My significant udder and I have recently come into a mass of crockery, cutlery and furniture. No, no one had to die; this was a case of surplus. Like a farmer with a bountiful crop, my friend Craig, now happily married and head of tech at blah blah blah, found that his tenants back in good old LDN were moving on.
‘Oh, what’s this? There are cups everywhere. What’s this? Knives and spoons to spare!’
I should have been in musicals. Anyway, the excess loot is only the setting for our story. The real tale begins with our attempt to get it back to the flat.
For this mammoth task we hired the services of recent St.Martin’s graduate Reuben. Not since Han Solo or Sinbad have you ever met a more charming rogue. He was the captain of a van as battered and bodged at the Millennium Falcon, with another Van’s engine and modified doors to boot. Apart from the credits this artist from the emerald isle would be receiving for his trouble, we throw in a brand new washing machine, Romani style.
Reuben, a man of multiple talents as we would discover, managed to unhook the washing machine from a maze of tentacled pipes, with little effort, all the while talking of waster pipes and other things that someone as genteel as I am ignorant of. Next, we moved the fridge, again Reuben worked a new set of skills, this time disconnecting the live wires, cutting and taping them. Awesome.
The most entertaining part of our adventure came during the journey home. Reuben regaled us with tales of moving furniture and sculptures alike. The best story involved a trip to Hampshire where his van broke down three times. Each time the same A.A mechanic was called out, until, finally, the van gave up the ghost and Reuben had to be towed from Hampshire back to
All this man crush aside, it made me realise that in the here and now, the age, of geeks and metrosexuals, these ‘real world’ skills have been lost. Who can boast, fixing an engine, knowing how to wire a fridge and detach a washing machine without flooding? None of us. We have become like the kryptonians, hiding away behind our talk of social media and the digital age, skin with the consistency of porridge, chasing after the recognition of our contemporaries
And to give this post a nice bit of symmetry, we'll end on a musical:
