M OTHER', said my daughter severely, 'I thought we'd agreed you wouldn't do that again.' Well, there are quite a few things we've agreed I wouldn't do again, like wearing the stretch leopard skin print jeans but, in this case, I knew what she meant. Returning from dinner with in-laws, she had been attracted by the sounds of muffled cursing from my sitting room. It was 10.45pm and I was sitting on the floor close to tears of frustration, starving because I'd missed supper, annoyed because I'd missed Heartbeat and the first half of Waking the Dead, and in pain because I was balancing several kilos of hardwood on my shoulder with the other bit threatening to fall off a nearby stool. 'Why can't you just buy a coffee table?' she said in a daughter-turned-mother kind of voice. 'You know the problem we had with the flat-pack computer desk.' Oh yes, I know the problem we had with the computer desk, or rather desks. The first one, courtesy of eBay, had sat waiting for me to gain the courage to open its packaging. Then my grandson, at the time 16, had visited and, while I was at work, had constructed it in a trice and had even set up a computer system, entirely unfamiliar to him, so all was up and running when I got home. 'Easy peasy,' he said when I thanked him, and I was so delighted I decided not to point out that smug people who say things like 'easy peasy' are usually likely to turn nice nanny into no more Mrs Nice Guy nanny. Thinking that if a teenager could knock up a desk in next to no time, I could do it too, I ordered a second desk. That was my mistake. There are lots of things adults can do as well as teenagers but understanding instructions for flat pack furniture isn't one of them. Perhaps it is all their experience with that incomprehensible language that texting is nowadays that helps them to understand guidelines translated badly from Cantonese into English. Anyway, I'll draw a veil over the ensuing three days of torture that is desk making, suffice to say that, two days into the construction I nearly gave up when I realised that the straight bits of wood I took to be the rim round the top of the desk turned out to be its legs Now here we were again. I wanted the table because it exactly matched the computer desks. It looked simple, two sides, a top, a bit across the middle and a little drawer. The instructions said that the estimated duration of construction was one hour. Can I get them under the Trade Descriptions Act? Everything went well at first. All the bits were there. I had all the right tools. The funny little round bits fitted in their holes, the screws went in without any problem and even the little wooden pieces dropped into place without need for bashing with a hammer. I even made the little drawer without any problems. Well, not many unless you count getting the handle upside down. It hadn't taken an hour of course, but I didn't expect it would, but at the rate I was going I'd be sitting down to Waking the Dead with a nice bit of supper and time to spare. Wrong. What got me were the final bits. The puzzle of how to get one end of the heavy top to stay in place with all its little bits in the right holes while fitting the other end in and also turning the screws underneath to fix it firmly at the same time. The answer is that you can't, whatever acrobatic position you take up, not unless you are an octopus. Which is why, as my daughter pointed out as she shouldered me out of the way, the instructions said that it needed two people to construct it. A piece of advice I'd missed. With one person at either end it was easy peasy. And I have to admit that she is very good at that sort of thing. The evening ended with me promising never to buy flat-pack furniture again. Which leaves me with the dilemma with what to do with the small wardrobe, now lying flat and unpacked under the bed!
Some things puzzle me. Well, quite a lot of things puzzle me. For instance, before I get onto the other thing, I'd like to know why it is that people reverse into parking spaces in car parks instead of driving straight in. I understand that some spaces, such as at the roadside, need to be reversed into but large public car parks don't. For instance, I drove into a supermarket car park the other day. It had lots of spaces, so I pulled into one and, because the space in front was also vacant, moved into that one so I could drive straight out. The man behind me, however, drove right round, stopped in front of me and reversed into a space two away from my car, going backwards and forwards a couple of times to get straight. Why? Even if I'd had to reverse out again, it's much easier to get the car in a good position by going in head first and follow the trajectory of the car in reverse. Is it a man thing? Am I jealous because my reversing record isn't exactly good? Probably yes to both.
The other thing I was puzzling about the other day, actually when I noticed that someone had bought six cans of cat food, all containing fish, was why it is assumed that cats like fish. Most animals which like fish are those which, in the wild, can happily catch it. And as fish can't live out of water, it is usually animals which don't mind going for a bit of a dip to hunt their dinner. Most cats, with the exception of a few species which are said to enjoy swimming, hate water. My cats have to be ushered out firmly even if it's only drizzling. They dislike their coats getting even damp. The ginger one, who has very thick fur, soaks up water like a sponge and doubles in weight if caught in a downpour, and puts on his deeply depressed face before retiring to a nice pile of clean linen in the airing cupboard. We once had a cat which used to follow us into the bathroom, jump on the edge of the bath and delicately walk round in a friendly sort of way. Until one day his paw slipped and he fell in. When retrieved he was so embarrassed he rushed out and wasn't seen for two days, and never went near the bathroom again. As for being deliberately immersed in water, I don't know a cat which would take kindly to it. Dogs don't always like baths, but they don't react quite so violently as cats do. Friends of mine, who had had one of my kittens, were horrified one day when it returned home with its beautiful long apricot fur covered in thick slimy black grease. Where it got it from they didn't know, but it was obviously not going to come off on its own and they were worried in case the cat licked it and poisoned himself. So they rang their vet and he suggested they get a dog shampoo, because there didn't seem to be one specifically for cats. 'And wear gloves,' he advised. They told me later that their normally placid and loving pet turned into a spitting, retching and clawing virago. They began by wearing rather delicate Marigold rubber gloves and ended up with something like motorcycle gauntlets. Telling a pale apricot Tasmanian devil that they were only doing it for his own good didn't work and it took weeks for him to forgive them for their assault on his person with water and shampoo. So this begs the question as to why cats, which are terribly fussy about food and most wouldn't dream of eating vegetables, salad or anything else which isn't meaty, are supposed to go crazy over food which in the past would only have been available to them surrounded by water. I suppose the only answer is that over the centuries since they have been domesticated cats have extended their tastes in food to include nice smelly things cooked by their owners, or nice smelly things left out by their owners and ripe for stealing. Still, a lot of cats don't really like fish and if they do they tend towards the luxury end of the market, prawns, salmon, swordfish steaks. One of mine will reluctantly eat tinned tuna in oil if I run out of cat food, the other won't touch it. Both will, just to be annoying, steal a piece of cooked fish if it is left unattended but not if I put it in their bowl. Even the stray won't eat tinned sardine and pilchard food. I suspect that most cats don't associate fish with the hated water, although most are fascinated by fish swimming around a pond or bowl, but that's just because they look interesting. They will even occasionally dip a paw in to see if they can bat them around. I did, however, have one cat which used to haunt the goldfish bowl containing Goldie, the children's pet. He could happily spend several hours rotating his head as Goldie swam round. We often noticed that Goldie's water seemed to be evaporating far more quickly than it should have done, and eventually found the culprit. We caught the cat, head in bowl, lapping furiously. If he couldn't get at Goldie by putting his paws in, he was going to drink his way there.