Darling Wifey & I bought our first house ten years ago this month, and one of my oldest friends helped me to fit a catflap when we moved in.

We had inadequate equipment for the job, and didn’t expect the back door to be quite as sturdy as it was (two inches of hardwood sandwiched between two sheets of quarter inch steel. Well, the house was built by a company based in Middlesbrough.) So it took us a full day to cut the hole in the door with a hand padsaw (no power tools in those austere times) and fit the catflap which, regretfully, ended up skewed by about five degrees.

Tilted catflaps do strange things to cats.

Anyway, the ongoing campaign to make our house Autism-proof involved fitting an LCD telly nice and high on a wall, out of the reach of Autistic inquisition. One expensive telly that cannot be damaged will, theoretically, be cheaper in the long run than replacing them every six months or so as Little Nutter conducts experiments with bowls of milky cereal.

So to Darling Wifey’s amusement, friend and I started to read the instructions and try to work out how to fix part A of the wall bracket to the wall, part B to the back of the telly, and then “simply” (whoever wrote the instructions should be sued under the Trade Descriptions Act) click the two together in a secure link. We started at 7, and we were ready to fix the telly to the wall by about 10… But we did a damn good job.

Finally, the “Grumpy Old Git” tantrum that I had at the beginning paid off. “I am not going to even start with the wall bracket until the telly has been set up first and we know that it works.” I even stamped my little feet.

When the telly had been on for a couple of hours, it developed a fault. It now turns itself off and on again every two seconds, and we can’t stop it.

Back to the shop…