Our new and working oven is still a novelty: we keep accidentally vaporising things under its incredibly effective grill. It’s also brought us back from the brink of domestic infrastructural collapse.
There was a point in mid-September when neither the oven, the dryer nor the dishwasher was working. I tried to present the situation as a unique opportunity to experience a life free from such fripperies, like they do on Edwardian Farm. The children, who rarely interact with any of these machines, hardly noticed the difference. When my wife pressed for change, I engaged in what has become known in our house as “defending the broken thing”.
“The dryer works perfectly well,” I said, “as long as you stand here and hold the button in.”
“I can’t just stand here,” my wife said. “I have other drudgery to be getting on with.”
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll fix it.”
I bought a roll of gaffer tape and left it on top of the dryer, along with a plastic poker chip.
“We simply place the poker chip over the button,” I told my wife, “where it acts as a substitute thumb. Then tape it down. Voilà.”
Shortly after I invented this solution, the dryer exercised its right to die. The oven followed suit a month later; it was 25 years old, the dryer at least 10. But the dishwasher is brand new, and hasn’t worked properly since I installed it in July. Again, I choose to be supportive of the troubled appliance.
“If you choose programme 6,” I say, “it usually gets two-thirds of the way through the cycle.”
“Before displaying error message F1,” my wife says.
“Correct,” I say.
“Insufficient water pressure,” she says.
“What can I do except agree with it?” I say. “We have insufficient water pressure.”
“It just seems weird,” she says.
“It’s fine,” I say. “You just restart the machine on programme 4, and after it quits again, skip straight to rinse.”
“It takes a day,” she says, “and everything comes out wet.”
Eventually, washing up by hand, drying clothes on the bannister and cooking everything on the hob becomes the norm. We find ourselves in the strange position of being in credit with our electricity supplier. But my wife is not happy with life on the Edwardian Farm.
“I can’t keep boiling and frying things,” she says.
“What about braising?” I say. In retrospect I think this is the remark that leads directly to the ordering of the new oven. After its successful installation by a trained professional, my wife is suffused with reforming zeal.
“The dishwasher man came round today,” she says one afternoon when I return home.
“Really?” I say. “Is it a software issue?”
“He said you installed it wrong,” she says, delighted.
“There’s nothing to do wrong,” I say. “Hose one, hose two, in, out.”
“You stuck the outflow hose too far down the pipe,” she says. “It created a siphon and sucked the machine dry.”
“What you mean is they made the outflow hose too long,” I say.
“Anyway, it works,” she says. “Hurrah!”
I look out of the window, where clouds are gathering. I find I am not defeated by my incompetence, but instead seized with a sense of wherewithal. As the sky darkens I open a drawer and find a miniature baking tray from a toy cooking set, pliable enough to bend in half like a peaked roof. I grab my roll of gaffer tape and head upstairs. The youngest looks up from the Xbox as I’m climbing out of the back window.
“Where are you going?” he says.
“I’m going to stop it raining in the kitchen,” I say.
“Good luck with that,” he says.
Follow Tim on Twitter
