
Most of the expensive plumbing repairs in a house begin as something a homeowner decided was probably nothing. A faint damp patch, a cistern that refills...

Booking a taxi has become a screen with a map on it, which is an improvement in most respects and a distraction in one: the screen...

A country town’s transport problem is not that it has none. It is that the services that exist run to their own schedules, and the trips...

Most people engage a tax agent because the return has to be lodged, and most agents know that the lodgement is the smallest part of the...

Six faults account for most of the plumbing problems Australian homeowners meet, and each of them starts smaller than the repair it eventually needs. A tap...

Detailing sits in the same category as servicing rather than in the one the word “clean” implies. A car’s surfaces are materials, and materials age: paint...

A hire car converts a trip from a timetable into an itinerary, and the paperwork around it is smaller than its reputation once the four or...

Plumbing is unusual among the household trades in how long it can fail without showing. Water runs behind plaster, under floors and below the ground, and...

A house full of quiet pipes is a house with nothing to report. When pipework starts making noise, the sound is information: it carries a cause,...

A dripping tap is the smallest plumbing fault in the house and one of the most expensive to ignore. It wastes water every hour of every...