Misty's Diary: cat flap treachery and domestic incompetence

Another entry from Misty’s diary. In which he witnesses the curious process of handiwork undertaken by the less satisfactory element of his domestic staff.

January 2015

Well, well. It’s been amusing watching Domestic number 2 at work.

Or what he erroneously imagines to be work.

It all started when my cat flap – MY cat flap – turned treacherous and viciously assaulted me. Oh, yes. You can’t imagine what that feels like.

A cat flap’s a passageway, a means of getting into and out of a place. This one came off the door and ambushed me. There I was, innocently coming through MY entrance to the house, when suddenly it grabbed me around the waist and wouldn’t let go. A plastic frame, like nothing so much as a gaping mouth, with the flap bit still attached, like nothing so much as a ghastly tongue.

I’m not too proud to admit that I was a little anxious for a moment. Not, I repeat not, panic-stricken as some slanderous tongues have suggested. Just worried enough to take appropriate action. What ought to have been a door had turned, without warning, into jaws that had me in their clutches. 

I went straight down on my back and let it have it with all claws drawn. Never been caught in a predator’s maw like that before and, believe you me, it’s no fun. I saw it off fast and made a break for freedom.

Domestic number 1 was quite nice about it.

“Oh, poor Misty!’ she exclaimed. “The cat flap’s come right off the door and he’s stuck in it.”

Domestic number 2 just laughed. Rather distastefully, it seemed to me.

“If he weren’t so bloody fat he’d have got through without difficulty. No wonder he got caught at the waist.”

Honestly, the things he says. And then gets upset when I bite him.

Anyway, he got his comeuppance straight away.

“I’m going to go an buy a new cat flap. I’ll even buy you a jigsaw,” said Number One. “Then you can put it in this afternoon.”

He said something like “Yes, dear,” but the fear in his eyes and his drooping shoulders told a far less positive story.

She turned up with the new cat flap and hour or so later.

“This one will do. It’s for large cats or small dogs,” she announced. As though it were good news. For the record, just because all the other cats round here are feeble little creatures, doesn’t make me a big cat.

You should have seen Domestic number 2 setting to work.

I never tire of watching Domestic number 2
trying to prove he isn't completely inept

“This illustration’s no good. The screws can’t possibly go there.”

“Yes, they can,” she explained in that tone of voice she adopts when he needs something simple clarified for him. You know, each syllable carefully detached from the previous one, all enunciated terribly clearly, and a little slowly. “That’s not an illustration, it’s a template. Cut it out, pin it to the door, mark all the way round, then cut to your markings.”

Well, he didn’t. He cut a bit round the existing opening. And tried to force the cat flap in. Which didn’t work. So he cut some more off. And failed again. 

Every time he cut the saw made an appalling racket. The chap next door works nights and tries to sleep during the day. He must have cursed! The domestics used to say they had a neighbour from hell. She’s gone, but the nice family who took her place must be wondering what sort of neighbours they have. 

Domestic number 1 came to take a look.

“What you’ve cut is far too small,” she said, “just take a look at the template.”

“It’s not a template,” he said, but by then it was just a grumble, without conviction.

“Look,” she said, “let me show you.”

She took a pair of scissors and cut expertly for a few seconds. She then held a perfectly cat flap shaped piece of paper up against the door.

“See? You haven’t cut enough.”

“Oh,” he said, looking abashed. 

Ten minutes more cutting and he’d got it about right. 

He’d cut a bit too much to be honest, so the plastic bit’s a little loose in the hole, but hey, for Domestic Number 2 that’s a triumph of engineering precision.

It had only taken him an hour and a half to do a twenty-minute job. Bending the jigsaw blade beyond repair in the process.

Still, the flap works fine. Much quieter. Smoother.

And it doesn’t try to make me look fat by taking me unawares and grabbing me round the middle.

Celebrate the gifted amateur, but spare a thought for the other variety

Don’t we all admire the gifted amateur? So inspiring. So selfless. So courageous.

Do you remember the film Chariots of Fire? Look at Lord Andrew Lindsay. He joined Harold Abrahams, the driven, striving Jew, running not just for the joy of athletics but to mark a victory over anti-Semitism, in attempting the ‘Caius dash’ round the courtyard of Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge. Lindsay helps push Abrahams along to success, while not quite making it himself.

At the 1924 Olympics, Lindsay takes a silver medal, the ideal result: so good as to suggest that he might have taken gold had he pushed himself harder like all those nasty semi-professionals, including Abrahams or the Yanks, but just off the top step of the podium, so as to maintain a becoming modesty.

Then of course Lindsay steps aside from his other event, the 200 metres, to give Eric Liddle the chance to compete in his place. Liddle wouldn’t run in the 100 metres because his Christian principles wouldn't allow him to take part in heats held on a Sunday; Lindsay’s sacrifice made it possible for him to win his gold medal at the longer distance.

Wonderful stuff, eh? Self-effacing. Noble in the truest sense of the word. All for the spirit of the thing. He even tells Liddell that he’s doing it ‘just to see you run.’ I can’t remember if he adds ‘old chap’, but you can feel the words are there. Such a decent fellow, so civilised. It would almost make me want to doff my cap, if I was into that kind of thing and owned a cap.

But Lindsay is the quintessence of the gifted amateur. What about the other kind?

I have to admit that for a long time I saw myself as one of them. The flattering idea was born in an interview when my soon-to-be boss declared me to be ‘ideally unqualified’ for the job, and appointed me anyway.

Sadly, however, more recently I’ve had to accept that I naturally belong to the ungifted category. And nowhere more so than when it comes displaying any kind of skill in manual work.

For instance, some months ago I proudly constructed two woodsheds at the bottom of our garden. I had help, I confess, but not that much. I did most of the work myself.

Honest.

True I was working from kits. So the construction didn’t really require great skill. All I had to do was assemble the parts in the right order. Which makes it slightly galling that I didn’t quite manage that simple task.

Most flagrantly, I came unstuck with the roofs, These were made from overlapping planks of wood. Put them one way round, and rainwater would run delicately off one plank onto the next one, which is below it. Trouble is, put it the other way round and the rain will, equally delicately, run down to the next plank, which is above it, form a pool and then leak through.

Onto the logs underneath.

Work of the ungifted amateur:
the roof traps the water and leaks it gently onto the wood beneath

It does seem terribly unfair that, given that the roofs could only be put on in one of two positions, I got it wrong in both cases.

The result is that having gone to considerable trouble and expense to make sure we had good, seasoned, dry wood to burn in our stove this winter, my wife has struggled throughout the season to kindle a flame from damp fuel.

Fortunately a wonderful builder is putting in a path in our garden for us.

‘I can sort that for you,’ he assured us, ‘in about five minutes.’

It was welcome news as I hadn’t been able to unscrew either roof in thirty minutes of trying. And he was good as his word, correcting the problem in a way that made me understand what ‘in a jiffy’ really meant.

Fixed by the  professional
The water flows away and the shed does its job of protecting the wood

It’s comforting to know that our two sheds, intended to protect our wood from rain, will now be doing just that instead of exactly the opposite.

I suppose I can console myself with the thought that at least I equalled Lord Andrew Lindsay’s performance. I took the silver medal. Though, sadly, there were no other competitors to finish behind me. And what I came second to was a lump of wood.

DIY: A test of character. Which I fail every time

So glad it’s Sunday. Above all because it means Saturday’s behind us. And Saturday was purgatory.

Danielle had decided the day would be devoted to DIY. Don’t get me wrong: I’m full of admiration for those who get pleasure from Do It Yourself work and are good at it. It’s just that I’m not of their number. I’m more of a GSETDI type, if I can possibly Get Someone Else To Do It instead of me. But it was made perfectly clear that yesterday I’d be doing it myself and the sooner I stopped whinging about it, the better it would be for all of us.

At 10:00 Elizabeth, a Hungarian colleague of Danielle’s, came round with her Ghanaian husband, Moses. She prepared us the most fabulous goulash, which was great, while he threw himself into the DIY tasks with a vengeance, dragging me along in his wake and keeping my nose firmly to the grindstone. I guess it was really DIYWSE, since Someone Else was helping, but that meant that I couldn’t slope off with a promise to return to the task in a week or two. Or five or six.

Moses proved outstanding at just keeping going and shoring up my flagging morale, even though said morale hadn’t been all that high to start with. So Moses turned out to be just as great as Elizabeth.

However, as day faded to evening, and sun gave way to rain, and we were still assembling a second woodshed in the garden, fingers numb and clothes wet, the enthusiasm that goes with the word ‘great’ became harder to sustain.

I tried to see some clever allusions in the work I was doing. Shades of Stella Gibbons, for instance: all that stuff in Cold Comfort Farm about seeing something nasty in the woodshed. I can affirm from experience that you don’t need to find anything in the woodshed: just building one in autumn rain is quite nasty enough.

And it was the second woodshed alongside our garden shed. There was a Monty Python sketch about Arthur ‘Two Sheds’ Jackson. Have I somehow transmuted into David ‘Three Sheds’ Beeson? If so, when did I decide to do so? Was it a choice I made at all?

Existential question for me to grapple with:
How did I become the owner of three sheds? And why?

But eventually it was done. We came indoors. Time for the DIY warriors to take a little rest, perhaps some refreshment, as a worthy reward for our labours.

It’s a commonplace that one should never ask a question to which one doesn’t know the answer.

‘Is that it then?’ I asked Danielle, confident that I knew what her reply would be.

‘Yes, that’s it’, she told me, momentarily giving me the false impression that my confidence had been justified: when I say that kind of thing, it’s what I mean, and so when someone says it to me, I believe it. I have to get my mind round the idea that for many others it’s immediately followed by a ‘but’ or, as in this case, an ‘except for’. There then followed a list of another half dozen jobs to be completed before we could down tools at last.

One of those jobs proved rather more intractable than any of us expected or its apparent simplicity suggested or, come to think of it, than it turned out to be when Danielle did it herself after we’d botched it. After struggling with it for a while, it’s just possible – and I’m admitting nothing here – that I may have given vent to some comments not overly marked by charity or forbearance.

The result was that when I suggested to Danielle yesterday evening the intriguing subject I had chosen for my latest blog post – a subject you will now be deprived of the pleasure of seeing treated with the remarkable incisiveness I was planning for it – she said:

‘You should do a blog about how absolutely unbearable David Beeson becomes when he has to do any kind of DIY.’

I was shocked but she had barely got into her stride.

‘Yes, you could describe how his whole evil side comes out. How he sits down sulking saying that he can’t be doing with any of this. How he reverts to a spoiled brat who has to be cajoled into doing the simplest thing.’

Still at a loss for words, I just had to endure the barrage, which ended with her looking me straight in the eyes and throwing out a challenge.

‘Let’s see you write that one,’ she said, ‘let’s see if your self-deprecating humour will stretch that far.’

Well, it does. So this post is dedicated to my poor long-suffering wife Danielle. With my apologies for being such a curmudgeon.

Even so, between you and me: I’m still glad that it’s Sunday and DIY day’s behind us. For a couple of weekends at least.