Chitra Ramaswamy: This girl’s doing it for herself

By Chitra Ramaswamy
Published on 15/07/2012 12:42

‘YOU can’t let guilt take over your life. Sometimes you have to flush and move on, to try and be a good person beyond the toilet bowl’

I HAVE never known what makes houses tick. I understand what makes them so – four walls and a roof, basically – but beyond that I tend to do the mental equivalent of slapping my hands over my 
eyes and screaming, “NOT LOOKING!” whenever 
I’m confronted with, say, a light bulb popping. Ignorance in matters DIY has been my bliss. Denial, my saviour. I just would rather not know.

There are two reasons for this self-enforced stupidity. One, 
I’ve never heard a Ramaswamy say the word ‘screwdriver’, 
much less hold one. In fact, the only screwdriver we’ve ever known is the one in Fawlty Towers, which if you recall was 
made with vodka and orange juice. You would be more likely 
to see a Ramaswamy marry Tom Cruise than change a fuse. 
And the only ladders we climb are in libraries.

Two, I’m frightened of houses. Every house, as far as I’m concerned, is a Hammer House of Horror underneath all that Ikea make-up. I know our homes are supposed to be refuges from the big, bad world, the one place where we can pick our noses without judgment. But how cosy can one feel surrounded by potential fire hazards? What of the boiler 
that could be silently gassing us to death? What of the dripping tap that threatens to drive us to the scariest house of all ... the madhouse? What of the cupboard door that won’t close? The leak in the stair? And why does the fridge always make the creepiest noises?

The perversity of my fear is that it actually gets worse with knowledge. I remember C one terrible day showing me how the toilet works. You could, I suppose, refer to this day as the death of romance. But in actual fact, when the cistern was opened with as much pomp as the lid being lifted on a coffin, it was more like the death of innocence. “This is the overflow mechanism to stop the water rising too high,” said C, which isn’t exactly up there with the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet. “But why so much water?” I wailed. “Please God, why?” “That’s how it flushes,” was the disturbing answer.

And so it dawned on me after three decades of happy-go-lucky, guilt-free flushing. Every time I sit on that seat, do my business and pull that dreaded lever, six litres of water are summoned to send my paltry waste to its grave. Six whole litres. It’s like harnessing the Niagara Falls to wash away a pea. Oh, the indulgence of it. It’s enough to turn you into one of those right-on, alfalfa sprout-eating people who always have a faithful old wee waiting to be flushed in their loo.

Anyway, you can’t let guilt take over your life. Sometimes you have to flush and move on, and try 
to be a good person beyond the toilet bowl. And so 
I decided to take a paint roller to my panic and to 
feel the fear and drill it anyway. I decided to learn 
some basic DIY.

I took last week off and spent it with fear in my heart and a paintbrush in my hand. I ate bacon rolls for breakfast. I went to B&Q every day and didn’t cry in the aisles once (OK, apart from that time in the joinery section). I wore paint-splattered jeans that were too big for me. I said words like Rawlplug and spirit level, and meant them. At the end of the week, I surveyed all that I’d done – the white walls, sugar-soaped skirtings, chair rescued from a dump, fridge from a recycling project in Shettleston – and felt what DIYers call a sense of achievement. And you know what? It feels so much better than fear. I guess that’s why it’s called doing it yourself.