In every
household, everyone has a job that is their
job, that causes bucketsful of resentment when anyone else in the family is asked
to do it. My son puts out the bins. When he’s not here or tries to fob
it off on the daughter, she digs in her heels with a will that could see small
countries invaded.
The daughter is
in charge of writing birthday cards and wrapping presents. If asked to fold a
triangle and stick his thumb on it, the son makes sure that the Sellotape takes
on a life of its own, collecting crumbs, dog hairs and bits of red fluff from
my slippers. The husband – apart from the rather huge task of doing the day job
- is in charge of watching the rugby and war films with the son. Whisper Bruce
Willis, Clint Eastwood or Tuilagi to me, my shoulders go up round my ears
and I remember an urgent need to sort socks.
Despite all
these years of feminism, most households I know fall roughly into gender
stereotypes – the men do the cars, the lawnmowing and DIY and the women do the day-to-day
cooking, cleaning and ironing with a few grey area tasks in between such as
supermarket shopping and Sunday lunches. But not in our household. I was
definitely a bloke in a former life. Checking of the tyres, filling up the
windscreen washers, screwing handles back on all fall under my jurisdiction,
partly to stop the husband appearing with a mallet when a hammer is required
and making one small job into several larger ones.
 |
| Husband's job: never to go near a nail Image courtesy of foto76, freedigitalphotos.net |
But one job that
is definitely my job is anything
disgusting. Recently, my happy little task was to unblock the drains. After a
huge downpour and the slow joining of the dots in my brain, I had to stop
pretending that those round lumps on the patio were anything to do with the dog
and accept that I needed a man – or in this case, a woman – with a rod and a
pair of large rubber gloves. The husband immediately started gagging, squealing
like a girl, dancing about with the Yellow Pages and dialling Dyno-Rod. But
weird as this might sound, I find a strange satisfaction in sorting things out,
caveman-like. Do hope I don’t grow a hairy chest. I find it so fulfilling to
get the manhole cover up, yank on some unidentified congealed blockage and have
to sprint away for fear of being buried under an avalanche of excrement.
Similarly, every
shower I’ve ever known appears to suck every last hair off my head with the
sole purpose of weaving a hairy rat out of it and giving it a new home in the
waste pipe. Never mind ecologically friendly drain clearers, a chap with a head
torch and pickaxe would be hard pressed to find his way through the wig-rats
that take up residence in our house. However, nothing is a match for me and my
wire coat hanger. The unbridled joy of getting hold of one tiny little thread
of hair and finding that a fat rat follows, a slippery little sucker glooping
out into my plastic bag. Bliss.
Recently, we had
our bathroom floor tiled. This led to a lovely little scene whereby I was
playing table tennis with the daughter when the teenage son came mumbling out
about there being some problem in the sitting room. I immediately assumed that
there was a glitch with the X-Box, an evening ruining broadband crisis or some
other tragedy relating to electronic what-nots. I was so engrossed in not
ceding any ground to the daughter in the one sport I can still occasionally muster
triumph that I nodded vaguely to the announcement that there was water pouring
through the ceiling. Eventually, the words ‘Swimming pool on the sofa’ filtered
through. In my moment of confusion, the
dog seized the chance to dash off down the garden with the ping-pong ball,
thereby transforming one disaster into a potential two…the ceiling waterfall
plus the lodging of the ball in the dog’s windpipe. As I’ve said before, she does everything with such aplomb. Once we managed to swap a piece of sausage
for the ping-pong ball I was free to concentrate on disaster number one.
 |
| Darling, shall I fetch the mallet? Image courtesy of Danilo Rizzuti, freedigitalphotos.net |
Suffice to say,
this is where I realised that everyone has clearly defined jobs, whichever
household they live in. The tiler’s job was to put tiles on the floor in a
straight line and grout them. It was not to know how to fix a pipe that had
been nicked by a nail, identify an isolation valve or have a handy mate who was
a plumber. The son’s job was to sit like the boy in the dyke legend with his
thumb over the hole whilst moaning about missing Waterloo Road. The husband’s
job was to scratch his chin whilst the wife sweated and screwdrivered off bath
panels with not a little swearing.
But luckily, the
wife’s job remit was a broad one which included identifying the household where
the husband’s job was to know how to
stop a leak, have the appropriate tools and the calm demeanour that meant he
didn’t mind turning out at nine o’clock at night.
Can’t wait for
that happy day when they identify me as the one who deals with drains…
