Last week Matthew Parris called me a poof. Not me specifically, but straight men, who, he said, are useless at doing stuff around the house. “Why are straight men such poofs?” he asked. “The average thirtysomething straight bloke can talk for hours about football these days, but can hardly change a light bulb.” What a cheek. Of course I can change a light bulb. I regularly do so.
Just so long as they are not those tricky recessed lights and my wife is there to find the bulb, pass it to me and hold the chair steady so that I don’t fall off when the light suddenly comes on.
By sheer coincidence, while Matthew was mocking modern heteros, I was being given a do-it-yourself lesson. New research highlights the hopelessness of modern men in the DIY department. Apparently three quarters of men remember their dads being good at DIY but fewer than half say that they’ve had any skills passed on to them. Women are annoyed about this state of affairs — 80 per cent want their blokes to be better at DIY. That’s not quite the case in our house, where my wife would rather I made no attempt whatsoever to do it myself. That’s not because she wants to do it. It’s just that she doesn’t seem to trust me to do the job properly.
OK, so there have been some unfortunate incidents. Once, while changing a washer on a kitchen tap, I became a little confused and failed to turn the water off. I discovered my mistake when a geyser erupted from the cold tap. This has become known as my Old Faithful moment. Then there was my insistence on buying expensive blackout blinds for the children’s bedrooms, which ended up gathering dust because it never seemed quite the right time to try to put them up.
The problem with DIY is that it looks like DIY. We’ve all been to the home of a DIY nut. He takes you on a tour, throws open the bathroom door and declares: “I did this all myself.” And you look at the wonky mosaic tiles and fight the urge to reply: “I can see that.” My last house had been done up by a DIY enthusiast. It had wacky wood panelling in stupid places, too many sockets and rickety radiator covers.
Then there is the effect of DIY on domestic harmony. There is nothing more likely to send me into a rage than installing a window lock — it takes two hours every time and leaves the frame riddled with holes and twisted screws. I have erected several Ikea Billy bookcases in my time, and even an Ikea double bed, but it doesn’t matter how hard I concentrate, how much care I take, the chipboard backing is always the wrong way round and bashed around the edges by the time I’ve finished. My friend Mike never erects Ikea furniture because his wife insists on paying a man to do the work. “I can do it,” he claims. “But it takes all afternoon and I get so furious that she thinks it’s well worth paying somebody 50 quid to do it.”
Matthew reckons that the thirtysomething who can talk about football but is barely able to distinguish one end of a screwdriver from the other “feels no shame at this”. And I guess that the tenor of my words thus far would suggest that this is an accurate description of me. But the truth is that there is a part of me that feels a little sheepish about my failure to know my way around my own toolbox. So I was not hostile to the idea when Stanley Tools, as part of its campaign to “Bring Back Proper Dads”, kindly offered to lend me its DIY king for an afternoon’s crash course.
Alan Hampshire, a former craft, design and technology teacher from Sheffield, has been with Stanley for 19 years and is now in charge of training employees and customers in how to use the company’s products. “But I’m only a DIYer,” he said modestly. “I’m not a professional, you know.”
Alan, or Stanley as he calls himself afteryears of people mistakenly calling him that, examined my toolboxes. I have not one but two splendid boxes, packed full of kit, bought for me by my parents in-law.
At first I thought they did so out of optimism, but it was simply that my father-in-law didn’t want to lug his own toolbox over to us every time my wife said that some little job needed doing.
Alan was immediately suspicious because neither the boxes nor the tools were of the right brand, but there were some more fundamental problems. Next to his huge boxes, mine were rather childish tiddlers.
“The criteria of a toolbox is that it can carry a 22in saw (56cm) and a 600mm (24in) level,” he said firmly. “You need to be able to stand on it and it needs to be completely waterproof.” My small plastic toolboxes failed on all counts.
()Our entire house is soon to be gutted, but I still had a few jobs with which I wanted Alan to help me. We have been without hot water in the bathroom sink since we moved in in the summer because the washer has gone and despite my insistence that there is no chance of my making the same mistake and re-creating Yellowstone National Park again, I have been strictly forbidden from attempting any sort of plumbing work.
