sixty years ago. The basin upstairs might be quick and the kitchen slow, and the people who live there know both numbers without having ever counted either.
What they know it with is the hand. The test is a finger or two held in the stream, and it is not a reading of temperature so much as a watch for change. Cold water is not news. What the hand is waiting for is the first sign of warming, which arrives as a softening rather than a step, because the first hot water has to heat the pipe as it comes and gives up some of itself doing it. Then it climbs fast. A hand that has been waiting for warm is often still in the stream when warm has become too hot, and comes out quicker than it went in.
The pipe also remembers. Run the tap again twenty minutes later and the water in it is still warm, so the wait is shorter, and an hour later it is longer again. Nobody keeps a log of this. The hand just learns that the second wash of the morning comes round faster than the first.
The litre in the pipe is wasted, and some people have decided not to waste it. In houses where water is metered or rationed you will find a jug by the sink, or a bucket in the shower, put there to catch the cold before the hot comes. It goes on the plants or into the kettle. This is the one place the wait gets measured, because the bucket fills with exactly the length of pipe.
A guest has none of this. Standing at someone else’s basin, they don’t know whether the wait here is five seconds or forty, so they stand with a hand in the water for the whole of it, unable to decide whether the tap is slow or whether this is the cold one. Some give up and wash in cold, and say nothing.
The people who live there don’t stand with their hand in it. They turn the tap on, go and find the towel or the toothbrush, and come back when the house says it’s ready. You can tell who lives in a house by who walks away from the running tap.
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