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A snag or two

Melissa Kite

Wednesday, 7th May 2008

Melissa Kite leads a Real Life

Once a year, usually at the beginning of summer, it suddenly occurs to me that the entire house is about to fall down. The realisation that every job I’ve allowed to accumulate is about to visit disaster on me — my DIY judgment day — usually occurs around the May bank holiday when the air is filled with the sound of good people drilling.

This year I knew the day of reckoning had come as soon as I opened my eyes. I looked to the left and my giant black rabbit BB was sitting on the bed chewing through my mobile-phone headset, his mouth full of wires disappearing upwards like so much spaghetti. Everything is going to break today, I told myself. I opened the bedroom door and it fell off its hinges. When I sat down to ponder the probable causes, it seemed likely it was because of the slamming, which has long been a recreational outlet of mine but is ultimately an expensive way to express emotions.

I now had to go through the rigmarole of balancing it back on its hinges and carrying it from one position to another every time I wanted to go in and out. The rabbit thought this hilarious. He sat watching me do it with one ear in the air and his nose twitching in a particularly sarcastic way. Of course, I had to get it repaired. So I rang Tony, my friendly neighbourhood fixer of all things, to report that I was having my yearly panic.

‘You still got that list of jobs from last year?’ he asked, ready as ever to confront me with my shocking household-maintenance record. I confirmed that, yes, I still had the list. I suggested with the cheerfulness of the deluded that maybe this was the week to get started on all the jobs I’d been putting off. Tony sighed.

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