The Shape Of Water
Garden hose antics end lockdown for Chris’s parents
Mum and Dad have been playing up again lately. They’d gone quite quiet after being told they couldn’t go anywhere for a year, something that was enforced with such surprising vigour by my niece that she’d have put an East Berlin border guard to shame. However, that enforcement is probably the reason they’re still with us, given Dad’s habit of hugging people in the street, a habit we’d have had to stamp out pretty quickly had it not been for everyone’s eventual quick thinking in legging it every time he emerged from his gate.
But Mum and Dad are certainly back with a vengeance now. It all started a few months back when they were allowed out of hibernation (actually, there is something about Dad that puts me in mind of a tortoise who’s just woken up).
They kicked off by asking my second cousin twice removed (it’s a big family) to fix their shed, then knocking him off its roof. It’s never a good idea to move a ladder just as somebody’s about to step down onto it, as my cousin explained at length to my dad from his position flat on his back on the lawn. In fairness to Dad, he had no idea there was even anyone on the shed roof, let alone about to fall off it.
Dad got his comeuppance a few weeks later, when my cousin installed a hosepipe for him and accidentally (?) forgot to attach a crucial washer. As
Dad was so drenched that all we saw was his cup of tea
Dad sat casually sipping a cup of tea beside the new hose, Mum turned on its tap and immediately began grumbling that it was leaking. Without stopping to turn the tap off, she hauled the hose off it, sending a back-blast of water in Dad’s direction, so copiously drenching him that all she could see through the deluge was his cup of tea. Then, as Dad howled his protests and sat dripping from head to toe, Mum tried to reattach the hose… still without turning the tap off. The second blast was the worse. This time she created a pressurised sideways torrent of water so intense that it knocked his cup clean out of his hand and sent him tumbling into a fence. Good work, cousin.
Unfortunately, they weren’t finished yet. After some Dad-bodged attempts to fix their sticky front door, it became stiffer than ever and almost impossible to open. Of course it did. So, eventually, and against Dad’s will, they had to get a carpenter out to fix it properly.
As he worked inside their hallway, a grocery delivery driver turned up and Mum called to him from a bedroom window, “Can you go round the back? The front door’s stuck.” The delivery man eyed the door in question, noticed it was already open a crack, and called back, “Nothing a good old kick won’t sort out!”
With that he booted the door wide open, sending a certain carpenter, kneeling on the other side of it, virtually head-over-heels backwards down the hallway.
This is how they do things at my mum’s house.
So, all’s well with them then. They came out of a year’s lockdown without any discernible changes whatsoever…