Chris Pascoe’s Fun Tales

With repeated ins and outs, it just had to end in disaster…

My wife Lorraine has been very impressed lately by my lack of clumsiness. Regular readers will know that a lack of clumsiness would be the very last thing about me to impress anyone. However, just lately, my life had been astonishingly mishap free.

I soon put that right… I think the fact that I’ve been able to flit around like a fat ballerina, not putting a nimble toe wrong and breaking nothing, has been the knowledge that if I had destroyed a single one of Lorraine’s prized possessions during our recent house move, she would have destroyed me. From intricate little ornaments like her Marvellous Mechanical Mouse Organ to a huge painting of a Parisian street scene that we had no idea celebrated the Tour de France until a visiting estate agent told us so, nothing got broken at all. Incredible.

Though probably not as incredible as displaying a painting for 30 years depicting something neither of us like.

Anyway… the wardrobe. Yes, I realise I hadn’t mentioned a wardrobe until this point, but a wardrobe it was that finally broke my demolition-duck. Why couldn’t I just have smashed a glass or something nice and small like that? No, I had to go and rugby tackle a wardrobe.

I blame Lorraine’s recent obsession with buying and selling our furniture – she’d sold the wardrobe for £30 and someone was collecting it from our doorstep at 5 pm.

So I heaved this big awkward heavy thing outside, then the buyer messaged saying she was delayed and would be with us at 6 pm. It started raining, so I heaved it back in. And out again at 6.

Only to receive a further message, saying it would now be 7. Grunting and groaning, I heaved it in again. And out again at 7.

She finally messaged to say that, thinking about it, there’d be no way she could fit a wardrobe in her Mini Metro, so

No, I had to go and rugby tackle an entire wardrobe

she’d have to cancel…

I was so pleased to hear this, there was a certain brusqueness in the way I tried to manhandle it back in that last time, which probably explains how it got completely wedged in the front door.

For ten minutes I pushed and pulled, unable to move it or squeeze past it out of the pouring rain. Finally, with one mighty shove it was through.

Lorraine describes it as one of the most surreal moments of her life. One moment she was walking into an empty hall with a cup of tea, the next a soaking wet man and a wardrobe came hammering through the front door, progressing three steps before collapsing in a heap, man on top of wardrobe. It was as if I’d angrily wrestled it to the ground. There was a brief creaking moment, and then the wardrobe totally disintegrated, both sides flying sideways and leaving me lying flat on my face hugging just its door.

“Right”, said Lorraine with a frown, “I’d better take that off the For Sale page…”

I love my wife.

Really I do…