Steve Canavan: Marital bliss so remote during radiator disaster

Mrs Canavan and I came as close to divorce as we’ve ever done this week after a serious incident involving a radiator.

Our three-year-old Mary, like every child of that age, doesn’t sit correctly. She will watch TV, for example, with her legs dangling on top of the couch and her head directly below her on a cushion, as if doing a handstand.

What’s extraordinary is that she stays in this position for entire episodes of Paw Patrol or whatever rubbish she’s watching. How she doesn’t pass out from blood surging to her head I’ll never know, but on the upside it bodes well for a future career as an acrobat in a travelling circus.

The downside of her unusual sitting position is that she has a habit of dropping things behind the couch – and behind the couch is where the radiator is.

After putting the kids to bed on Tuesday I walked in the lounge to discover Mrs Canavan chunnering about the TV remote control going missing.

‘Where’ve you put it?’ she asked accusingly, as if I’d deliberately hidden it.

“I’ve not touched it,” I said.

There was an interesting intellectual documentary she wanted to watch – or was it Love Island, can’t remember? – so we conducted a thorough fingertip search of the room, even moving a bookcase that hasn’t been moved since we purchased our house in 2011 (interestingly under there I found a half-eaten packet of fruit pastilles, two Christmas tree baubles, and a hiking sock I lost in late 2013. It didn’t smell so good).

But there was no sign of the remote control.

Then, remembering where Mary sits and her habit of dropping stuff, I peered down the gap in the middle of the radiator.

Sure enough there staring at me, surrounded by a paraphernalia of other dropped stuff, was the remote.

Our initial excitement at the find, however, was overshadowed by the realisation that we now had to get the bugger out. The gap was too small to get our hands down and the task of getting to it was made trickier by the fact the window sill is directly above the radiator, making it mighty awkward to access.

I looked at it for several minutes – I specialise in doing this when there’s a difficult problem to be solved - as if hoping the remote would somehow levitate itself and magically float to the top.

It didn’t.

While I was sat essentially doing nothing, Mrs Canavan, the practical one, came back into the room with coat hangers, which we used to try and grab the remote and lever it slowly towards the top of the radiator where we could grab it.

I’m not kidding when I say we spent 55 minutes doing this, once getting so close that I touched it with one finger before it depressingly fell with a clatter back to the bottom.

Just as things were getting desperate, I had the idea of rolling up some cardboard and shoving it through the bottom of the radiator, to try and prod the remote upwards.

To better see what we were doing Mrs Canavan switched on the torch on her phone and balanced it on top of the radiator. She then lay on the floor to use the cardboard to push the remote up, while I tried to grab it from the top with the coat hanger.

Two things happened.

First, in the act of manoeuvring the coat hanger around, I accidentally knocked her phone and it fell towards the floor, landing – rather unfortunately but with uncanny accuracy - smack on the centre of her face.

It’s fair to say this didn’t go down well.

‘Arghhh,’ she screamed. ‘What the hell did you do that for?’

“Well, I didn’t do it on purpose did I,” I retorted.

We’d been trying to get this remote out for more than an hour and a half now and, as you may be able to detect, tempers were beginning to fray.

After Mrs Canavan had sworn several times and applied an ice pack to her bruised face, I placed the phone back on top of the radiator and we tried again.

But in my enthusiastic efforts to move the coat hangers about I knocked the phone the other way … and this time it slid down the middle of the radiator, nestling just next to the remote.

Mrs C was lying on the floor, so didn’t see what had happened.

“Erm,” I said hesitantly, more apprehensive than if I had to inform Mrs Canavan her immediate family had been wiped out in a car crash, “I’m afraid I’ve just, erm, well, I’ve just, erm, knocked your phone down the radiator too.”

There was a silence - the kind of eerie silence householders experienced in the Second World War just prior to a doodlebug exploding – before Mrs Canavan, with more force than a doodlebug, went berserk.

I did probably the wrong thing here and began giggling at the sheer absurdity of what had happened. I’d like to say Mrs C saw the funny side too but I’d be lying.

I’m pretty sure she wanted to call a divorce lawyer there and then, thwarted only by the fact she didn’t have a phone to make the call on.

It was at this point, laughing fit over and slightly panicked, I googled ‘how to remove a radiator from the wall’ but it looked way too tricky for a man whose only previous DIY experience is putting new batteries in Mary’s toy bath shark.

Fortunately the phone, and our marriage, was saved by an emergency text message to our neighbours (sent from my phone, clearly) asking – and I quote – ‘has anyone got any grabber-type device we can use to get something from down a radiator?’

Amazingly the chap at number six had exactly that, a kind of long thin litter-picker thing, and within two minutes of him dropping it off we had retrieved both phone and remote control.

By this time – gone 11pm – it was too late to watch the damn TV and besides Mrs Canavan and I weren’t speaking and she had a headache from the pain of the facial injury suffered earlier.

We went to bed in silence and have barely spoken since. We may or may not be still married this time next week - I’ll let you know.