A spot of DIY

Dig observes the deteriorating domestic situation and, with a beady eye on the likely cost of divorce, mends this:


Mending the door into the yard by applying two large hinges has been on the list since Saturday 2nd June when it fell off and hit me on the head.

And the first thing that some passing teenager does on passing the newly restored door is to try and kick it in.

Ho hum

Grit is all sad and lethargic. Perhaps it is because she has failed at the Independent no diet task. Today it is to be more conventional, or less conventional; which ever one is opposite to what you are normally.

This is difficult. I don't know whether I am conventional or not. For example, I like eating Indian take aways. Perhaps I should change it to Chinese. I like wearing black jeans. Perhaps I should wear white jeans. And I like reading the Independent. Perhaps I should read the Guardian instead. In fact they might have a diet to try too.

Well, it could be any number of things. Including this.


This is the door into the yard that fell on me last year. Look, there's the accident-prone window cleaner just appearing with his ladder now. Seconds after this photo was taken he managed to knock over the milk and bring down the washing line.

Or perhaps it is the sight of this. Dig has decided to mend the toaster. It is in bits all over the kitchen.

Another gate

Sasha, the German au pair who is taking over from Ermintrude, arrives tonight at 11.30pm.

Well I hope Sasha is agile. Because all day long any visitor to the house has had to climb over the front gate if they are to get into the garden and to the front door, because Dig wedged the gate shut this morning by accident. Ermintrude has found the whole incident very funny as she's clambered over the gate with Squirrel, Shark and Tiger to get out into the street, several times now, to go about the day's business to the shops and the tennis courts. But she's used to us now, and that helps.

Anyway, I needn't have worried about Sasha's introduction to the Pile being 'Would you mind climbing over the gate?' delivered in the street darkness at midnight, probably with Smalltown's police sirens wailing in the background, and Dig looking like everything's normal.

No, because Gert, the neighbour, comes to our rescue. Think not that she is aged in her 60s, has a hole in her heart, and a deaf 16-year old dog that can't bend its knees but which still sends Tiger screaming into the house. Think not, either, that Gert is the neighbour who owns Trisha the cat, who is on the receiving end of the Grit family's hisses as we hide behind bushes and may, sadly, now be in need of psychiatric cat counselling while Gert wonders why it seems to shake and run whenever it sees Shark coming.

Gert probably doesn't know the full story of what we've done to Trisha. And if she does, it probably helps. Because Gert kicks the gate in. She takes aim and gives the gate a good thump several times with her foot and Pow! it pops open. She has magnificent strength, she says, because until she discovered she had a hole in the heart in May, she used to go scuba diving.

Now see how Grit's policy of keeping on good terms with the neighbours pays off.

Our punishment

Well we've managed to get rid of British Gas. We cut them off and got a new supplier. And in retaliation, they send us a bill for £1,335.28.

This, apparently, is the final gas bill for gas used from 26 May to 26 June. One month! My goodness, we must have had the heating turned up. And all the gas rings going. 24 hours a day.

But, British Gas, it still wouldn't be enough, would it? Dash! What could it be, I wonder? The cooker's electric, so that can't be it. And the gas lights were dismantled some decades ago, so that can't be it either. Could it be that it's spite and incompetence? Well, I never!

British Gas says they know it's true, because they came round and read the meter in July.

I don't think so, Matey, because the gas meters are in the yard and the only way to them is through the gate.

Now the back gate came off and hit me on the head on Saturday 2nd June. I blogged it, see? And I'm pretty sure I've not used it since. In fact I've been carrying the rubbish through the house routinely on a Thursday night since it happened and, what with the rain, the flooded yard and the slugs, I'm not likely to get confused and think it's been mended now, am I?

So here we start again, the letter writing, the threat of the police, the imminent court action. Now Grit had better stop, because otherwise it'll turn into a rant, and we don't want that.

That I'm saving for British Gas.

Departure day

We're off to Kent. This is not as easy as it sounds. You think, pack the car, get the kids in, drive to the petrol station, set the sat nav going, and then you're off.

At the Grit household it doesn't work like that. First of all, it's unpack the car. Because everything's gone in. Cuddly toys, lego bricks, torn pieces of paper, sticks, plant pots. Squirrel says the plant pots might come in handy for collecting things. Shark wants to put in a pair of ice skating gloves, just in case we go ice skating. Tiger says she's not leaving without her tennis racquet. We negotiate. I accept buckets and spades and the toy boat. No plant pots. No ice skating. No tennis. When everyone's had a fight about which bucket and spade was bought for whom, I set up a video for the kids to watch because I have to unpack everything on the quiet, and if Tiger sees her tennis racquet coming out she might just have a fit and we won't set off till dusk.

Next, get the kids in. This is slightly complicated by the fact that when it is time to get the kids in, I put the rubbish out for collection. And when I do, the back gate falls off. This is not good.

The back gate is not just a gate. It's more a door. It's very old, wooden, and set within a tall and wide wooden gate that is supposed to swing open to let in your 1922 Austin 7. The gate (and the door within it) leads to a yard which leads to an Edwardian garage, which would probably be a listed building if anyone cared to list such things. Anyhow, when I open the door in the gate to take out the rubbish, it falls forward and hits me slap! on the side of the head. This is also not good. The door carries some weight behind it and for a minute I think I might have to die or at least pass out. If I die or pass out, I will fall on the mountain of rubbish in black bin liners waiting to be carried out to the street collection point. Then like a flash-thought I think the black bins usually have slugs on them. If I fall back, I fall on slugs. That thought keeps me upright.

It takes me a good half hour to prop the door back up. The pin which holds the hinge has corroded away, so I have to lift the door up enough to slot one side of the hinge into the other. If I leave the door collapsed, burglers will get in, and they will steal my silver teaspoons and Dig's computer. After twenty minutes I'm in tears and despair because of the terrible weight and the near death experience of the head injury.

By the time I do get the gate propped back into place, the video's finished, I'm filthy, exhausted, bruised and smelly, and the kids are observing that I'm carrying bags of slug-drenched rubbish through the house to the front door, apparently to the waiting car outside. 'Are we taking that?' asks Squirrel, puzzled that I appear to be heading out with a black bin liner bursting with potato peelings, broccoli stems, unrecyclable plastic, a broken wine glass wrapped in newspaper and some black slimy mixture I glumphed out from a jam jar that morning, but which in February we called 'a science experiment'. 'Yes', I answer.

Next, it's a drive down the road to the petrol station. I can pay at the pump. I would pay at the pump if the card I have isn't declared unusuable by the pump machine which spits it out in disgust. So then I have to pay at the shop with the woman who tuts because my card won't scan and she has to key in the numbers herself, and she probably doesn't like the look of the wild woman with tear stained face and swollen head. Then we drive back up the road to home to get the sat nav.

Then we're off. I cannot bear to recall the endless arguments about the tennis racquet, the plant pots, the ice skating and the dolphin bucket. Let's just get to Kent, I think. And thank goodness I have a half-bot of picnic wine in the driver's door compartment for fortification purposes about Junction 29 of the M25.