Why DIY should be turned into a no holds barred Olympic sport

Aug 12 2008 By Richard McComb

For some reason, my words of encouragement did not go down well.

“Leave it to me, darling,” I said wild-eyed. “I’ll whack it in and give it a deep screw.”

It was meant as a joke, and I thought it was amusing (it still tickles me now because I’m childish), but Sally didn’t see the funny side.

She was half-way up a ladder, trying to fix a new set of black-out blinds to our bedroom window. The drilling was done, the sawing and chopping was completed, but the blasted, poxy plastic window fittings were proving tricky to ram home with a fixation tool, ie a screw.

Hence my invitation to apply brute force and render a “deep screw.”

The gentlemanly offer was snubbed – Sally opted to do her own wizard work with the Phillips screwdriver – and I detected a change of mood in the domestic camp.

This is what always happens with DIY. It is not designed as a team sport and inevitably ends in blood, sweat and tears. For this reason, it would make a dramatic, self-destructive Olympic sport. Shelving erection and dado rail fixing could give this year’s inaugural BMX competition a close run, BMX being the only “sport” that makes skateboarding look like a worthwhile endeavour.

I mean, have you seen the sponge heads who skateboard in the city centre’s pedestrianised areas, running, or rolling, riot in Colmore Plaza and outside the council house.

They are there every weekday lunch-time, all of them no doubt on jobseekers’ allowance or on an extended break, having been sent down from a minor private school.

The hair-bears try to do these mindless flicks with their feet in an attempt to spin their boards in mid-air and land upright. They never manage it. They are all rubbish, really rubbish.

Why don’t they just go off and drink cider in remote corners of playing fields, or play with their Ninja Turtles?

Anyway, there is a fair chance Britain would excel at Olympic DIY, just as we do at spud-gun shooting and synchronized paddling.

Do a nationwide poll, Lord Coe, and ask the Great British public what new events they want to see included in the 2012 games in London. Other than Olympic EastEnders-watching and binge drinking, garden-fence creosoting and “team laminated wood-effect floor-laying” would be at the top of the wish-list.

Of course, the activity known as DIY is so-called for a very good reason. If one does it on one’s self, one is likely to get infuriated. But the solitary nature of the pursuit (one, after all, is on one’s self) means one cannot engage in combat, which by its nature requires two participants.

However, once another person is added to the equation, so that DIY becomes DIY-WAP (Do-It-Yourself-With-Another-Person) the potential for outstandingly foul verbal abuse, threats (“You are never going near me again!”) and intimations of physical violence is limitless.

Other than the fact it is mind-blowingly dull, and I am as bad at it as Birmingham’s yoof is at skateboarding, DIY is also expensive (compared with not doing anything), and so I don’t do it.

I leave it to my wife, who hates it too, but is marginally better at it than me. Our collective hopelessness with drills, screwdrivers, raw plugs and bits and bobs means we, or rather she, does one DIY thing once every five years.

I thought it was just me, that my male peers were at it like rabbits, so to speak. Having canvassed opinion, however, it seems that many fellow members of my age cohort are equally inept at fixing things. Our dads were masters of the hacksaw and kings of domestic rewiring. A blocked drain was a cause for fist-pumping resolve, a veritable call to arms, not a cue for psychosis and avoidance activity.

I have always felt slightly guilty because of this failure. So I thought my chance for absolution had arrived when we stayed at the in-laws and their downstairs loo flooded.

They were away, overseas, and I thought it unnecessary to recall a 77-year-old grandfather because his toilet had malfunctioned. Goddamn it, I was going to fix it.

I looked in the shed and rummaged in grandpa Bob’s toolbox. There were hundreds of screws and crinkly metal things and some bits that looked like original engine parts from a Spitfire. Nope. Clueless. I went to a builders’ merchant and talked the talk: “Need a ballcock, mate.”

“Don’t ’ave ‘em,” he said.

Stumped, I went to a DIY emporium and bought something that looked identical to the knackered thing in the loo. Piece of cake But could I get it to fit in? Arguing that I could create more damage, I left the new part for Bob. He fixed it in a jiffy on his return, no doubt giving it a deep screw.