I’m standing in the garden on a sunny Sunday morning, hatching a plan to visit a DIY superstore. I need a new hose fitting, and some kind of caustic chemical to dissolve the calcified haze on the kitchen skylight caused by the constant dripping from the overflow outlet of the upstairs toilet.
“Get me some gravel,” my wife says when I announce my intentions.
“OK,” I say. “I’ll be back before lunch.”
I realise my mistake as I pull into the car park: it’s full. Hundreds of other people have stood in their gardens this morning and thought: “I could be having a barbecue on my deck, if only I had a barbecue. Or a deck.”
I’m not alone in my failure to anticipate the busiest DIY shopping day of the year so far; the management of this particular superstore seem no less taken aback. They’re fresh out of gravel, and almost everything else I’ve come for. I fill my trolley anyway – I’m here, I think, so I’ll pick up a shovel. And some topsoil.
Only three tills are open, and the queues stretch into the aisles. The one I’m in has grown two branches; at some point I will have to reach an accommodation with the man standing in the equivalent position in the other fork. I’ve already decided to let him go first – he has a small child and a lawnmower – but I don’t want him to know that yet. The mutual hostility of our exchanged glances is my only entertainment.
In spite of the gridlock, the staff are demonstrating a spectacular lack of urgency. Nothing is moving. I scowl at the guy with the lawnmower again, then look away quickly. As I close my eyes and lock my jaw, something dawns on me.
Ten minutes later, I’m in the kitchen, recounting the moment to my wife.
“I just thought, what’s the point?” I say.
“Wait,” she says. “Have you actually come back empty-handed?”
“I left my trolley in the paint aisle and walked out,” I say. “It was incredibly liberating.”
“I see,” she says.
“I realised that life is short,” I say. “And also that I didn’t have any money on me.”
“Right,” my wife says.
“I’ve gained understanding, and it cost me nothing,” I say.
“I suppose not,” she says.
“Apart from the pound for the trolley. Still, it feels like a victory.”
“It’s lovely that you’re able to look at it that way,” she says.
The middle one walks in and opens the fridge. “Look at what what way?” he says.
“Your father went to buy gravel and forgot his wallet,” my wife says. “Now he’s pretending he had an epiphany.”
“They were out of gravel,” I say. “I’m never going there again.”
“You never go anywhere anyway,” she says.
“He goes to the supermarket sometimes,” the middle one says.
“I went to the supermarket yesterday,” I say. “On what was, I now see, my final visit.”
“Great,” my wife says.
An hour later, I’m up on the kitchen roof scraping the calcified haze off the skylight with a razor blade. Doing the best job possible with the tools available is, it turns out, pretty unrewarding: progress is slow, and the squeak of blade against glass stomach-turning.
I look up and see the youngest one staring at me from a window. “Can I have a go?” he says.
I look down at the glass, carefully composing my features. “Um, yeah,” I say.
He climbs out of the window, and I climb in. I find a sunny spot in the garden where I can sit out of sight, but still hear the squeak of the blade, which from a distance has a curiously satisfying ring.
