another blog in the wall....THE SUNDAY ITEMS: #35 THE MIDDLE CLASS DILEMMA: WORK OR PAY

Here’s the middle class dilemma: houses and flats need maintenance, redecoration, fixing things in emergencies, or more creative change/remodelling. Do you go for DIY or PSE, which my friend Robin Catto calls Jewish DIY (he would know): earn more money and Pay Somebody Else? From very early on I chose DIY which is the masculine equivalent of dressing out of charity shops. With uncanny foresight I anticipated that as an academic I would never have money so I’d better learn to do it all myself.

My father didn’t have a lot of knowledge to pass on, nor was his skill-set extensive. His thing was Polyfilla, a material in which he became a virtuoso: had there been a Chair in Higher Filling Studies in a British University he would have been the stand-out candidate. If he had not been quite so optimistic in extending the range of its uses, he would not have learned the hard way that it cannot be used for roofing or mending sanitary ware.

He did give me a load of parana pine that he found in the basement of his shop, which I converted into several sets of bookshelves for me and my friends: this only involved sawing and screwing so it hardly merited the term carpentry. I became bored with this when I realised I had done enough to re-house the British Library. Then a larger challenge popped up. My girlfriend bemoaned the lack of a working area for preparing her teaching materials for her new job. I thought “I can do that”, and proceeded to build her a desk, in secret, in my landlord’s basement workshop. Pride comes before a fall (or in this case, before 32 mortice and tenon joints). These are where a tenon (euphemistically called ‘the male’) fits snugly into the coy ‘female’ slot to join two pieces of wood. I had all the zeal of a new convert: my carpentry was to be pure, essential woodwork. No screws, bolts, nails and metalwork. Just wood on wood, the happy marriage of precision cutting and friction, that would hold everything rock solid and secure. Yeah, right.

Having painstakingly cut and chiseled all those joints over many months, I found that the essential ‘goodness of fit’, had eluded me at least 25 times: the structure was as rigid as a cereal packet collapsed for the recycling truck. Using slightly more metalwork than the Angel of the North I finally secured the structure. The girlfriend’s birthday and two Christmases had passed and the suspicion that I was having a tryst with someone in the basement had grown. But hey, Rome wasn’t built in a day - but it was built rather quicker than the desk. It was, in the end, rather magnificent, and very much appreciated. Note to self: don’t ever, ever do anything like that ever again. I said ever. However I did have a letter of appreciation from British Steel in recognition of the noticeable rise in their share price over the period.

Soon my portfolio of building skills portfolio diversified. Decorating was the next step, and my landlord and lady sat tolerantly by while I painted the doors of their elegant Georgian house bright AA yellow. And this was not the worst decorative crime I committed: I later painted a bedroom a rich maroon, all over, and while the colour was not strictly accurate it gave the room a slightly visceral overtone.

The woodwork continued and it was that part of a job which I relished most. I grew to love wood and everything about it. It is solid and strong but workable; it looks great, from its basic colour to its contours of grain; it smells great when put to the saw; and when you let the sawdust accumulate in the workshop, it drifts like desert sand into great creamy dunes. Screw up your eyes and you can see an old biplane tracing its peaks and valleys, its shadow following a few yards behind, in perfect mimicry.

As time went by my collection of tools grew. You start off buying cheap because you are on a student budget, and you buy everything cheap. Gradually you start to buy more expensive ones, even proper professional stuff, because it’s easy to rationalise (‘do the job better’ ‘last longer’ ‘good investment’) and because this kind of purchase has begun to be a treat, a real thrill: a little bit sad, but true. A beautiful new spirit level can raise the spirits, no question. And by their power tools shall ye know them: the fledgling DIY person starts off with Black and Decker, later graduates to Bosch (feeling slightly superior), the Sainsbury of power tools but he can only cut it amongst professionals if he’s packing Makita or DeWalt. I don't know if it's still true but in the 70s an ex-Black & Decker rep told me that their electric drill motors were wound to last only 16 hours, so little does the average DIY man actually use it.

So many different projects over the years it’s hard to remember them all. I’ve built or re-built 3 kitchens for myself and a couple for other people. There were periods of unemployment or austerity when I did it for extra income. Friends kindly commissioned me, like J&M who wanted a wooden kitchen, rather than IKEA flatpack chic. And there were restoration jobs which were interesting but not very profitable because they invariably required much more work than I’d estimated for, and then it’s hard to ask for more money, particularly from friends. During that period I took out a 50s fireplace and put in a restored Victorian one for an ex-girlfriend in Dalston. I remarked to her that the charred bricks at the back looked fragile and I should put another course in front of them. “No, no”, she said, fearing a bigger bill. I thought she was wrong. When she returned later that evening I took her round the side of the house and shone a torch upwards: protruding from the side of the house by about 9 inches was a long knitting needle I’d pushed through the mortar between the bricks: the wall was less than one charred brick thick, and half the house could have come down with an injudicious blow. So building work, skills and knowledge are not trivial matters: the more I acquired the more I assumed a further identity as a real builder, rather proudly, and wondered what on earth my students would have thought of the Professor moonlighting as a chippy.

In 2005 I bought an Edwardian house in NW London, as a family house: the family was short-lived but my younger daughter and I remain there today. It was one of those houses which seems to be in reasonable repair, such that a good deal of redecoration can be postponed and spread over a longer period. Wrong. Within days it became clear that the plumbing and electrics had to be completely renewed, which of course knocks on to redecoration, plus bathroom and kitchen to be replaced. In the event I did everything except the electrics, which involved a lot of skill acquisition e.g. replumbing the entire house, with no knowledge or experience, just a 10-week evening class in Stanmore. Looking back it seems a little crazy, but it was a good kind of craziness because the job got done, at a fraction of the professional rate, and I got real satisfaction out of having conquered another peak, and become fluent in plumbspeak. Plumbing is fairly easy, and fun, but you do have to concentrate. I was feeling immensely pleased at having completed the pipework on a bathroom, having connected hot and cold supply and waste to basin, bidet and wc, and decided to quit while I was head and go home – it was 8.30pm, Saturday night. As I walked down the hall to the front door, a drop of cold-water hit me on the back of the neck – from the hall light-fitting. I went cold. Back upstairs, take up floorboards, to find I had expertly driven a screw through the middle of the soft copper cold water supply pipe, through having guessed where the pipe was rather than measure it. There’s nothing like that irrevocable feeling of depression, frustration, annoyance, tedium at having to repeat, and the conviction that your IQ is probably less than your shoe-size. There is an adage in the building trade: “Look 3 times, measure twice, cut once”: probably a good Rule for Life.

As a rule of thumb, DIY costs about 30% of PSE. It can make you feel like a Master of the Universe when it turns out well, and a dumb schmuck when it doesn’t – who still has to get someone in to put things right. You should try it, it’s the only way to learn. I have a cabin full of good tools, which I’ll lend – if you collect and return. Trial and error is the only way to learn. If at first you don’t succeed you may do on the fourth attempt. Beyond that, your tool of choice is probably the telephone.

A DIY tip: have you ever drilled a hole in the wall, which is too big for the screw/Rawlplug you are using? Pack out the hole tightly with matchsticks, or better, cocktail sticks, broken off where they reach the surface. (Before plastics, builders would make their own Rawlplugs out of bits of wood). Voilà: the perfect fitting wooden plug will take the screw and keep it rigid, strongly enough to hold up the whole house (so far….).

So, the apple really doesn't fall very far from the tree.....

Hallowe'en

Hallowe’en provides so many reasons for dispatch to the Room of Shame that it is surprising it hasn’t hasn’t gone there voluntarily, after leaving a note. It’s fake, a fabricated non-event created by the Americans to colour in their cultural history by people who can only trace their lineage back to last Thursday, unless you count Native Americans which the white folks have obstinately failed to do for the last 400 years or so. The person who discovers a real link to a Native American festival in the autumn is going to clean up, authenticity being as rare and valuable commodity as green and blue striped gold ore; as such will be abolished as Satanic by President Trump.

But for us it’s just another cheap, flashy American import, gleefully seized upon by toy manufacturers and market traders, and even major supermarkets. Dentists love Hallowe’en, it's their pension fund; national sugar consumption levels peak in late October through this excuse to consume unlimited amounts of sweets, and tooth decay comes close behind. So as well as putting up with marauding gangs of kids hammering on the doors of Seniors and squinting through the venetian blinds (to check you’re really out), we have to lay in supplies of cheap sweets to buy them off, bringing a major spike in dental cares, childhood obesity and diabetes. What’s not to like? Don’t give me that rubbish about ‘a healthy alternative’. Having produced carrot sticks one year, a ten year-old, clearly surfing a sugar-rush, told me to “stick them up your…….(don’t know what the rhyming slang for this is, but respectfully suggest ‘Whitehall farce’).

It’s all about social pressure and fashion. I am a curmudgeon about this, I own it – and hopefully a spoilsport, too. I’m all for people enjoying weird, meaningless fantasy lives, celebrating ancient rites, dressing up and having a good time – that’s what I go to football for – please just do it at home with consenting adults, not through my letterbox. Capiche?

I'm getting really sick of these facile and exaggerated comparisons between Donald Trump and Adolph Hitler. In some respects it's very unfair on Der Führer. For all his monstrous, murderous, depraved, sick behaviour, he was quite a cultured man, appreciated and wrote books, loved music (maybe a little heavy on the Wagner), painted and was very nice to children, animals and women. Trump has none of these redeeming features, and we now discover is a serial groper who uses his power and wealth to abuse women. We may have suspected it, we may have heard rumours, but we didn't expect to hear it confirmed from the stallion's mouth. Possibly Hillary may be a little circumspect about condemning such men - as well she might. But she can leave it to Trump to dig himself further into the hole with every subsequent statement. But if the Trump train hits the buffers it would be a shame if it happened because of this. Yes, this behaviour confirms him as truly loathsome, but it doesn't portray the full horror of such a bigoted, ignorant, braggart being so close to the leadership of the West. And don't tell me he wouldn't have been as evil as Hitler, seriously, because he is clearly cruel, unscrupulous, hysterical, impulsive, dishonest, megalomaniac and incredibly stupid, which in my book makes him capable of practically any excess. He is, to use a technical term from Psychiatry, completely out to lunch, and in power he would endanger the planet.

Please watch this: it's an extraordinary flamenco/jazz, blues fusion. A lot of people think of flamenco as a Costa tourist thing, just guitars and dancing, and strictly Spanish. But in this you can here the clear roots in North Africa and some Middle Eastern influences. As for the dancing, it is spectacular and makes me wonder whether 70 is too late to learn. After all, it's pretty much what I do already: stand on the same spot and move your feet a bit...

This was sent to me from Aix: thank you FC, for finally introducing a bit of class and culture into the blog, at long last.

"Les Footballeurs" by Nicolas de Staël, a French abstract painter of Russian origin. The referee is clearly kicking the red-shirted (Arsenal? Liverpool? Man U) figure up the arse for behaviour typical of these teams, a kind of retributive justice which could be more effective than our namby-pamby coloured cards and verbal wrist-slapping. Or you might prefer some more traditional Fine art: