TEDDY JAMIESON

Jhas been fiddling with the cupboard door for 15 minutes without success. Something has fallen off. Let’s call it “the bumper bit”. I don’t know the proper technical term. It’s the bit that ensures the cupboard door doesn’t bang shut. It looks like it just slots on top of the hinge already there. But it’s not for slotting. J is having no luck reattaching it at all.

She pauses to check on her dinner. As we’re now a divided family food-wise (two of us being vegetarian and two not) there are usually at least two meals being cooked every night. As she busies herself with the sauce pots I idly pick up the bumper bit. I look at both sides. I look at the hinge. I can see where the bumper bit is meant to go. I lean in, line it up and press. It fits. It clicks. It stays. I’ve done it. I’ve fixed it.

There are, I accept, more impressive ways to flaunt one’s masculinity, but I’d be a liar if I didn’t whisper to myself “I’m the man” at least once during the next 20 minutes [1].

I am not, it should be clear to anyone who pays even the most cursory attention to this column, any kind of alpha male. Frankly I’ve had beta males kick sand in my face. My blokishness really only asserts itself by default. Mostly because it just so happens I’m the family’s only driver [2]. That and by watching Jason Statham movies whenever I get the chance. (Liam Neeson’s Taken films too, if I’m really at a loose end. Me and Liam share the same accent – he grew up just down the road from me – so I could probably do what he does if push came to shooting Bosnian gangsters in the face. It’s the leaping from rooftop to rooftop I’m not sure of.)

There was a time when my lack of traditional male attributes could just about be spun as a positive. That was back in the 1980s when traditional male virtues were embodied in the vaguely ridiculous (and vaguely homoerotic) displays of Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger. My inability to change a set of spark plugs then meant I could just about be shoehorned into the media notion of the new man. But that was then. I can’t pretend I didn’t feel vaguely emasculated when my brother in law – who is just as touchy feely as I am but knows how to use a screwdriver – had to fit the mini TV to the wall on his last visit.

So let me revel in my bumper bit success just a little while longer.

Who knows when (or if) I’ll have the chance again?