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.

Monty Python and a curious approach to religious difference

Every now and then I have to travel for work on a Sunday, and that leaves my week completely topsy turvy. I remember that my son Michael became fractious, often even tearful, on a Sunday evening for the first several years of his school education. Such was the dread of the coming Monday morning. 

Well, I don’t feel that bad. In fact I enjoy my work. Even so, I attach great importance to having a full weekend, and it isn’t really complete if I don’t get my Sunday evening sat at home with my wife and doing very little. My son needed that Sunday evening with his mother, I need it with my wife. Though I'm happy to spend it with his mother, since they turn out to be the same person anyway. 

This weekend I was deprived of that Sunday evening calm as a transition to the maelstrom of the week. I was on a train heading towards a Monday morning meeting. That's going to leave me disoriented for the rest of the week, unable to remember what day it is, as I navigate blindly towards the relief of next weekend. 

The train I caught was taking me towards the Pennine town of Bolton, now all but absorbed into Greater Manchester. The name of Bolton always makes me think of ‘Notlob’. For those who perhaps don’t have the Monty Python Dead Parrot Sketch off by heart, here’s the relevant bit:

‘I understand that this is Bolton.’

‘Yeah?’

‘But you told me it was Ipswich!’

‘It was a pun.’

‘A pun?’

‘No, no... not a pun... What's the other thing where it reads the same backwards as forwards?’

A pause.

‘A palindrome?’

‘Yeah, yeah.’

‘It's not a palindrome! The palindrome of "Bolton" would be "Notlob!" It don't work!’

Fortunately there’s more to Bolton than the Parrot sketch. For one thing, right behind the office where we went for our meeting there’s a colossal church. Of near-Cathedral proportions, it’s a silent but eloquent testament to that glorious nineteenth-century tradition of men who made fortunes in Northern towns, from wool or cotton, steel or coal, endowing their towns with monumental buildings, secular or religious: great municipal halls, public libraries or, as in this case, massively over-proportioned churches.

Bolton Parish Church
mighty monument to the industrial glories of the past

The people we were visiting told us they parked their cars in the church grounds. They said it made the walk back to the vehicles interesting on winter nights, as they picked their way through the howling wind, between the gravestones.

Talking about religion makes me think of my travelling companions on the train up. I took them at first for a young couple, of ‘Indian’ origin – the quotation marks because, of course, they were as as English as any, by their attitudes and their accents, even if one of them took a couple of phone calls in Urdu. 

When we got chatting they revealed that they were in fact colleagues travelling to a week’s work at a client’s.

At one point they began to talk about the difficulties the young man was having over what he felt were unnecessarily complex preparations for some religious ceremony or another.

‘Ah, yes, but we’re Sunni,’ said his companion, ‘and we don’t have any of that shit.’

He nodded, dejectedly, recognising the superiority, at least in this respect, of Sunni practice.

But a few minutes later, talking about some other aspect of observance, she told him, apparently completely unconscious of the inconsistency, ‘well, your religion is just so much more attractive than ours.’

Poignant, I felt. A touching moment. When I think of the trouble, the bloodletting, that Sunnis and Shias have inflicted on each other down the ages, the burning of the Catholics by the Protestants and vice versa, the tribulations everyone heaped on the Jews, to overhear that conversation struck me as a powerful illustration of just how trivial those distinctions are.

If only they could always be as easily dealt with as by that blithe young woman.