The best things in life aren't three

After a reminder of the perils of working for yourself on Saturday when I had a full day of teaching – well, four hours, which is quite enough for a weekend – I was also reminded of the perils of living with Stephen when he decided to set about wrecking the marital home, and all in the name of DIY.

As my regulars will know, over the past few weeks he has been beavering away upcycling some of the old skirting board to use in our bedroom, and had arrived at the point where it was ready to fix to the wall. Having had a bit of disappointment when Franco performed a similar operation in the snug and guest room, he had decided that he would do the whole job himself as (a) he couldn’t make a worse hand of it and, more importantly, (b) it would be much cheaper than getting a man in. Those of you who know me well will know exactly where I stand on the latter but being at best ham-fisted where home improvements are concerned my role is to smile encouraging and keep my own counsel when home improvements are tackled in house.

So it was that on Sunday morning Stephen set to with gusto but without a pencil behind his ear (which may be where he went wrong) and started off by using something large, yellow and plastic to grip the pieces of wood while he sawed them into the required lengths, each with a perfect 45 degree edge to ensure a close fit. I say ‘grip’, but really they were only slotted in to the grooves as, apparently, he wasn’t quite able to put his hands on the vice attachment that would actually hold them steady. Still, with an unnerving ability to improvise, he managed to hold them in place and finish the job with all digits intact.

Then came the fun part, attaching the boards, which is not the easiest of tasks in an old property whose walls were built without any apparent concern for making sure they were square. Hence the uncooperative behaviour of one length that resolutely refused to adhere no matter how much No More Nails Stephen threw at it. Not wanting to be done down in this atavistic battle between man and nature, he brought in the big boys in the shape of a couple of serious looking nails (so much for the misnamed glue) and proceeded to hammer them into the wall – and straight through the pipe feeding the radiator.

Not that he was immediately aware of what had happened, as, with the perverse physics that operate in matters of this kind, the water didn’t come gushing instantly out of the wall. Instead, it welled out of the junction at the radiator itself, spreading inexorably across the bedroom floor. What else was there to do but turn off the water and phone Andrea, our friendly local super plumber, who promised to send his brother as an advance party on Monday morning to excavate the wall prior to his own arrival sometime later in the day to fix the burst pipe.

It’s just as well that we live in a house with a real, living fire otherwise the rest of Sunday (and there was quite a bit of it to get through) would have been very chilly indeed. That, and the fact that it was Date Night at the pub, meant we managed to keep warm while Stephen berated himself for his stupidity and I commiserated with only a hint of smugness.

As it turned out, Andrea was even better than his word. His brother arrived the next morning shortly after 8.30 to dig out the wall and survey the damage just as I was leaving to do the shopping. Having little to contribute to the remedial process, I left him in Stephen’s capable (?) hands and headed off for my date with a trolley – which is when we found out about the second mishap of the weekend.

As I was at the checkout, packing my bags, Alma, one of the assistants who was cleaning the pavement outside the supermarket, came to the door and started gesticulated and calling to me. I managed to detect the word ruota and, following her pointed finger, saw that our back tyre was as flat as a pancake and no amount of pressing it made the slightest difference either to its buoyancy or mine. A quick call to Stephen identified the cause when he recalled that on driving away from the pub the previous night, he had caught the kerb as he turned the corner. Strike two to him.

I had three choices: (1) to change the tyre myself – like that was ever going to happen, especially in my Colmar jacket; (2) to wait for the pipe to be fixed and then for Stephen to walk up into the village – but I had far too much to do to hang around in MSP on a Monday morning with nothing open; (3) to fly in the face of sensible advice and drive home carefully. Obviously, I chose the latter – well, we had done two journeys since the tyre was damaged so one more couldn’t do any harm.

And this is where the day started to improve as, when I arrived back at LCDDB (with no further harm done) it was to see Andrea’s brother packing away his tools having completed the work on the pipe. Thanks to Stephen’s marksmanship, not only was the exact location of the burst easy to pinpoint so only a small opening was needed, but he had with unerring precision hammered the nail into the centre of the pipe and out the other side. A quick welding job followed by a spot of plastering and the job was a good one, leaving Stephen free to rectify to the car by changing the tyre. Ah, the benefits of having at least one vaguely practical person in the family.

That, therefore, should have been the end of the bad luck, but intent on proving true the adage that things always happen in threes, Stephen decided, later on, to drop his MacBook. Fortune, though, while not exactly smiling must have had a slight grin on her face as it landed on its side with the dongle for the mouse taking the impact. It’s just as well the dongle sacrificed itself in the interest of the greater good as adding a new MacBook to the costs of repairing the pipe and having a new tyre fitted would have used up all our gin money for the foreseeable future.

After all this we were in need of something nice to happen, which it did today when Sara came to lunch. Sara is the lovely intern at the madhouse that is MKP, and is on placement there to learn how businesses work – which, presumably, is by doing exactly the opposite to everything Leaping Luca does. She brought happiness, warmth and a fine bottle of wine while we supplied spaghetti alla puttanesca, tomatoes and mozzarella and Carnevale cakes. Why worry about burst tyres and burst pipes when, in the world, you have food and friendship?