Dripping tap? Get your staff to sort it out!
The newly appointed Minister for Brexit Opportunities and Government efficiency has agreed to answer all your most urgent questions on household maintenance .
DEAR JACOB, I am planning to hit a nail on the head, and someone told me you’re the man to ask how. Advice, please!
J.C., York. JACOB SAYS: I trust I am breaching no confidences, Mr C, when I make so bold as to inform you that I am favoured, some might say blessed, with a far from minimal amount of knowledge vis-a-vis hitting the aforementioned nail on its head.
I am reliably informed that one can purchase a single nail from a ‘hardware store’. I very much doubt it would cost you more than a few pounds. At the same time, you might think of purchasing a ‘hammer’, which is, my trusty dictionary tells me, a hand tool consisting of a solid head set crosswise on a handle that is swung to deliver an impact to a small area of an object, in this particular case your nail.
The rest is, I might add, comparatively straightforward: one asks one’s handyman to hit the thin, rigid piece of metal on its uppermost protuberance, and he obliges.
Delighted to be of help, Mr C!
DEAR JACOB, Are you familiar with the expression ‘It’s as easy as falling off a log’? Advice, please, on how to fall off a log.
L.P., Ongar, Essex. JACOB SAYS: This is a problem I have been contemplating for a great many years. I have no desire to climb on to a log, let alone fall off one.
Was it not Lord Melbourne who first suggested that the only right and proper place for a log is either in one’s fire basket, or in one’s fire?
Without breaching any confidences, I might add that our Prime Minister is exceptionally gifted when it comes to falling off logs. In fact, I have yet to see him stand on a log without immediately falling off it.
And I’m delighted, once again, to have been given this opportunity to defend him.
DEAR JACOB, I’m hoping to teach my grandmother to suck eggs. What’s the best way to do it?
E.P. (Mrs), Swindon, Wilts. JACOB SAYS: Let’s begin at the beginning, if I may. As those of us with an education already know, and others must surely suspect, an egg is an oval object laid by a female bird, enclosed in a chalky shell, by which one, of course, means that the oval object is enclosed in a chalky shell rather than the bird, for if the bird were to be enclosed in a chalky shell then its opportunities for free movement would, one regrets to say, be severely curtailed. I trust that clears up that aspect of your question. As to the other, in my, alas, now distant youth, I taught my grandmother to suck eggs on a daily basis. She was, I am delighted to say, hugely grateful for one’s expert advice. But as to how you should go about teaching your own particular grandmother to suck one or more eggs, well, I recommend you consult your Bagehot.
DEAR JACOB, What’s the best way to deal with a dripping tap?
W. R., Salford, Gtr Manchester. JACOB SAYS: As Minister for Brexit Opportunities, one can safely say that since we are now free from the monstrous yoke of Brussels, we are all suffering less from the insufferable scourge of the dripping tap. Left to itself, the British tap never drips.
Should my own tap insist on dripping, I do not hesitate. I get someone to deal with it.
And that remains my advice to you, Mr R. It’s perfectly possible, of course, that, up there in Salford, your household staff does not extent to an employee with overall responsibility for taps, and the dripping thereof.
We are not all of us wealthy, and life would be most unappealing if we were. No fault of yours, Mr R! The rich man in his castle, the poor man at the gate. I am all for ‘levelling up’, of course, but it should only go so far, and no further.
DEAR JACOB, I am struggling to put my own trousers on. Any suggestions?
P.C., Totnes, Devon. JACOB SAYS: My advice to you is perfectly simple, Mr C. Ask Nanny to lend a hand. It works every time.