Nick Knowles, eat your heart out

You may remember my complaints about Book Loyalty. Well, I've renewed the Get That Finished, Read Something Else campaign and it's caused me to realise that so far, the only time I empathised with the author at all was in chapter one. He was talking about student houses being dilapidated.

Our house is quote nice. It's got a little walled garden bit, some mirrors, and most importantly, it doen't have the motel-esque atmoshpere of despair most student houses do. Maybe it's the smell of badly-cooked rice, maybe it's the "no point insulating that electrical cable, they'll only be here twelve months" attitude to maintenance, I don't know, but most stuent houses I've ever visited were not the kind of place you'd want to walk barefoot. Compared to that, we're doing OK.

One of the first things a critical visitor would notice is that there's a crack in the wall that makes the Great Rift Valley look like a half-hour job with some polyfilla. I'd always vaugely assumed this was due to tectonic drift or something, but a recent barbeque drove us outside into the garden: from there, somone noticed that a venerable beech tree is resting on our roof, and a suspiciously sapling-like copse seems to be growing directly out of our chimney.

There are good things about having a house that's more than 10% copse: one of them is that immediately outside our bathroom window, there are flowering roses. They smell like Turkish Delight. Unfortunately, sometimes the smell is overpowered.

Recently, our garden has become victim of the greatest property problem since The Front Door Doesn't Shut Anymore. There's an unused lean-too back there, and it seems to form a vital link in the East Oxford sewarage system. If you're unlucky enough to get a waft, you get to know exactly what Michael Faraday was about.

I am a British male living with three females, so it was me who was driven by the collective unconscious to take action. Unfortunately, I'm not what you'd call a handyman. But I think my solution, even if it doesn't gain approval of so-called professionals, has a certain elegance.

I celotaped the door to that lean-to closed. The door doesn't close naturally as doors should, and I reasoned that having the door closed would only help matters. So out I went with some disocunt parcel tape and a pair of scissors. The first bond strained and just about held, so I decided to re-inforce it with some more. Feeling very technological, I even applied cross-angled tape to make the bond stronger.

At this point I thought to myself: "Why not just seal all around the door? Then the smell wouldn't escape". Three metres of tape later, I finished the job by scattering some salt and bicarbonate of soda around, in the thinking that if I made the area a caustic wasteland, nothing could live and rot.

Now, I don't know this is going to work.

But if it does, it'll be the greatest DIY coup of all time.

Song in my head: "English Summer Rain" by Placebo