While I’m hoping my dad will come over to look at my broken boiler today, the downside to this is I feel the need to swing into action an ‘Operation Cleanup’.
It’s not that I live in squalor. It’s just that, being a man of limited means – and limited DIY ability – I find myself surrounded by a string of things I haven’t fixed, or little household jobs I haven’t got around to doing just yet. While this leads to low level frustration from day to day, when nothing quite works how I want it, when someone else comes to visit, I start to see my flat from their perspective; worse still when this person is my dad, who takes the underlying definition of dad (i.e. Handyman Machine) to the extreme. He makes a mockery of my skill-set of basic juggling and pronouncing-Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch-capability.
At the time of writing this (7:39am) the military manoeuvre has begun. It started with fixing my loose toilet seat, which I did before breakfast. There’s nothing I can do about the broken kitchen door handle - that needs a new mechanism - but I can deploy a few distraction techniques (“Look, Dad, a peacock”). I don’t expect success, as he homes in on the needs-to-be-tinkered-with like a shark to blood, but it’s worth making a stab at it. At least I’ll come out the other side able to have a bath, which is a plus point for everybody.
It’s not that I live in squalor. It’s just that, being a man of limited means – and limited DIY ability – I find myself surrounded by a string of things I haven’t fixed, or little household jobs I haven’t got around to doing just yet. While this leads to low level frustration from day to day, when nothing quite works how I want it, when someone else comes to visit, I start to see my flat from their perspective; worse still when this person is my dad, who takes the underlying definition of dad (i.e. Handyman Machine) to the extreme. He makes a mockery of my skill-set of basic juggling and pronouncing-Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch-capability.
At the time of writing this (7:39am) the military manoeuvre has begun. It started with fixing my loose toilet seat, which I did before breakfast. There’s nothing I can do about the broken kitchen door handle - that needs a new mechanism - but I can deploy a few distraction techniques (“Look, Dad, a peacock”). I don’t expect success, as he homes in on the needs-to-be-tinkered-with like a shark to blood, but it’s worth making a stab at it. At least I’ll come out the other side able to have a bath, which is a plus point for everybody.