I DIY-ED IT MY WAY!
AWEST Yorkshire handyman says that a series of bizarre, billion-to-one coincidences have ruined his successful business, leaving him bankrupt, homeless, and facing a possible prison sentence. For six weeks, entrepreneur Ackworth Coxwold, 61, enjoyed a thrivingcareerdoingminordomesticrepairsinandaround the Castleford area, until a succession of remarkable twists of fate combined to leave his life in tatters.
He told us: “I’d always been a Jack-of-all-trades and good with my hands, so when I lost my job at the local recycling plant for reasons I won’t go into, I decided it was time to strike out on my own and become my own boss. I put a card advertising my services as a handyman in the post office window. I felt I had a number of USPs that were bound to guarantee success: No job was too big or small, I offered competitive rates, and what’s more I would happily give free estimates to prospective customers. I went home and waited for the work to start rolling in.”
Odd-job man Ackworth looks back on rollercoaster career
“Business was slow at first. I got a few jobs in the first week, boarding up a broken window, changing a fuse, and sawing a couple of inches off the bottom off a jammed door, and word started to spread about my friendly, low-cost, cash-only business. Pretty soon I found myself rushed off my feet. Sometimes there were two, three or four calls coming in every week. In the end, my wife Maureen even gave up her job in the launderette to become my full-time PA.”
“I thought I was set up for life, with a booming DIY business that would continue to grow and grow. But then, just as everything seemed to be going swimmingly for me, the fickle finger of fate intervened. Bizarre coincidence followed bizarre coincidence, and before I knew what was happening, I was going under.”
Ack Stumped Over
the Candlesticks
“The first disaster that befell me occurred during my second week as CEO of Coxwold’s Home Repairs. I had been called out to Featherstone to fix a leaky trap on the kitchen sink. As luck would have it, it was Maureen’s birthday, and on my way to the job I spotted a couple of silver candlesticks in the window of a local antiques shop. I knew they were just the sort of thing my wife would love as a present, so I popped into the shop, bought them for a fiver, and popped them in my toolbag.
lady
I didn’t give my purchases a second thought when I arrived at the job. The lady of the house showed me the problem and I immediately set about riving off the plastic Ubend with my biggest pair of molegrips. After a couple of minutes, she said she was just popping to the corner shop to get some milk. Moments later I heard the front door shut behind her as she left.
About ten minutes later she was back with the milk, and it was then that all hell broke loose. She spotted that two silver candlesticks were missing from the table in the hallway. I could only imagine that she must have left the door on the sneck when she went out to the shop, and an opportunist thief had sneaked in and made off with them while I had my head in the cupboard under the sink.
She didn’t believe me, and demanded to have a look in my bag. Of course, I showed her because I had nothing to hide. She rooted through my tools and immediately produced the silver candlesticks that I had bought for Maureen’s birthday present that very morning. My blood ran cold: by a billion-to-one chance, they were identical to the ones I had eyed up on the hall table when I came in just a quarter of an hour previously.
radio
I tried to explain that it was nothing more than a bizarre coincidence, but the householder was already on the phone to the local police. I’d had a run-in with the local rozzers just before I lost my job at the recycling plant, and I knew them to be unreasonable people who refuse to accept truthful excuses if they consider them far-fetched.
To save any grief, I gave the woman my candlesticks and quickly left, leaving myself £5 out of pocket. To make matters worse, she refused to pay me for the repair I’d done on her sink, claiming I’d bodged the job. But that wasn’t my fault. Whichever cowboy had fitted the sink in the first place must have crossed the thread, because when I put the U-bend back in it was leaking worse than before.
Hooky Knicker
Tale Didn’t Wash
“A week later, I got a call from a housewife in Allerton Bywater. She told me her washing machine was playing up. It wasn’t draining properly, and she couldn’t get the door open. She left me in the laundry room to work my DIY magic while she went off to make me a cup of tea. As a time-served handyman, I knew exactly how to fix the problem. A quick rive backwards and forwards in the side of the door with my biggest flat-headed screwdriver, and I soon had the troublesome catch forced.
As the door swung open, a little bit of plastic and a couple of circlips flew out. I picked them up to re-fit them, but I couldn’t work out where they had come from. I assumed they
important, but I thought I had better test the washing machine before I left to make sure my repair had been successful.
There was a laundry basket in the corner of the room, so I took a load of clothes out and pushed them in the drum. Unfortunately, the door wouldn’t stay shut, so when the lady of the house came back in with my cuppa, I explained that it was probably a manufacturing defect and she needed to get a qualified specialist out.
rosa
As I was talking to her, she looked down and her expression suddenly changed. For some reason I couldn’t fathom, her eyes were fixed on the pocket of my overalls, and she looked absolutely furious. I couldn’t imagine what it was that had caused the sudden change in the previously cordial atmosphere. I looked down and there, hanging out of my pocket, was the lacy hem of a pair of her knickers.
For a moment I was dumbstruck. I couldn’t imagine where they had come from and how they had got there. Obviously, I was entirely innocent of any wrongdoing, but a bizarre million-toone set of circumstances had conspired to make it seem like I was somehow at fault. And once again, my blustered protestations of innocence fell on deaf ears.
Thinking about it, it was clear to me what had happened. As I was loading the washing into the machine for its test run, a pair of the woman’s scanties must have hooked round one of my cuff buttons, later becoming detached as I reached in there for my vape. But my livid customer had put two and two together to make five, and she was refusing to listen to reason. As she kicked me out of the house, she was calling me all the names under the sun.
Bad Luck On the Cards
“Matters eventually came to a head just before Christmas. I was in Knottingley, where an old lady wanted her chimney swept. I haven’t got any proper professional sweep’s brushes, but I managed to rig myself up a perfectly serviceable set using garden canes, a roll of duct tape and a lavatory brush.
About halfway through the job, I decided to take a short tea break. There was horse running at Chepstow that afternoon that I liked the look of, so I phoned my bookies to have a flutter on it. As I reached into my wallet to get one of my credit cards, they all fell out onto the floor by the side of the chair. Tutting at my clumsiness, I scooped them up and stuffed them into my pocket.
After having my flutter on Lucky Boy in the 3.30, I got back to work, although I didn’t actually manage to finish the job in the end, because the bogbrush came adrift halfway up and got lodged in the chimney flue.
ernst
A couple of days later, however, I realised that I had once again been the victim of yet another freak, billion-to-one occurrence. To my horror, I discovered that I had somehow got the old lady’s bank card in my wallet. It must have fallen out of her purse behind the clock on the mantelpiece, and I had clearly picked it up by mistake with my own cards when I dropped them.
What’s more, I had unknowingly used it to make a whole series of contactless payments. But it was only when it was refused when I tried to use it to buy a big telly in Currys that I realised my mistake. I immediately decided to take the card back to its rightful owner, and set off to run the 8 miles to the old lady’s house.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t quite reweren’t member where her house was, and she’d blocked the card anyway, so I just chucked it in a bush.
Coxwold Battered
Over Hooky Haul
“The straw that finally broke the camel’s back and catapulted my thriving business into receivership happened one Friday in early January. I was in Townville, smashing up the asbestos roof on an old prefab garage. You’ve got to take the proper precautions when you deal with asbestos, as it’s dangerous stuff, so I had a scarf tied round my mouth and nose and I turned my face away while I crammed the bits into the wheelie bin.
I knocked off at noon, and went to the local fish & chip shop for my usual lunch – haddock and scraps. However, this one was far from usual. As I chomped through the delicious crispy batter, I saw something glinting in the haddock. It was a pair of pearl earrings, with a matching bracelet and necklace. I decided to pop into my local pawnbrokers on the way home to see what he’d give me for them.
“I looked and there, down hanging out of my pocket, was the lacy hem of a pair of her knickers.”
I was intending to give the money to a kiddies’ charity, but I never got the chance, because it turned out the stuff had been hallmarked and the numbers showed up on the West Yorkshire CrimeStoppers database. Thinking about it, it was clear what had happened. The thief must have panicked after committing his crime, and thrown his booty in the sea. The fish had obviously eaten them before getting caught, ending up battered and wrapped in newspaper on my lap.
jaffa
But the amazing coincidences didn’t stop there. By a billion-to-one chance, the jewellery had been stolen from a house not half a mile from my home. Even more bizarrely, it was a house where I had been working not a week previously, repairing a broken pane of glass in a bedroom window. Almost unbelievably, I had touched the very dressing table from where they had been stolen, probably from the middle drawer on the left, leaving my fingerprints on it.
“As through I chomped the delicious crispy batter, I saw something glinting in the haddock. It was a pair of pearl earrings, with a matching bracelet and necklace”
The next morning I was up before the local magistrates, who met my protestations of innocence with outright derision. And I can see their point. The chances of such a bizarre chain of events occurring must have literally been trillions-to-one. I don’t doubt if I’d been in their shoes, I might well have found my unlikely tale of woe a little bit implausible too.
Following the court case, during which he pleaded guilty to 18 charges of theft, credit card fraud and indecent exposure, Coxwold says his reputation as a trustworthy household handyman has been left in tatters. With his business destroyed, he has no way to raise the £1500 he needs to pay his fines, and now fears he may end up in prison.
NEXT WEEK: While Ackworth is bleeding the radiators in a Cutsyke house, Police are called to a report of a naked man coincidentally fitting his description – and amazingly bearing an exact DNA match – who has been seen masturbating in the upstairs bedroom window.