The Life Coach

Dear Kanga,

Thank you for listening to all my woes in my recent email, and about the flooding. I am particularly intrigued by your suggestion that I get a “life coach,” as they seem to be all the fashion these days. I am not sure whether someone like this would be adequate, however, this far down the line into my chaotic existence. I think I just wasn’t brought up properly.

What I really need is someone who cares, someone who could help, who could batter me into shape or at least set a good example. I blame my parents in the last respect. No-one has ever shown me how to do things properly. 

I think parents are very important for teaching you the basics of life and I am not sure my parents did this. Philip Larkin would surely agree. They did teach me fundamental abstract concepts of etiquette, like honesty, courtesy and politeness, with a little kindness, a little understanding and a lot of beatings. But the really practical stuff, that you, as a boy, you are supposed to learn off your dad, such as plumbing, car maintenance and gardening, I never really picked up for reasons below. As for what I should have learned off a female parent, such as how to put grips in your hair and flirt in a gingham dress, I'd really rather not go into.

Consider my father at DIY. Or tidiness. Or, indeed, anything round the home. He never mastered “the drawer concept” and neither have I. It's a box. You pull it out of a bigger box, and leave it there. If you put anything into the box it is vitally important not to push it back into the bigger box because that way you would lose sight of it and forget it was there. It makes no difference - once you've let go of the thing it magically ceases to be visible and you have to buy a new one.

My father took this to rococo levels. I don't know where he got his training in DIY but a suspicion is that is must have been a precursor of NASA and some kind of zero-g astronaut. I have, quite literally, seen him, when using a tool, then, having completed the immediate task, simply let go of it in mid-air, as if it would float there. Moments later, when he might find he needed the tool again, he would grope at the atmosphere, expecting to find it and looking like he was playing “cat's cradle” with The Invisible Man. He seemed unaware of gravity and that things fell. He, in his youth, must never have dropped anything from his pram (except, possibly, himself, head-first.) Nor, when he suspected that something might have ended up on the floor, did he ever consider that whatever it was might have bounced, and would stare fixedly at the spot where it could have landed initially, willing it to reappear.

He did no better with the lid phenomenon, on jars, paint-tins and bottles, or cupboard doors and their shutting facility. This was most prominent in the kitchen, where my mother would concuss herself so often by walking into them she used to tell Casualty that my father was a wife-beater as it was a more plausible excuse. This would drive her into paroxysms of swearing, cursing, and, frequently, bleeding, which my father never connected with anything to do with himself.

He was no person to be left with tools anyway. Once, when cutting some carpet to fit round a rectangular chimney breast, he simple carved, in a diagonal, from where the cut started to where it should end. When the carpet no longer fitted (nor could the error be corrected, without resorting to a tessellation of little triangles, he announced, “We've made a mistake” to all those in earshot. Who was this “we”? No-one else had dared go near him for hours ever since he picked up the Stanley knife. (Curiously, on this occasion, he never relinquished his grasp on this item until the carpet was unusable in any form besides as a series of unconventional table-mats.)

He was no more adept with other tools. Screwdrivers simply became unshiftably embedded in the thing he was trying to attach something to. Spanners flew from his hands taking all the skin from his knuckles in the process. He couldn’t even hammer in a nail without a house several streets away collapsing. Sometimes, when ambition seized him beyond reason, or some psychotic red mist descended upon him, his zenith of non-achievement was to try and glaze something. He would retrieve his glass-cutter from odd places such as his own turn-ups, a bar of soap or, in one case, a bag of self-raising flour, and buy in large quantities of sheet glass. Hours later, he would still be trying to putty them together like the stain-glass friezes of some cathedral like York Minster or Notre Dame. Some windows were left without any glass at all. While some folk quibble about whether they need double glazing, I can honestly say I grew up in a house that wasn’t, in parts, even single-glazed. It was like this until I finally left the place for good in 2001, when some property developer was conned into thinking that the crumbling pile was not, literally, anything more than a crumbling pile.

Just to mention gardening. My father did show a modest flare for this. He came from The Fens, where his ancestors had had a long history of cultivating swamps. He himself settled for an allotment, where he grew a surprising variety of weeds every year. Hidden amongst them was the odd broad bean or potato. He would bring an example of such home, like some trophy he hunted rather than gathered for mother to cook for Sunday lunch. The only problem was, he would arrive at lunchtime, too late for my mother to cook whatever it was. This would drive her into a paroxysm of anger.

His skill with car maintenance was no less legendary. He would drive a car until it simply stopped and wouldn’t re-start. I myself had been a car driver for years before I realised that oil and petrol do different things and both are necessary. This cost me at least one car. As for water, I thought that was just to wash the screen, which, as my father detested switching on the wipers even when they worked, or even existed, I thought was for wimps. Now you can see why.

My mother had her own specialities she brought to this personal developmental processes. I did learn to cook from her and to this day, given just a few ingredients and a minimal set of kitchenware, can produce something eatable within a reasonable time, though it would not be perhaps cordon-bleu. I mention this however, because it shows I do have some capacity, as yet unexploited in other areas, to organise things. Just so long as they include an onion, a potato and a stock cube. I still have never equalled my mother's ability to produce a three course meal for four people in under twenty minutes, in a pre-end-of-rationing, 1950's style of cuisine. Putting books on a shelf is another challenge. One thing I have discovered for myself is that shelves shouldn’t slope, though I’m not sure how to avoid this.

One thing I did not pick up from my mother, though, was a fondness for baking. She would constantly make egg custards that would then "separate." This would drive her into paroxysms of anger.  She would bake cakes and quite literally insist that no-one move around the house for fear of making them “fall” and ruin them. They would rise beautifully in the oven but almost always came out dish-shaped at the end. This, too, would drive her into paroxysms of anger. She would commandeer any kind of fruit, no matter what its source or suitability, and combine it into crumble. This would usually be followed by a comment along the lines of, "I think it could do with a spot more sugar." From my experience, if she'd nuked some of this stuff with concentrated aspartame it would still have been uneatable. To this day I cannot stand anything baked, with the possible exception of bread. She also had a go at this, taking seven or eight hours to make something she could have got from the local grocer's in five minutes and with less enamel-shattering damage. Some of her loaves were used to patch a hole in the coal shed.

This recalls to me also the tuition in dental care I got from my sires. This can be summarised as ‘none whatsoever.’ My mother would boast, through a fine set of stumps, that she had never been to a dentist. My father's mouth appeared to have been retiled by someone during his stay in the Navy. I thought a “toothbrush” was so-called as it was a dainty implement for cleaning around the taps in the bathroom. Not that any of us did that anyway.

I ended up with two brothers. One showed aptitude, after a fashion, for taking things apart. I never recall him putting them back together again. He once took to bits a Norton classic motorcycle. Even now, forty years later, I find the occasional washer in one of those ornaments-you-keep-things-in, and wonder whence it came. Along with the shirt buttons that my mother collected obsessively, sometimes off the clothing of passers-by in the streets. The last I had heard of this brother was that he had successfully disassembled two aeroplanes and a yacht.

My other brother simply gave up on self-care and joined the Army, then married a woman, from Mediterranean shores, not unlike Hitler but without the moustache. To give you an insight into her steely control of the lad, after a visit to my parents, she upbraided him for having his shirt-collar outside the edge of his pullover. That was years ago and I've not really spoken to him since. I hadn’t really spoken to him before, come to that, but this kind of seemed to put the lid on it. I had just been about to ask him out for a drink. There is no way in this lifetime that she would have let him.

I spoke in an earlier email about the trouble I was having plumbing in the white objects in the kitchen. This has not been helped by someone blocking off one pipe that is nevertheless open at another point, though I need both points, as it were. I simply can’t afford a plumber to come and stick two hoses on a pipe and charge a seventy pound call out fee plus labour while he sits on the worktop and eats his Yorkie bar, plus parts (a jubilee clip at 45 pence plus fetching it, £15.) One of the gizmos I did get to help me with all this has actually been worth while, however. I bought an electric screwdriver.

The main reason for this is because I’ve got such feeble hands and can’t even get the top off a bottle of squash - I do this by sticking the bottle in the door jamb and twisting the bottle. This works but spills a substantial amount of cordial on the floor and I’m still working out how to avoid this. (Another labour-saving device I got for the same reason was a pair of mole-grips. Imagine my disappointment when I couldn’t even figure out how to open them. They’re supposed to work like scissors, right? I was particularly disconcerted to find no instructions on the back of the packet. I wonder why.) But back to the electric screwdriver.

I’ve had so much fun with this - I simply would not have believed it possible with a piece of DIY equipment. I've been screwing away for hours with it, switching it from forward to reverse, twisting the two-position, rubberised non-slip hand-grip between positions. I’ve unscrewed things, tightened things, loosened things or even left them in an intermediate state, just for the hell of it. I’ve screwed things down and - no surprise here – I’ve screwed things up. I mean, I’ve really screwed them up completely. I just can’t stop screwing.

And this seems to have led to my ultimate downfall. I decided to investigate just how well the power sockets in the kitchen were screwed into the wall. Please recall that the kitchen floor is still under several inches of water.

I was uninjured. But I can’t seem to find a torch to check the fuse-box. Or any fuses. Or, come, to that, the fuse-box itself.

I am writing this on my laptop and hoping to use the wi-fi broadband connection to send it before the battery dies and darkness claims dominion over all.

Yes, I do need a life coach, one that can look after me around the clock indefinitely.

But, then, don’t we all? If only my parents had brought me up properly.

    Yours as ever,

        Josh.

THE END