Like most people, I can wire a plug and change a wheel. These are simple things. But I cannot reassemble the coffee machine that I took to pieces this morning, and I cannot drill a hole in a wall. Anything even remotely complicated and I’m stumped, which is why, when I came home yesterday to find one of my donkeys in the middle of the road, I knew the day would not end well.
Have you ever tried to move a donkey when it wants to remain stationary? It’d be easier to move France. So what do you do? If you break off from traffic control to fetch an enticing apple from the kitchen, you know that when you get back to the scene, Uma — for that is her name — will have entered a passing car via its windscreen.
And quite apart from the sadness that such an accident would cause me and the relatives of the person in the car — whose death will have been neither comfortable nor dignified — there would be many forms to complete and many stern words from a policeman.
I was weighing all this up when the arrival of a noisy motorcycle galvanised Uma into action. Sadly, the action in question was a great deal of Elvis impersonations with the top lip and an industrial bout of heehawing.
Eventually, other motorists arrived on the scene and, this being the countryside, where people have little else to do, everyone got out of their cars to help. When we had a thousand or so, we were able to push the poor animal, legs locked, back into the paddock from which she had escaped.
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And then, two hours later, the police called round to say that she, along with her mate Eddie, was out again. This time, on what is called an A road but is actually a motorcycle racetrack.
With the help of most of the population of southern England, and tactical air support, they were heaved back into the field, and this time I set about finding the route they were using to get out. And it was the damnedest thing. I looked for holes in the fence. I looked under their stove. I looked under their vaulting horse. I even checked their beds for evidence of missing planks. But there was nothing, and so I concluded that they were getting airborne somehow. Maybe they’d built a glider.
This is the other part of my condition. Like many men, I can never find anything that I’m looking for, even when I’m actually looking at it. In a fridge, I think milk is actually invisible to the male eye. And so, it turns out, are dirty great holes in the fence.
I genuinely do not understand this. When an 18th-century carpenter tacked together two small pieces of mahogany, he could reasonably expect that they’d remain conjoined until the end of time. And yet fencing, which is held together by massive 6in nails, falls to pieces, all on its own, every 15 minutes.
Why does this happen? And what do you do when it happens on a bank holiday Sunday? There was no possibility of ringing for help, which meant I would have to fix the damn thing myself. This, I worked out, would require some nails and the tool of the gods — a hammer.
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But, astonishingly, the only hammer we have in the house is the sort of gaily painted little thing Jane Austen might have used to pin a picture of Little Lord Fauntleroy to her bedhead. So I decided to use the butt of my AK-47 instead.
Have you ever tried to nail two pieces of fence post together? It is literally impossible. The nail goes in well to start with but then, as you up the tempo and the vigour of your strokes, it gets a kink in the middle and all is lost. Once a nail is bent, it can never be made to go straight. You need to start again.
I started again many thousands of times until, eventually, the nail went all the way through the first piece of wood and was ready to penetrate the upright. Which, I should explain, was a solid post, set in concrete. You’d imagine, then, that it would not flex at all. But it did. Each time I hit my nail with the AK, it simply boinged backwards, out of the way, until it fell over.
So now the gap, which had been just about big enough for a desperate donkey to get through, had become wide enough for a main battle tank.
I’m not a man given to tears or tantrums, but as darkness began to envelop the scene, I felt close to both. And that brings me on to the thrust of this morning’s missive.
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In the olden days, friends would have laughed at my hopelessness. They would have enjoyed my inability to knock a nail into a piece of wood. It would have been amusing. But these days we are no longer permitted to mock the afflicted.
If a child is dyslexic, it is no longer made to wear a dunce’s cap. Indeed, it is allowed extra time in its exams. And there’s more. I heard last week that if a child has hyperactivity problems, you don’t smack its bottom. In fact, if it has hyperactivity problems at Thorpe Park it is allowed to jump the queues.
We live in a time when the playing field is levelled out for everyone: when the rich and the privileged are rejected by the universities they’ve selected, while the weak and the ginger are given a leg-up at every opportunity. And yet nothing is being done to help people like me. People who are spanners.
You, reading this, can clear your drains. I cannot. You can service your lawnmower. I cannot. You can knock nails into wood and mend your fence.
I ended up parking my car across the gap until I could find a professional. And now the horses have wiped their sweet-itch-ravaged backsides all over my Mercedes.
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Don’t you think, then, that if we are going to have a world where legislation erases all foibles and shortfalls, it should apply to everyone? In a society that’s truly fair, I think I should get free plumbing and fence repairs. Or am I missing something?