Definitely Not My Forte!

My role in DIY is to find screwdrivers, hammers or paintbrushes. It is also to hold things in place while other people are using the tools I have located! At no point is it to get involved with the project as a direct participant. For those of you of a certain vintage I wouldn’t quite be Frank Spencer but I wouldn’t be far off! In childhood, my lack of practical ability in the area of DIY had been the despair of pretty much everyone. My Dad was the most practical man I have ever met and he rebuilt parts of the house we lived in for my teenage years as well as installing the electrics. There was nothing he couldn’t do and there was nothing I could do. I couldn’t measure accurately, I certainly couldn’t cut accurately and I was fully aware of my shortcomings. At school my dislike for DIY became more entrenched due to the bullying I was subjected to by the woodwork and metalwork teachers. The latter, in particular, was evil. That’s the only way to describe him. I never hated a teacher more because he delighted in drawing attention to my inability to draw a three dimensional figure or making fun of my dreadful efforts in front of a class of children who already delighted in bullying me. After three years of Mr Vokes I had had enough of anything practical.

As an adult I had the greatest of fortune in meeting and marrying Janet, an intensely practical person with a flair for DIY. She had been put into the position where she needed to do a lot of the practical work around the house as a child because her father was significantly older than most. She was able to check her car, paint and wallpaper rooms and make things out of wood. It was so good to watch her improve the places we lived in and she was quite happy that I could cook so well. Funnily enough I was saying the other day that I wished we could have had cookery lessons at school because of my hatred for woodwork and metalwork. She replied that she would have loved metalwork and woodwork lessons because she hated cookery lessons! It turned out that in terms of our skills we were the perfect dovetail joint, with each of us making the most of our expertise.

Our younger son has luckily followed in Janet’s footsteps and is very practical himself. Just last weekend he came round and put up two curtain rails in the bedrooms and made an excellent job of it. It means that we have two people who make up the DIY taskforce in our homes and I will be very happy to continue looking for tools and other items whilst not getting involved, knowing that if I did it would be disastrous!!