mostly david ephgrave

Today I did one of the few household jobs I’m capable of and fixed our toilet flush with a coat-hanger. (Oh, the glamour.) You’d think I would have picked up more skills by now but, outside of my toilet-fixing trick, rewiring a plug or replacing the fuse wire in our extremely antiquated fuse-box, I’m pretty useless. Admittedly, I once repainted my bathroom, but I wouldn’t say I did the best job ever; more like somewhere in the Top Ten. Housework’s a different matter; I’m a dab hand with the iron and a mean-machine when it comes to washing up. The one that puzzles me that people apparently find difficult is doing the laundry; there’s an advert running at the moment for a pod-based detergent you just throw into the drum, which seems to be labour under the misapprehension that pouring liquid is the height of skilled work. The question is when do you adopt these handyman (or handywoman) skills? Is it all part-and-parcel with becoming a ...

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. Th...

For someone who’s very musically minded, I’m ashamed to admit I know very little about the work of Billy Bragg. I know the basics – that he’s a left-leaning political activist with a musical output that blends folk, punk and 'protest' – but that’s about as far as my knowledge stretches. Bizarrely, I’m probably more familiar with Bill Bailey’s Bragg pastiche, ‘Unisex Chip Shop’, than of anything by the original artist. Even Bragg’s own son quoted the song as a favourite of his ‘dad’s’ work, so it seems that I’m in good company. Bailey and Bragg once joined forces to duet the song at Glastonbury's Leftfield; track down the video on YouTube if you're interested; it's quite entertaining. One of Billy Bragg’s songs that I do know, however, is his recent single, ‘Handyman Blues’; it just came on the radio, and I bloody love it. I first heard it on The One Show on BBC1 (that bastion of popular culture). Bragg was appearing to promote his current album...