I am standing in front of an audience at the Chester literature festival. We have reached the questions part of my talk, which means there are only about 15 minutes to go. A man in the third row raises his hand.
“Have you got a new oven yet?” he asks.
I consider my answer for a moment. “Yes,” I say. “I think so.”
I explain to a town hall full of strangers that the previous morning, with a new oven shortly to be delivered, I was hurriedly removing the old one from its slot, confident that the task of unwiring it would not be beyond me. But what I encountered behind the oven was both serious-looking and brown with age. When I unscrewed the cover of the junction box and pulled, the whole thing cracked and fell off the wall. I yelped.
“Just leave it then,” my wife said, shining a bike light into the mess behind the oven.
“If I don’t disconnect it,” I said, “they won’t take it away.” I weighed my options for some minutes. Then I turned off the electricity and used gardening shears to cut the cable connecting the oven.
“What now?” my wife asked.
“I have to go to Chester,” I said.
“So that’s how I left things,” I tell the audience. “A broken oven on the kitchen floor, and a live wire sticking out of the wall.” There is a smattering of nervous laughter, then silence.
“Does anyone here know how to connect an oven?” I ask. “I mean, how hard can it be?” No one says anything.
“Are there any more questions?” I say. “Ask me about my dryer.”
Less than 24 hours later, I am standing in the electrical aisle at Homebase, holding a piece of scorched flex and calling my wife repeatedly. “Not sure why you would choose not to answer your phone at this crucial point,” I hiss at her voice mail. Sensing a presence at my back, I turn to find a staff member wearing a tiny headset.
“Can I help you with anything?” he says.
“Maybe,” I say. “My new oven came supplied without any sort of mains cable.” He nods. “But this sample of wire from the old oven,” I say, holding up my length of scorched flex, “is 25 years old, and appears to have no modern equivalent.”
“Uh-huh,” he says.
“You have much fatter wire and much thinner wire,” I say, “but nothing in between. I’m also slightly bewildered by your array of junction boxes, none of which, as far as I can tell, will accommodate your fatter wire.”
“Maybe you should go to an electrical store,” he says.
“It’s Sunday,” I say. “What I really need to know is the minimum number of amps required, as stated in the new oven’s manual, but none of the people in my house is answering their phone.”
“OK,” the man says, taking a precautionary step backwards.
“So, basically,” I continue, “I can either go home empty-handed, or buy one of everything you have. Either way, I face only disapproval.”
He agrees that my DIY question is really more of an existential dilemma – or at least he doesn’t disagree and instead pretends to take a call on his headset and leaves me to it. I buy everything.
Three hours later, aided by nothing other than the instruction manual, some basic tools, an inquiring nature and a qualified electrician called Carlos whom my wife rang while I was out, I succeed in installing the new oven. A frozen pizza glows on its centre rack.
“It’s weird,” the youngest one says. “The light works, so you can actually see the food while it’s cooking.”
“Welcome to the future,” I say.
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