THIS week there was no drinking water in the Palace of Westminster.
For an entire three hours the venerable halls of power were without so much as a drop to quench the thirst of the odd lot (myself included) who choose to work here during the parliamentary recess.
How did we survive? Who will play me in the film? To these questions, I have not answers.
Another water-related mishap from last year: The shower in the press gallery (yes, we have one here) was switched off for longer than three months. It was only after it was restored that I found out why. There were fears the water could carry legionnaire's disease.
The Houses of Parliament are situated right on the water, on the northern bank of the River Thames at Westminster, befitting a maritime empire, such as Britain was.
Follow the river out east and you come out to the North Sea, onwards to invade Belgium, France and the Netherlands, if you fancied it.
Follow it up west and there are the gentle English villages of Surrey, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire – very much the rural idyll of the reactionary imagination, all very Three Men in a Boat.
It’s strong for symbolism but works less well on the practicality front. The bit that estate agents never tell you is that “waterfront property” means “damp and filled with rats”.
Add to that the fact that MPs have for years now been unable to agree on a way of fixing the place up and you get a Parliament that feels like it is falling apart around your ears.
If the historic symbolism of the maritime empire’s centre sitting on the edge of the artery which connected it to the world felt apt, perhaps today’s metaphor of a crumbling pile sitting on the edge of a polluted river is even more so.
That’s why it was all the more bizarre to start this week, the tempo of which has been started every morning by picking up the pieces from whatever lunacy has poured from the mind of Donald Trump overnight, with Keir Starmer offering up UK troops to police any peace deal between Ukraine and Russia.
Yes, the Prime Minister asked us, please overlook the fact that I have been excluded from Trump’s talks with the Kremlin, take me seriously when I say that Britain still has a role to play on the international stage.
Thankfully, Starmer was shot down faster than would be an RAF jet doing a reccy over France (the French now outgun Britain on virtually every military metric).
Germany’s Olaf Scholz responded to the suggestion as “inappropriate”, while ex-Army chief Lord Dannatt said that Britain’s military was so depleted it just would not be possible to fulfil Starmer’s pledge.
Starmer wanted power desperately for years. Now he has got it, he’s found that he’s the king of a sandcastle. And Trump has just trampled all over it.
It is weeks like this that remind you how unlikely it was that the rest of the world used to be subordinate to Westminster – and how Scotland still is.
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