Merde

Hallelujah, after an evening of attempting to unblock a sewage pipe, the sun came out this morning and it came as very welcome relief.
For a few days recently I'd suspected that all was not well with our effluent disposal, but I knew where to start looking, so Bryan and I located a manhole, that had long been covered over, only to find that we were up to our elbows in merde. Human merde, and lots of it. Despite putting 30 metres of rods down the offending pipe we were unable to progress much further until I could buy some more.
When we first moved here I remembered seeing the next manhole in the chain but it was covered over when the garden was landscaped. Bum. Putting the rods down enabled me to measure the distance from the first manhole to the next and get a good idea of where we would have to start to dig to uncover it.
I'd put a call out to Jean-Francis, 'man with JCB' (above on a less smelly day) and at lunch time he showed up and started turning the back garden into a battle field. An hour and a huge hole later we found it, about 5 feet down. I'll spare you the very gory details but this manhole was obviously the problem and we set about unblocking it. Two hours later, after we'd flushed it out the cause of the problem became apparent. This manhole consisted of a relatively small concrete box with one pipe entering the box at right angles to the exit pipe and with no channel connecting the two. With time it was bound to get blocked. A disgraceful piece of building work.