The Farmer & His Wife

You have to keep plugging away, says John Taylor.

ANNE was sitting in her chair, absorbed in her own thoughts, when she started to laugh so much that tears rolled down her cheeks.

I looked at her in astonishment, wondering what on earth she was laughing at.

Needless to say, it was me.

“John, you really are hopeless,” she said as she wiped her eyes.

I felt it was a rather sweeping statement.

It turns out that what Anne was referring to was the fact that I’m hopeless with my hands.

The week before, she had bought a new kettle and asked me to fit a new plug to it.

Some hours later I still hadn’t managed to fix it to the kettle.

Fortunately, a nephew came to see us. I took him away from Anne’s prying eyes, and asked him to look into the plug.

After Anne stopped laughing, I explained to her why I never learned these things.

When I was a boy we had oil lamps and candles for going to bed. Later on, we acquired a gas lamp.

This lamp had a kind of mantle and a pump in the wee tank at the bottom.

There was a very thin wire on a handle with which you cleaned the jet.

Woe betide you if you didn’t, and ended up as my father did one Sunday afternoon in the kitchen.

There was an unearthly bang, the top blew off, then ignited and set the clothes on the kitchen pulley alight.

We did get electricity, but I was long past wanting to know how it worked.

Well, to come back to why Anne was laughing at me.

For the last 10 years or so there’s been a hood over the cooker, with a filter which is meant to absorb the smell and the steam.

Anne’s been on for a while about changing the filter.

I got as far as trying to unscrew the thing. No go. I could feel I’d just break it.

One of our grandsons came to stay. He had the guard below the filters off in a jiffy.

He read a notice. The plastic case should be taken off the filters before use!

Well, we’d been switching it on for about 10 years and it wasn’t doing any good. Now we know why!

In Anne’s eyes that and the incident with the kettle just go to show how hopeless I am. She’ll never let me live them down. ■