unretaliatorilyrelabelled

When I was small I remember that my gran's taps were the other way around from ours, but put this down to her house being in Wales. After all, my cousins' school terms usually started a week before or after ours with similar mismatches at half-term; it was just something which was different in different countries (like the side of the road on which people drove), even though there was only really a choice of two arrangements. I can't remember if this held for all the sets of taps in the house or if it was just the main kitchen sink taps, the only set of taps for which it was important to remember which way round they went in order to avoid mis-filling glasses with warm water. In any case, since then I've encountered the entire range of arrangements of hot and cold taps several times over but have never been flummoxed for more than a few milliseconds and have certainly never felt the need to semi-permanently label a set of taps I would be using for a few days. If in doubt as to which tap is the hot tap it's usually the one the soap is kept nearest to, or at least is on ours and also in Nicky's parents' bathroom, though perhaps the large, clear, confident, un-solvented-away labels on their bathroom sink taps have induced a feeling of tap-temperature-related certainty in Nicky's dad which causes greater unsettlement than might be considered normal when he's faced with a set of taps on which the labels were a little bit faded and a wee bit smaller. Had I thought of it sooner I might have installed some Post-Its with big pointy arrows pointing at the relevant tap to make sure no-one was ever in any doubt but as Nicky's parents' bathroom's decoration is mostly Nicky's mum's responsibility I refrained.