Putting up new curtains proved harder than columnist Kevin Page thought it would be
Most Sundays you will find me, deep in concentration, whacking a little white ball around the carefully manicured grounds of my local golf course.
This Sunday past would have been no different, but for the intervention of Mrs P and her plans for some home renovation work.
She wanted me to put up some curtains.
Ordinarily, I would have protested.
My Sunday golf is a long-held tradition, as is the convivial pint or two after the 18 holes have tortured me enough.
Generally speaking, it has to be something super-important to drag me away from that. Like a death in the family, a wedding or a saucy text from Angelina Jolie, that sort of high-level importance.
However, I have recently come into possession of a brand-new power tool and this came into play when deciding whether I should stay or go.
The tool in question is a cordless impact driver, which lets you basically push screws noisily into all manner of things with great power. I'm getting emotional just thinking about it.
So, obviously, the opportunity to take it out of the box and drive screws into the wall while putting up curtain rails was simply too good to bypass and so I put my exercise regime (ahem) on hold for a weekend.
It would be fair to say my decision came with some bonuses. Not only was Mrs P appreciative of my decision in terms of a radiant smile and eyes which still makes me weak at the knees after all these years, but coffee and snacks were regularly forthcoming as we moved around the house taking down the old curtain tracks and putting up the new ones.
I can still feel the pleasurable grunt of my new power tool as we progressed. Life was good.
Anyway.
I was five track brackets in when the first hiccup occurred.
I missed the bit of wood I was aiming for and ended up with an unsightly hole in an unsightly place. Oh well, add the repair to the ever-growing To Do list.
Then I discovered some of the brackets are for the thick end of the rail and some are for the thin end, that bit that extends out.
No drama. It just meant the six I'd put up had to be replaced. Or did they?
Closer inspection revealed I could leave the brackets in the wall and just remove the tiny screw holding the top moveable bit and swap them over. Easy.
But then I dropped the handful of tiny screws.
Naturally, they bounced everywhere but where I thought they'd be and it took me the better part of an hour to locate them all.
Thankfully, Mrs P found one for me. Or rather it found her when she trod on it and screeched in pain.
By the time we got round to actually putting some curtains up, I thought I'd best do something to help beyond the actually physical job of lifting them up to hang.
So, I took over the measuring while she did the gathering and stuff. And here's where things got interesting.
In my defence I have measured and cut lots of wood over the past 50 or so years, so when I say "160", for example, I know what that means. One metre and 60 centimetres right? Apparently not to my beloved.
She took it to mean one metre and 60 millimetres.
And so surprise, surprise – our curtains didn't cover the windows. So, we had to go back to square one. Undo all the cords she'd studiously tied a couple of hours earlier. Regather the curtains, retie them, rehook them and then put them all back up again.
It would be fair to say my arms were just about hanging limp at my side by the time we'd finished and as I crawled into bed later that night, I was hoping they would stop throbbing.
It was so bad at one stage it got noisy and woke me up. At least that's what I thought it was.
Apparently, I was mistaken. There had been a noise coming from the lounge according to Mrs P, now wide awake and sitting up beside me, urging me to go investigate.
And so, with George The Dog ready to pounce on any intruder, we padded down the hall to the lounge where the reason for the noise became clear the second I turned the light on.
The combined weight of the curtains on the brackets I'd obviously put it in the wrong place had proven too much for the thin walls in our old house and the whole lot had come crashing down.
All this means is that next weekend I will have to go back over the job I've just done and reinstall the curtain tracks, after I've patched up the holes in the wall of course.
I had hoped to return to the golf course but I doubt Mrs P will put up with a bedsheet over the window any longer.
You could say it's curtains to my plan.