Forget football: what about my loo handle?

I'll still be trying to solve the latest worrying crisis in my life - repairing my broken toilet handle.

Life must go on. It might sound ridiculous, even trivial, to you. But for me it's become one of the biggest challenges I have faced for many a year.

It all began simply enough. My young grandson was visiting and he came downstairs with a silver metallic object in his hand and announced: "This has broken off." I know he's capable, as are most kids, of incredible destruction, but how, I wondered, had he managed to snap off a solid metal handle from the side of the toilet cistern? Closer examination explained all. It was not metal, as it appeared, but a chromium-plated hard plastic which, after 30 years of flushing, had finally given up the ghost.

"Don't worry," I said. "I'll soon have it fixed."

Those remarks are now firmly stored in my personal filing system under "Famous last words."

You see, four weeks have now passed, and I've still not got it fixed. If you think Sleepless in Seattle was sad, just try Flushless in June! For a start, you can't do with visitors.

The problems mounted up like this.

First, find a suitable replacement. Have you ever tried to buy a handle for a low cistern side-flush? In the old days you brought a wooden handle on a chain, hooked it to a crank handle in a top box and -- hey presto! -- a mini Niagara falls.

Now there are front flushers and side flushers, switches and cranks, all of varying lengths -- and, unfortunately for me -- all seemed to come attached to an entire bathroom.

I tried the do-it-yourself barns but all they had to offer were ugly wooden-handled jobs which would have looked more at home in a Siberian khazi.

Then I remembered a beautiful gold-plated flusher I once brought in a plumber's shop in Accrington and trekked over there to find, under the arches, that not only did the shop no longer exist, but the whole block of property had vanished!

In desperation, I called at the nearest plumber's supply centre which seemed to sell everything from jointing olives to bathroom suites.

"Oh, I don't think we have any handles," came the response, but, after half an hour in the warehouse, he turned up with the only one in stock -- and it was just what I wanted. "That'll be £8.50."

Next came the problem of fitting it. On examination, the replacement fitment of handle plus shaft needed to be 20cm long, but there was only 8cm of space between the entry hole in the side of the cistern and the toilet wall. This meant I couldn't even remove the broken old fitment never mind fit a new one. I thought I had cracked it when I found an alternative short-reach, press type handle but this proved useless, too. I was coming to the conclusion that when they constructed my house they must have put the toilet in first and built the house around it. This argument was even more convincing when I contemplated detaching the cistern from the toilet and wall altogether for it was sandwiched between immovable inflow and outflow pipes making it impossible to disconnect and swing sideways to slide the old handle out and new one in.

That was if I could manage to turn off the water supply, which after a kitchen refit, had left the stop tap unwisely imprisoned behind the built-in washer and an end unit! Ummm.... half a day to part-demolish kitchen to reach stop tap.

Ingenious solution -- turn off the supply from the street outside! I reckoned without the carefulness of the gang who last renewed the gas mains a couple of years ago. My small, pavement sited water grate was filled with concrete -- you couldn't even see the tap let alone turn it. (Memo to self: Must notify whichever foreign power runs our water supply, these days).

And now I'm looking at a third solution: drill the shaft of the handle, saw it into pieces that will fit and reconnect it with small bolts inside the cistern. Sounds like hard work. I might just call a plumber and take the pain.

Oh well! I can only hope that at least England are flushed with success.