Life is Healthy

I don't usually just link to other things on the web as there are plenty of other places that do. But I currently have five scripts to write which is (a) good, and (b) good, but might give me some kind of nervous breakdown. Just while I'm typing this sentence five deadlines are ticking away. And this sentence. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. Why aren't I working on one of them right now? Right this second? Instead of typing this sentence? I am an idiot. A real idiot.

So whilst there is this blogging hiatus, I ask how do you make the greatest piece of music in the world even better? Like this:



Doesn't that just work brilliantly?

Check out the YouTube info and comments for the sad story of how Shawn Phillips came up with this seminal piece of music (I have flashbacks to power cuts and the IRA every time I hear it) in a jam session, then due to not being a member of the Musicians' Union ended up signing away everything.

(Original instrumental version here.)

I have accidentally shaved off my sideburns.

To be strictly accurate, I only accidentally shaved off one sideburn - to accidentally do both would have been either particularly careless or astonishingly ambidextrous - but when you are looking in horror at your unfamiliar, unsymmetrical reflection in the mirror, turning your face slowly from side to side, mumbling "sideburn... no sideburn... sideburn... no sideburn", the second sideburn's fate is pretty much sealed, and no amount of thinking that you can glue the first sideburn back on with Pritt stick is going to help it. The second sideburn has the life expectancy of a mayfly that has recently taken up smoking, and has also just wandered into a pub full of Millwall supporters wearing a T-shirt that states "I dislike Millwall supporters". It had to go.

The initial mistake was a simple mix-up with the clippers. My sideburns, which I have had since 1991, had been getting a bit bushy since my last haircut was before Christmas, so I decided to do what I usually do and use the clippers to trim them a bit closer so I could postpone getting a haircut and thus save myself £6. I made one big swoop with the clippers right up my right cheek, and as I looked at the unusually large amount of hair that the clippers now seemed to be covered in, my first thought was "That is an unusually large amount of hair - my sideburns must have been a bit longer than I realised", followed quickly by a second thought of "OH MY GOD WHERE IS THE BLACK PLASTIC COMBY PRONGY THING THAT IS USUALLY ATTACHED TO THE CLIPPERS TO REGULATE THE HAIR CUTTING LENGTH IT MUST HAVE FALLEN OFF IN THE WARDROBE!!!"

So I now have one of those haircuts that boys had in the 1940s where the hair is longish on top, and shaved down to skin at the sides.

What is worse is that nobody, not even my girlfriend (whose regular and expensive haircuts I take great care to remember about and comment on), has noticed.

I pride myself on my powers of observation. For instance, I am very good at noticing when people are left-handed, either in real life, or on-screen. Obviously this is fairly easy if you are consciously trying to spot if someone is a leftie as you can just wait for them to pick up a pen. What I mean is that I notice without consciously looking. As soon as I see someone writing something with their left hand, the thought immediately pops into my head: “That person is left-handed”, but if they are using their right hand then I don’t immediately think anything at all. I have never found a use for this beyond annoying my girlfriend during films, or pointing things out to new acquaintances that they would have been aware for the majority of their lives, but who knows what crime I might witness where the conviction hinges on which hand the accused was using to plunge a bloody knife into someone’s body? Beyond reasonable doubt I would notice if they were using their left hand, but if they were just like 90-93% of the population I would probably not register the scene at all and carry on walking. So beware, all you sinistral stabbers. Though I actually have no statistics as to how many southpaws I am missing – I only have my intuition that I am spotting them all. What I need to do is team up with someone who only consciously notices when people are right-handed, spend a lot of time together, filming everyone we see whether on-screen or in real life, then play the video back and see if there is anyone we have missed. Perhaps those people will turn out to be ambidextrous. Who knows? It’s a crazy life I lead.

Anyway, I was sitting in a cafe in Brighton on Saturday with my girlfriend when I noticed a strange thing. There were two photos of Brighton Pier on the wall behind her, taken from different angles. But something was odd about them. As I looked more closely I realised that the right-hand one was not a different photo taken from the other side of the pier as I first though, but was the first photo, reprinted in reverse. All the detail, down to the last pebble, was just flipped around. It felt like a cheap trick. How much time and money had the photographer tried to save by doing this instead of just walking to the other side of the pier and taking another photo?

After some intense study and internal conjecture whilst my fry-up got cold, I pointed all this fascinating detail out to my girlfriend, who stopped eating, sighed, took one look over her shoulder and said, “There’s a mirror between them”.

Sadly, she was right. The end wall had an alcove entirely filled with a mirror. There was only one photo, and I had been looking at its mirror image. This also explained why for 15 minutes a man had been sitting on a chair looking straight down the stairs to the basement, which I had thought a bit odd, even for Brighton. He was merely a reflection of a man who was sitting perfectly normally on a chair in the cafe eating his lunch, oblivious to the idiot at the next table. I consoled myself with the knowledge that one of these two men would be left-handed.

I am at the supermarket, doing shopping. Good shopping. Great shopping. Classic shopping. Got my clubcard, got my vouchers, 2-for-1s, 3-for-2s. Checking the list, checking costs per unit weight, checking use-by dates, checking own-brand alternatives. It’s one of the biggest Tescos in the country, but I know it like either side of my hand.

I get to the checkout and am putting my stuff on the conveyor belt when I realise there’s been a catastrophic system breakdown and I’ve forgotten to get a butternut squash. Five years ago, butternut squash was just something weird they ate on Friends, now we have one a week. And they say that globalisation is a bad thing.

I know exactly where they’ll be, and the customer in front of me is still having her items scanned so I should be able to make it there and back without causing a delay. The customer in front of me is also a woman, so will doubtlessly, on being told the total she has to pay, stare in total befuddlement about this unexpected development and spend a billion years looking through her handbag for some means of paying. (NB This is not sexist, it is based on empirical evidence of at least one previous supermarket visit.)

“I’ve just forgotten something”, I tell the checkout woman. “I’ve just forgotten something”, I tell everyone in the queue behind me, and run off to the fruit and veg section. The butternut squash is exactly where I knew it would be. I pick one of optimum size and quality, checking the use-by date for maximum freshness, and turn to go back.

Then I stop in horror as I realise I have no idea which checkout is mine. I look along the dozens of lines, but nothing seems familiar. I scout up and down looking for landmarks, but I may as well be on Mars. Is this my checkout woman? Is this her? Was it a woman? Are these the angry people waiting for me? Is this my shopping? Suddenly I’m four years old and I’ve lost my mum.

I’m about to ask customer services to make a tannoy announcement when on one particular conveyor belt I recognise a pairing of a pile of nappies and a pile of ready meals. This certainly looks like my shopping. And the line isn’t moving. And everyone is looking at me angrily. But it can’t be my shopping because there, sitting between the alcohol and some more alcohol, is a butternut squash.

“Do you have a clubcard?” asks the checkout woman as I stare at the fruit as though a talking serpent has just asked me to eat it. Either someone else with not very much time on his hands (ready meals), and a child the same age as mine (size 5 nappies, large quantities of alcohol), who also looks exactly like me because all these people are expecting me to start putting his stuff into bags, has temporarily left the queue to go and get an item he's forgotten and I've come back a couple of minutes later, or I have sleep-bought a butternut squash.

I thought it wouldn’t be a popular move to go and put the second butternut squash back, so I’m now looking for recipes involving two butternut squashes.

Now that the weather is cold and we don't want to open the windows much, space to dry clothes is at a premium in our tiny flat. With our LOVELY SON producing more than his fair share of laundry there is a strict pecking order of what gets washed first: faeces, vomit, urine, food, other dirt, then stuff that's merely been worn. (And that's just my girlfriend's clothes haha.)

So I was very happy yesterday morning when I put my jumper on and checked my reflection as I had thought there was a stain on the front of it, but it turned out there wasn't. Hurrah - that meant I could get another six weeks' wear out of it.

I wore it to my meeting. I wore it to the shops. I wore it at home when friends came round. It was only when I came to take it off last night that I realised that something about it had been annoying me all day - something scratching me at the front of my neck. Turns out it was the label. Not only was I wearing it back-to-front, but there was a lovely stain down what was now the back.

I am pleased to report that my son's gross motor skills are developing well, and that last night he managed to kick a ball for the first time. Unable to even sit up on his own yet, it may be a while before Signor Capello picks him for England (though if he were a few months older I'm sure he could have got a place in one of McClaren's squads). He was a natural though, not needing a Kevin Keegan poster to tell him to keep his eye on the ball, keep his head over the ball and to strike cleanly through the centre of the ball.

Sadly, the ball in question was inside my scrotum at the time. But may no longer be.

I guess he's happy being an only child.

I bought these pens the other day for writing on CDs and DVDs. I can attest that they are indeed permanent, quick drying, water resistant and have extra fine tips. But by far my favourite feature of them is something that I have only just noticed, and that is that as specified on the packet, the ink matches the cap.

So that's the secret code. I had just been using them at random, and about a quarter of the time I would shout "Oh no, I wanted red ink, not black!" and about a quarter of the time I would shout "Oh no, I wanted black ink, not red!" and only about half the time would I shout "Hurrah - that is the colour of ink that I wanted!" If it was the wrong colour I was having to throw the disc away and burn another one (because, as stated, the ink is permanent, quick drying and water resistant). This was getting pretty expensive.

I guess that what they say is right - you should always read the instructions.

Our boiler is covered under a maintenance plan with British Gas. We have never needed to call them out, so I was a bit miffed when they jacked up their price by 39%. I had a look around and found that I could save us £30 a year by switching to Coverheat. (Don't worry that I have sold out and am now plugging companies on my blog. Rest assured that no one comes out of this well, including myself.)

The Coverheat man came out on Friday and serviced our boiler, which was working perfectly well (heating the flat, giving us hot water - the only two things that I really ask of it), then told us that the spark electrode was cracked and wouldn't go back properly. This meant that the boiler was now no longer working as he couldn't even try to refit it (Corgi regulations, possibility of dying etc). I was somewhat bemused that a boiler repairman had taken a working boiler and turned it into a non-working boiler. The only explanation that I could find was that the space-time continuum had been reversed and that we can soon expect the re-election of Tony Blair, withdrawal from Iraq and global cooling (so it might be quite nice to have a boiler that worked).

He could fix it though. Yes, he could fix it. But because we were not yet covered under Coverheat as the boiler had not passed its initial inspection, it would cost us about a billion pounds. Aha, but I had been SO CLEVER as I had not cancelled the British Gas contract yet. The only problem was that when you are covered under one of these contracts, you are NOT SUPPOSED TO LET ANYONE ELSE TOUCH THE BOILER, particularly someone from another company who might break it. So, I made him put it back together in such a way that although it wouldn't work any more it wouldn't be obvious that someone else had just serviced it. British Gas would come on Monday, and we were going away for the weekend, so we wouldn't be cold for too long.

On Monday, the British Gas man came and removed the boiler cover. "Has it been serviced recently?" he asked.

"Um, fairly recently", I didn't quite lie.

He poked around for a bit, then said, "Yep, it's the gas valve. I can't do it now, but I can come back and fit it tomorrow."

But it wasn't the gas valve, was it? It was the spark electrode. I knew that, the Coverheat man knew that, if only the British Gas man knew that. What would probably now happen was he'd come back on Tuesday, fit a new gas valve, then realise it was the spark electrode after all and we'd have to wait yet another day in the cold. But how could I tell him that it was the spark electrode without letting on that someone else had serviced the boiler?

"Um, are you sure?"

"Yeah - those symptoms, it's always the gas valve."

"Really? It couldn't be anything else?"

"Nah. I do one of these a week."

"It kind of sounds to me like, I dunno, something isn't sparking? You know? Not that I know anything about boilers, or anyone who does, but from the noises it makes it sort of sounds like the gas is coming in, and then something should spark to light it, some kind of, I dunno, electrode? And that isn't happening."

"I'll see you tomorrow when I come back with the gas valve."

Today he came back and fitted the new gas valve. Obviously, the boiler then still didn't work. He was very apologetic. He should have checked the spark electrode as well, but in seven years he'd only seen one faulty one. He's coming back tomorrow with a new one.

We are currently warming ourselves on the heated towel rail. Maybe I could spend that £30 on an extra jumper.

Buzzzzzz.

After the revelation of how much childcare costs (think of a number, double it, add a zero - that's what you can pay just to be on a waiting list), I have taken on a foolish amount of work. As a result I have been learning to work with distractions such as a crying baby, so a slight buzzing somewhere in the room is nothing to me now.

Buzzzzzz.

Whatever has been buzzing has been doing it for half an hour or so now without bothering me. It's late afternoon, my girlfriend and baby are out, and I have a deadline. But, pleased with working an Apocalypse Now reference into the script that will go over the heads of only 99.999% of the audience, I sit back and notice a wasp buzzing around my head!!! In December!!! I hate wasps!!! If this is what is happening due to global warming I might even turn my patio heaters down when I'm not using them.

Buzzzzzz.

I yelp and jump around a bit like an 8-year-old girl, flap my hands, then do a funny run with my arms down by my sides. I shut it into the study and look for a bit of newspaper to hit it with. What with all the working and looking after the baby I've hardly read any of the weekend's papers, and I don't want to get squashed wasp on the international news section, Guardian editorial or business and finance (OK, the Sudoku, TV guide, and the dot-to-dot in the family bit). Eventually I settle on the Observer travel pages - there is no way we are travelling anywhere in the foreseeable future.

Buzzzzzz.

I peer around the door. The wasp is buzzing around the halogen spotlights. I raise my arm to hit it. It flies off.

Buzzzzzz.

Now it is on my whiteboard. I raise my arm to hit it. It flies off.

Buzzzzzz.

Now it is back on the lights. I raise my arm and give it one hard whack. I hit the light. The bulb blows. This blows the main fuse, plunging the entire flat into pitch darkness.

Buzzzzzz.

Buzzzzzz.

Buzzzzzz.

(What followed was like The Blair Witch Project, only instead of three students in the woods there was an idiot middle-aged man with a dodgy torch trying to find a five-amp fuse, and instead of a ghost there was a wasp.)

For the past eight months I have been wondering what sort of a father I will be. I was still wondering at our first ante-natal class yesterday. The only other father there was Keen Dad, who was asking more questions than all the mothers put together. I like to think of myself as a New Man - I've certainly flicked through a couple of my girlfriend's magazines about babies and stuff, but this guy sounds like he's been conducting his own medical trials on the long-term effects of different feeding methodologies.

I try to think of a question to ask that will make it clear to everyone present that I too am going to be a great father. I think so hard that I knock a glass of iced water all over the doll that the midwife has been using to demonstrate feeding techniques.

I try to make a joke: "Oops! I think your baby's wet itself."

"I can see we're going to have to tell Social Services about you", jokes the midwife. At least I think she is joking.

Perhaps being a father is like being an actor - bad dress rehearsal, good performance?

I am achier than Billy Ray Cyrus's breaky heart. My back hurts like that of my village's coalman in the 1970s and my knees are sorer than Monica Lewinsky’s (note to self – try to think of some more up-to-date references), but I have laid the kitchen floor.

All the kitchen furniture, including the fridge, is in the living room. There is still tacky glue everywhere so we have to wear plastic bags on our feet when we cook, and I’m fairly sure that the cooker is stuck fast to the floor, which will at least be a good excuse for never cleaning behind it again.

The biggest difficulty was that once I'd opened the adhesive and started spreading I had to finish the whole job there and then, so it wasn’t until 1:30am that I laid the last strip. Aching, I removed my sticky clothes and washed my hands, peeling huge wodges of tacky glue from my fingers and was just about to go to bed when I found a sticky problem. My DIY jeans had their knees ripped years ago, which meant that my bare knees were now completely covered with dried glue.

I’m quite a hairy man, and despite stoically not complaining about the back pain at anything less than three minute intervals all day it just hurt too much to pull the glue off. (Ladies - please don't bother trying to trump me with any “You don't know what pain is till you've had a bikini wax” stories. It is a well known medical fact that men's knees contain more nerve endings than women's loolahs.) I tried opening the freezer door and freezing it solid like chewing gum so I could chip it off, but other body parts were in danger of becoming brittle as well. There was only one more thing I could try...

And that, darling, is why you found me in the shower at 2am this morning shaving my legs.

I have an annoying habit. It is that I can’t help pointing out to people that what they think of as amazing coincidences are usually statistically fairly probable. I am often to be heard using the phrase “What would be really amazing is if there were no coincidences”. By the time I have mentioned self-selecting samples or false causality it is usually agreed that I have won the point, or that it is time to be going home.

As an example, my Dad, who was a primary school teacher, was amazed by the fact that he never once taught a pupil who had the same birthday as him. But I used some simple maths to show that 25 new children each year for 40 years is only 1000 kids – it would be more amazing if all those birthdays were evenly spread throughout the year. It was actually quite likely that there would be some days with no birthdays, and it was only because one of those days was his birthday that he found it significant. This speech perhaps wasn’t the high point of his retirement party.

Anyway, so a stranger from off of the internet wanted to ask me some questions about writing and I agreed to meet him for a drink after work so that I could impart all of my wisdom and experience to him. It turned out that I actually didn’t have all that much wisdom and experience to impart, and there was a good 10 minutes before I needed to leave to meet my girlfriend and some friends of ours for dinner. (NB this is probably the first time in the last decade that I have gone from one social engagement straight to another without an intervening period of two weeks or so watching repeats of Friends.) So, with a bit of time to kill I asked the stranger from off of the internet where he came from originally. Only to find out that we went to the same secondary school!

Isn’t that amazing? Of course, we both thought that the other one was winding us up, or stalking us, or that some kind of ITV Friends Reunited show was underway and that the hidden cameras would come out any moment.

The hidden cameras did not come out. It truly was an amazing coincidence. And luckily I never bullied him and he didn’t have a sister whom I failed to get off with so it wasn’t awkward or anything.

I then went to my dinner engagement. My girlfriend and our friends were already there, so I made a grand entrance and told them all to shut up as I had the greatest story ever told, and I started to relate the events of the evening so far, right up to asking the stranger from off of the internet where he was from. “And guess what?” I said, triumphantly.

“He went to the same school as you?” my girlfriend asked. I made a note not to invite her to any more stand-up gigs I might do.

“Yes! Isn’t it amazing?”

There were some polite nods.

“Was he in your year?”

“No.”

“Was he from your village?”

“No.”

“Did you know him at all?”

“Er, no. He’s five years younger, and because of the schools in that town reorganising we were never actually at the same school at the same time. But we remembered a couple of the same teachers.”

The conversation stopped. I felt a bit like the scientist who announced about 20 years ago that he had perfected cold fusion to give us all limitless free energy. When he had actually just perfected heating up some water in a test tube. Imagine if he had also said that in an amazing coincidence his new lab assistant had turned out to be his cousin’s friend’s neighbour’s ex-husband’s brother-in-law.

“So it’s like when I met your friend Denise you did your MA with, and it turned out I went to the same school as her”, said my girlfriend. “But again we weren’t in the same year and didn’t actually know each other.”

“Not really”, I said. “You both come from London, and you met her in London. That’s not an amazing coincidence. This is – we went to school miles from London. This must be a one in a million chance.”

There was then some discussion about this implying a significant overspend in the government’s education budget, with a secondary school for every 60 people, regardless of whether they were aged 11-16 or not. I shortened the odds somewhat, but still insisted it was amazing.

Then one of our friends asked about all the hundreds of people whom I’ve met in the past couple of decades who didn’t go to my school, and whether I found that remarkable in any way.

I had taught them too well; my own weapons had been turned upon me. I muttered something about wanting to choose a starter, and the conversation moved on. But after that amazing coincidence I'm doing the lottery this weekend. Somebody's got to win it.

When texting your Jewish friend, Jez, try not to begin the text "Hi Jew!"

It has been a long search for the perfect car. I have been reading surveys, browsing magazines and scouring price guides. I have registered with websites, and automated emails have filled my inbox with likely candidates. I have spent days going to look at these, only to find each one fall at hurdles such as not having been serviced at the correct intervals, having a rather worrying sticker on the dashboard warning me that the mileage might not be accurate, or having more scratches than a flea-ridden dog.

Finally, we have found The One. It is the right make, model, age, condition and price. It has the correct stamps in the service history, and my detailed multi-part mechanical inspection has confirmed that it does indeed have four wheels.

My girlfriend goes to find a salesman just as I decide to perform one last check.

She returns, the salesman taking one look at me and instantly upgrading his monthly bonus expectation.

“Actually, I’ve changed my mind”, I say, as I sprawl casually against the side of the car.

“What?” asks my girlfriend.

“Yes. There’s a problem with the...” Damn, the car is perfect. “The colour.”

“But you’re the one who wanted silver.”

“It looks different in this light.”

The salesman looks around, confused, as there has not been an unexpected eclipse in the last two minutes. I lean further back, desperately trying to mime something to my girlfriend.

“We’ll keep looking”, I say, sending the salesman back to mentally cancel his foreign holiday.

“What was wrong this time?” my girlfriend asks with a sigh. It is true that I have been dragging her around lots of garages when, to be honest, we could have already been driving around in something perfectly suitable for the past month.

“I wanted to see if it had a lock on the petrol cap, and this came off in my hand”, I say, showing her part of the fuel filler flap that I had only managed to hold in place by nonchalently leaning against it.

I sort of wedge it back on, and we continue the search.

When I am not complaining about the long winter evenings I am complaining that at this time of year the sun wakes me up too early. I am probably only happy for two days out of 365 – around the vernal and autumnal equinoxes. And only then if the weather is good.

So I decided to fit a blackout blind in our bedroom to help me sleep until the Seasonal Affected Disorder kicks in again. Miraculously, the made-to-my-measurements blind fitted, and when I put it up it not only stayed up, it also blocked out about 99.999% of the daylight. Could this plan have worked?

I went to the bathroom in the middle of last night. When I came back it was so dark that I stubbed my toe on the bed. Now I'm really unhappy.

I am quite indecisive. Or am I? Haha. No, I am. Definitely. I think. My girlfriend shares this quality, which tends to make for a happy relationship. I would imagine that one decisive person and one indecisive person together would be a nightmare for both. Two decisive people together would be OK, so long as they also agreed on their decisions. But two indecisive people together seems to work. Though for all I know, my girlfriend still might not have made up her mind about me, and 5½ years on with a baby on the way she is perhaps totting up columns of pros and cons somewhere (“Pros: am having baby with him. Cons: can be quite indecisive.”)

So, painting the new bathroom has turned into quite a complicated decision-making process. We have already totally blown our budget just on tester pots. It’s not helped by the fact that the colours in the brochures and the colours when they are actually put on the wall bear as little relation to each other as Prince Harry and Prince Charles. We literally have the entire range of Homebase, Crown and Dulux colours in the neutral/brown palette, from Jasmine White through to Choc Chip on the walls. In fact, the 20+ different samples now cover more wall area than the old paint does. It looks like a patchwork quilt, apart from the Choc Chip bit, which has gone on a bit smearily, and looks like some kind of dirty protest.

We are getting nowhere with just picking which is our favourite, so decide to have an elimination process. We pair samples up randomly, then decide which of the two we like better. The loser is voted off, and after qualifying heats, first round, quarter finals, semi-finals and a grand final, we have a winner. Predictably, it is an inoffensive, neutral hue, almost exactly halfway between Jasmine White and Choc Chip.

“So, which one is that?” My girlfriend asks.

“I have absolutely no idea. I should probably have labelled them all somehow.”

I open all the pots up again and start to paint some more patches, trying to find the chosen colour.

It is said that all stories should have a beginning, a middle and an end. This can be traced back to Aristotle, who, in The Poetics, wrote, “A beginning is that which is not itself necessarily after anything else, and which has naturally something else after it; an end is that which is naturally after something itself, either as its necessary or usual consequent, and with nothing else after it; and a middle, that which is by nature after one thing and has also another after it.”

Here is last weekend in the form of what screenwriting gurus now refer to as The Three Act Structure:

ACT I – set-up
“These cupboards will look great. I wonder why I don’t do DIY more often.”

ACT II – conflict
“SHIT FUCK SHIT SHIT SHIT FUCK AAAAAGH!!!”

“Are you all right?”

“DON’T COME IN!!! Er, can you get me some plasters? And some Polyfilla? Lots of Polyfilla.”

ACT III – resolution
“These cupboards look great. I wonder why I don’t do DIY more often.”

DIY is the closest that men get to the experience of childbirth. To keep the human race/Homebase in existence, as soon as it’s over our brains release a chemical that instantly makes us forget how awful, painful and bloody the whole thing was and instead makes us lovingly coo over our babies/cupboards and immediately start planning to have another baby/knock through into the living room.

Of course, when Aristotle said that there is nothing after an end, Ancient Greece had yet to form the concept of the sequel. This weekend: Spur Socket – The Fusebox Strikes Back.

My water tank’s overflow is dripping. It will be a simple matter to replace the washer in the ballcock, and I intend to do the job myself because this will be cheaper. I can think of no circumstances where it is better to get a professional in if I can save money in the short term by having a crack at it myself, particularly as I have at least some of the right tools for the job and am quite good at improvising with others.

The only problem is that the water tank is in the top of a tall cupboard. If I stand on a chair I can get to the tank, but can't quite reach the valve. I could really do with a stepladder, but I do not own a stepladder because the only cupboard in my flat tall enough to store a stepladder in is full of water tanks.

I do, however, have an ironing board. I have seen people on television standing on ironing boards in a humorous fashion, usually pretending to be surfing. I can only assume that these people would have undertaken a full health and safety audit before attempting such a stunt, and that an ironing board is therefore fully capable of supporting a man’s weight.

It is just as I am unscrewing the whole ballcock assembly, thinking “I had better not drop these little bits of valve in the water tank – they are probably Very Important”, that I make a sudden lurch downwards and to the left. There are three tiny, but ominous splashes as I drop the Very Important Bits of Valve.

I get up off the floor and look around the flat for hidden cameras – this would make great footage for “Britain’s Biggest Idiot”. The ironing board is now leaning at quite a rakish angle. By “rakish”, I mean “unusable” – both for standing on, or ironing. I cannot believe that in trying to mend one thing I have made the first thing worse, and also broken a second thing. It is this kind of situation that is often rejected in my sitcom scripts for being “too unrealistic”. Well, who’s laughing now, eh, BBC?

I try to straighten the ironing board’s left leg, but despite years of hard physical labour at a computer keyboard I lack the upper body strength required to bend tubular steel. But my girlfriend will be bound to notice that something is different about the ironing board when the bottom halves of her skirts and blouses are more creased than the top halves because the iron keeps slipping down to the left. I suppose that I could stand on the ironing board again and try to bend the right leg by the same amount to level it out. My girlfriend might then say that the ironing board is lower than usual, but I will just say that she must have grown. She is not very tall, so will probably be quite pleased with that explanation and not question it any further.

I stand on tiptoe on the chair and shine a torch down into the depths of the tank. I can see the Very Important Bits of Valve glimmering on the bottom like pearls, far out of reach. Alongside them are some identical Very Important Bits of Valve. Clearly I am not the first idiot to have lived here.

I leave a note for my girlfriend explaining that the water is turned off and head to Homebase with a list that reads “washer, whole new ballcock, stepladder, ironing board”.