"If you’ve got a coffin in the back of the hearse, that helps. You do get some strange looks though when you’ve got a bath in there"
After he was done, we asked him who to make the cheque out to. “Gothic Plumbing”, he says. Well, obviously. We hand over the cheque and he hands us his business card. "Gothic Plumbing", sure enough, complete with bat and gargoyle. After he’s gone, my wife and I look at each other, look at his business card and look at each other again. “Did that just happen?” I ask her. She assures me it did.
I make it my mission to find out more about my Goth Plumber. I call him up and ask if he’d like to be interviewed for LeftLion and surprisingly, he does. Turns out there’s a lot more to my Gothic friend than meets the eye…
Which came first, the Goth or the Plumber?
I was Goth before I knew what Goth was. I liked wearing black, and people would come up to me and say “Are you a Goth?” and I would say, “Oh, what’s that?” It started in the 80s and I just happened to like the music and the style. It’s so easy in the morning when choosing something to wear when everything is black. It’s become popular with the kids now, which I don’t like because it’s put the prices on the shoes up.
Being a Goth must make your work life interesting…
When I started working for a company and given the obligatory blue overalls, I decided to set up my own business. What should I call it? Gothic Plumbing. It’s partly marketing to be honest. If you go to the Yellow Pages, it’s different from anything else in there. Yes, it puts some people off, but it generates a certain amount of interest from people into alternative lifestyles themselves. I don’t go to jobs wearing the makeup and nail varnish, that doesn’t go over very well. Chipped nail varnish doesn’t look very good anyway.
What the strangest reaction you’ve got from a customer?
I got a call-out from a little old lady one time. When I got to the door, she said, “Oh, me duck, you’ve got the wrong house, you want the one next door”. I said, “No, I’m the plumber.” That gave her a bit of a fright. You get strange reactions from children asking if your earrings are real, and you also get people asking me to turn up in all the Goth gear. I tend to steer clear of those ones. You also get the odd idiot calling up asking “Is that Chav Plumbing?”
I hear you ordinarily drive a hearse. What happened to it?
The brakes failed a mile and a half away from my house on the A453. The best way to put it would be to say I brought it to a controlled crash into my dustbins. And that’s after it passed its MOT with flying colours. The A453 is a very busy road - I was very lucky it was 7 in the evening as there were suitable gaps in the traffic. I was also lucky I was in a hearse, as people tend to give a hearse a little more room on the road.
Driving a hearse must have its benefits. You must get free parking...
Yeah, you do to a certain degree, unless you get an over-efficient traffic warden. If you’ve got a coffin in the back, that helps. You do get some strange looks though when you’ve got a bath in there…
You’re obviously not from Nottingham - what brought you here from London?
When I came back from a three-year stint in Cyprus with The Royal Air Force, I was sent back to a base in Lincolnshire.
What? Really?
Yes. I used to take aerial photographs in the service. I processed survey photographs for the government, photos of boats that weren’t supposed to be there, fishing where they weren’t supposed to and drug smugglers. I helped document the Turkish invasion in Cyprus. It was still the Cold War days at the tail-end of the Vietnam war so we did some work with the Americans there as well.
I thought the UK had nothing to do with the war...
We didn’t. But the Americans had bases here and we processed a lot of photographs for them. Half the time you didn’t know what you were looking at, but they had some amazing equipment. They had a camera that swung like a pendulum, strapped beneath their planes. If they flew in a straight line over Britain, they could photograph the entire country in a single pass. In such detail that you could make out golf balls on the golf courses.
Holy crap. How long ago was that?
25 – 30 years ago.
God, you can only imagine what they’ve got now.
Quite.
Aw, right, did you catch that? As if being a Goth and a plumber wasn’t surreal enough, the guy took secret spy photos of the Turkish invasion in Cyprus and of the Vietnam War and just gave me first hand insight into American spy technology. He might just be the most interesting person I’ve ever met. Note to self: Speak to builders more often…
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