IT’S TIME TO TALK PRESSURE WASHERS

'I've bought a water charger pistol thingy. You know the one maintenance man uses to clean the decking. It will arrive tomorrow. You can do something useful for a change.'

It's the words every married man, whose wife has to suffer the agonizing hydraulic press that is the morning commute on the underground whilst he sloths around the house in his pajamas, his only job to make sure her beloved pets don't somehow find their way to the washing machine, or embark on a bus to Acton without its owners permission, hears.

Sure enough the brandless brown packaged box arrived almost with the stealth precision that I imagine a super spy would surreptitiously receive his provisions from an assigned MI6 operative. No face, no words, no names. I had my brief, now I had my weapon.

That weapon being the compact design Bosch high pressure washer EasyAquatak 110. Complete with a 110-bar pump, 450-ml High-Pressure Detergent Nozzle, push-fit connections and in-use gun storage that the wife purchased on Amazon for a steal at £66 courtesy of a Black Friday deal. None of the words on the product meant anything to me, except of course the gun, which elevated my fantasy levels and catered to my James Bond alter-ego.

Then comes the inevitable short lived adrenaline dump, once I cleave open the washer from its cardboard housing, only to find several manuals, descending in sizes like Russian dolls, miscellaneous hoses and an array plastic nozzles each with their carefully appointed names such as Variable fan jet nozzle, Rotary nozzle and High pressure detergent nozzle.

The unglamorous side of any new appliance is in its assembly, and establishing for God-sakes why one piece of the plasticy-puzzle is surplus to requirements. This feeling or colossal humbling ineptitude is only usurped by the disassembly of the same plasticy puzzle which this time refuses point blank, like a fat self entitled Genie, to be squished back into its box from whence it came. After the perfunctory 20 minutes of YouTube pressure washer guide videos that some helpful Indian chap has uploaded to his channel, it's time to literally pull the trigger.

Shot-blasting one's decking free of mold and fox shit, comes with an intense relief once one has successfully figured out the necessary sequence of events such as. The tap need not be on when attempting to connect the hose to the extension reel. In fact, it's actually impossible to connect whilst on so turning the tap to the water supply is literally the second to last thing you need to do. If the power to the washer comes on initially and cuts out almost instantly, there is no need to check the plugs and its various fuses and extensions. The whole shebang is governed utterly by one squeeze of the gun handle. And away one goes.

The pleasure one derives from the merciless evisceration of green and black unidentifiable matter that has tarred the decking for the past six months, comes to a peak after 3 to 4 minutes. Then as Bill Hicks would say, my bubble is popped and brought hurtling back to the truth. It's cold outside, I have a sore elbow, its a painfully slow process and putting it mildly, its frankly fucking boring. But for the purpose of this review, I can safely say everything does its job sufficiently well.

Photo by Sonnie Hiles on Unsplash