Taking Stock - February 8, 2016

It’s a fact of life with young children that nothing is indestructible, and I suspect that for every one damaged item I know about, there are five or six hidden somewhere waiting to be discovered.

Some of the bigger items which have failed the twin test include a set of blinds, the dog’s bed and my home computer, which gave up the ghost after being repeatedly switched on and off by one impatient twin.

I’ll admit it’s not always the children who are to blame. For a start, I wrote off two pans in one frustrating 20-minute bid to make caramel.

Then there’s the toilet.

Now, regular readers will know I’m not much of a handyman.

I don’t have a shed, my favourite tool is a hammer and while I do own a set of screwdrivers they came out of a Christmas cracker.

I really should have known better when lifting the cistern lid to examine a drip-drip-drip noise coming from the bathroom.

Soon that drip-drip-drip was a raging torrent – visions building in my head of a Paddington Bear-style bathroom disaster.

It’s not that I don’t know what’s wrong, it’s just that other than hitting it with the aforementioned hammer or applying liberal quantities of gaffer tape I’m stumped for a solution.

Eventually, the only course of action was to turn off the water and summon a man who knew what he was doing.

I wish I was more practical, but it really isn’t my fault. I simply had no DIY role model.

He of the Bobby Charlton Combover was never what you might call practical – I remember as a child watching a set of shelves he’d put up in the dining room, waiting to see which one would fall first.

The problem is, in a flat pack world, everyone’s expected to know their way around an allen key – to be able to put a table together without getting the legs backwards or swearing at the thing and throwing it across the garden.

Never mind the toilet, if I can sort a set of shelves I’ll be flushed with pride.