IN today’s effluent society, drains are something many take for granted. Not me.

I had a spot of trouble with ours earlier this year. A blockage. Luckily, our guardian angel, who lives over the road, miraculously appeared and came over to help try to solve the messy situation.

While she was at the sharp end in the front garden, I was in the back, feeding a hose out to her.

Without thinking, I took a step backwards, forgetting we had already removed a manhole cover.

I ended up knee-deep where angels fear to tread.

I hope you’ll excuse the colloquial expression but such close encounters of the t**d kind, make you respect our sewerage system. It quietly gets on with the job. People hail the railways as typifying Victorian achievements but I take my socks and trousers off to that underground movement of long-dead engineers who built many of the tunnels beneath our feet.

Since the 19th century our population has burst but the sewerage system hasn’t. With so many new housing estates and other developments built in the past decades you might have thought that we would have experienced a Sewage Crisis by now but the Eden of Dorset has survived without too much trouble affecting the layman.

Now Wessex Water has completed the first year of a billion pound investment programme to renew old sewers and water mains with more improvements in the pipeline. That is money down the drain that we should applaud.

Old sewers may have been a magnificent feat of engineering but they won’t last forever and this work is a step in the right direction.

Which, when confronted with my recent manhole experience, is more than I achieved myself.