What a pleasure it has been to have workmen digging up my street. No, seriously. I want to pay tribute to British Gas and Morrison and all the other contractors who have been tunnelling into my home, tearing out shrubs and ripping up floorboards in order to lay horrible-looking pipes attached to huge and hideous new gas meters.
Normally, of course, I would complain gustily about the fact that I have been mired in the most colossal inconvenience, bereft of gas for hours on end, subjected to endless drilling and digging, day after day for weeks.
But it has been an absolute pleasure, every minute of it. And do you know why? Because of the abundance of real men it has brought along. I can’t remember the last time I encountered a real man, never mind a street full of them and never mind my street full of them. Just to be clear, by ‘real man’, I mean a man who is rugged but also clever, being possessed of that special brand of knowledge we women find so alluring, which I call ‘the knowledge of pipes and things’. Like my dad, for example. An engineer with almost mystical abilities in maths and mechanics, he can mend anything with a screwdriver and a can of WD40. He once made a contraption to pull the apples off the trees in our back garden from a deep-fat chip fryer, a broom and two ladies’ hairpins. You see — a real man.
Real men don’t always talk much. They are strong and silent and prone to wandering off enigmatically to fix things. They don’t discuss doing something, they don’t weigh up the pros and cons with silken words, they just do it. And they are in pretty short supply these days, what with the proliferation in pointless university degrees and our short-sighted disregard for the glorious wonder of skills. Skills, like the ability to connect basic appliances to the mains, are now so rare that they should be listed, like historic buildings. ‘Why don’t I come back to your place and plumb in your washing machine?’ is the best chat-up line on Earth if only men knew it. Instead of joining internet dating sites and doing psychotherapy to tackle their co-dependency issues, they should be enrolling in night courses to learn how to change a fuse. They’d have girls queuing round the block. So back to my gas men.
I confess I was jubilant when I picked my way around the road blocks and cones one morning to find that my car wouldn’t start. I looked out upon a rich array of knights in white T-shirts. Ah, the agony of choice.
In the end I settled on two contractors sitting in their white van opposite. ‘Hi, there!’ I said cheerfully, not ditsily. You don’t actually need to be ditsy around real men, that’s a myth. Ditsiness is what you have to affect in order to get a pretend man to do something. Real men don’t care if you flirt or not. It’s of no consequence. They only deal in rawl plugs. ‘Excuse me! You don’t have some jump leads in your van, do you?’ They leapt into action within seconds. They were practically ripping the floor of the van up. There were no jump leads but that wasn’t going to stop them. They sped off down the road to look for their mate in another van. But when they got there he didn’t have jump leads either. Was this the end of it? It was not. They had undertaken to start a car, and start a car they would.
‘Right,’ said the younger of the two, a broad-shouldered guy like a blond Michael Madsen with a bit of Jimmy Dean thrown in, ‘we’re going to have to jump start her.’ I was tightly parked with no more than a few inches in front and behind. ‘How…?’ I started. But he waved my doubts away. ‘Don’t worry. We’ll get you out.’ And so I sat in the car while the real men rocked it out of its tiny parking space and pushed it up the road as if it were a box of bananas. ‘OK,’ the blond Michael Madsen said, ‘foot down on the clutch like I told you? When I say go, lift your foot off. Ready? Go!’ And then the most romantic thing that has happened in my life in a long time happened. The car sprang to life. As I drove off to recharge the battery I looked in my rear-view mirror. There they were, waving and making thumbs-up signs. Please don’t go, British Gas. Can’t you find some more piping to do?
Melissa Kite is deputy political editor of the Sunday Telegraph.
Comments