Chris Pascoe’s Fun Tales

Before settling on cat-sitting, Chris dabbled in many other professions

Never mess with things you know nothing about. I started my column with those words a few weeks ago (and went on to describe destroying a bathroom and slapping myself in the face with an electric mosquito swatter). And then, just last week I talked about Reg the builder, whose catchphrase would have to be “Can we fix it…? No, I don’t think we can.”

The reason I mention the above is that if you combine those two topics, you have a spot-on description of my early-life attempts to become a tradesman.

I started out as an apprentice carpet fitter, one of the safer, less complex trades… or so you’d think. I managed to make carpet fitting complex and highly dangerous. For one thing, despite my boss’s increasingly exasperated efforts to make me cut anything in a straight line, I never quite managed it.

Something else I never quite managed was to fit a carpet, which is quite an important part of carpet fitting. What I did manage to do, on a regular basis, was fix myself to the floor. This was due to my relationship with gripper-rods, those thin strips of wood covered in lots of tiny upturned tacks, cleverly designed so that carpets will

I did manage on a regular basis to fix myself to the floor

attach to them. It was always me that became attached to them, and not in an affectionate way.

Through a mixture of inaccuracy with a hammer and the continuous stupidity of laying my hand across the gripper-rods to hold them in place, I repeatedly nailed myself to the floor. Finally my boss could take no more and, worried he’d eventually have to fork out for a blood transfusion, finally let me go with the sound advice, “You need to think about doing something safer. A lot safer.”

With that in mind, I began a new life as an apprentice electrician. That life would have been very short, had I not been forced to stop six months later by my boss, after he witnessed me explode a line of 40 light bulbs one by one at the prestigious Temple Chambers on London’s South Embankment. There was something about reversed polarities but I never did know quite how I achieved it, which is probably a good reason I shouldn’t have been doing it in the first place.

Since then, I’ve only ever attempted electrical work on one other occasion. Armed with the lighting skills acquired in almost blowing up Temple Chambers, I set about fixing new spotlights in our kitchen.

With everything wired up and in place, I decided it might be a good idea to phone an electrician friend named Steve, just to check I’d got all the wires in the right places before switching the power back on.

“Talk me through it,” said Steve. “Ahem, yes, blue wire in the left terminal, brown one there, OK, ahem, got you. Yep Chris, that should definitely do it.” “Will it?” I cried, elated. “Yep, that’ll definitely burn your house down.”

I never did try plumbing. That’s probably why the UK is still above sea level.