Sewing up the moth holes in your jumper
Once you have given up trying to work out how the bugger got into your cashmere drawer in the first place and did a Very Hungry Caterpillar number on your entire collection, you decide to take matters into your own hands. So, OK, the thread doesn’t exactly match. And the hole now looks like the botched work of a surgeon who ended up struck off, but not before several of his patients had made it onto that programme they have on the E! channel where people weep on camera with upside noses and eyebrows up by their hairlines. The hole’s sealed. You have won.
Reigniting the boiler
You’re an intelligent person. You passed your Maths GCSE. You can hold a decent conversation about the single market post-Brexit. SURELY you can get a boiler to work. After deciding that the manual is only for professionals when they’re plumbing the thing in and therefore not relevant to you, you lose your temper a bit and just start pressing things. There are noises. And none of them are healthy. You decide this is all the result of corrupt boiler companies in cahoots with the plumbing trade, who have deliberately designed their products to fail at the weekends so that you’ll have to pay more for the call-out fee. It’s a disgrace.
Defrosting the freezer
Isn’t the stupid thing meant to defrost itself? Why does it now look like Jack Nicholson at the end of The Shining except more evil? You can’t get anything in – or anything out – and something has to be done. YouTube says a hairdryer will sort it out in 15 minutes. Over an hour later, you are covered in slightly stinky water, and yet with barely a dent made in the snowdrift clinging to the ceiling of your freezer. All while your frozen prawns slowly start to contaminate the fridge.
Engine trouble
Your car is making a weird noise. There is a light you don’t understand flashing on the dashboard. RIGHT. You get out of the car and open the bonnet. You stare at the metal intestines before you. You touch something. It’s red hot. You swear. You shut the bonnet. At least you did your damndest.
The broken lamp
Well, it’s not the bulb, so it must be the fuse. So you’ve opened the plug and something that is probably important has fallen out and rolled away. And there are all those wires. (Oh God, which is the dangerous one again?) Why won’t it all fit back together? What happened to that screw? Surely it can work with a plug that has been *mostly* put back together? Why has the whole house just gone dark?
