It runs in the genes

The longer I live the more confident I become that my research is now at a point where publication is possible without any fear of contradiction.  I am therefore ready to state categorically that the accident-prone, heroically stupid and supremely over-confident gene is in fact present in all human males – not just those of my own gene pool.

Perhaps now that dinner comes about as a result of no more than a quick trip to Woolworths instead of slaying a sabre-toothed tiger, we need a substitute to prove our manliness and our need to engage in DIY harks back to some ancient genetic blueprint deeply ingrained within us all.

There are some men who appear to have evolved, but it only takes someone like me a short while to re-infect them.  My father-in-law is a good example.  When I met my wife, her father Neil had only a few mis-matched screwdrivers, a small biscuit tin of assorted nails and tap-washers and some left-over paint in the garage.  A few years later, he can only just fit his car in the garage, has a garden shed, power-tools and enough DIY disaster stories to fill a slim volume of his own.

People who grew up in South Africa will know what a pre-cast concrete wall is.  For the benefit of others, it is a garden wall made of slotted concrete pillars planted about four feet apart with reinforced panels slotted in between.  In a country needing to keep large vicious dogs in and other undesirable elements out, these economical walls sprang up across the countryside in the seventies, got much higher in eighties and nineties, and had remote-controlled gates and electric fencing added shortly thereafter.

As can be imagined, the spacing between the pillars is critical.  To close and the panels won’t slide in – too far and the panels fall out.  I once saw a man pull the rear axle off of his van in an attempt to adjust one of these pillars outwards the day after concreting it in and there are doubtless countless stories about the accidents and additions to the already colourful language of the nation as a result of similar DIY attempts involving pre-cast walling.

In Neil’s case a corner pillar had sagged an inch or two and the top panel had fallen out and cracked in half.  Since this was in the bottom corner of the garden and out of view, nothing much was done but matters came to a head with the erection of the electric fence a few years later.  A wall and an electric fence are all good and well but a gap four feet wide and a foot high in between is a bit of a problem.

Fearing damage to the car should we attempt to straighten the pole I proposed a novel and simple remedy.  I would purchase a section of expanded metal BBQ grid and bolt it to the wall on each side, top and bottom, thereby closing the gap and simultaneously preventing further sagging of the errant pillar.

Neil expressed some reservations about this unconventional approach but wanting to impress on my in-laws my ability to suitably look after their daughter I assured him I could organise all the necessary materials and perform the installation myself.

This agreed, I arrived early the following Saturday morning bearing pre-cut grid, concrete anchors, electric drill and extension cable.  While I unpacked the car my mother-in-law made coffee and toast with honey which she served on the patio, the summer sun already beginning to dry out the heavy dew that had fallen overnight.

Neil eyed the BBQ grid with a critical eye.  “Are you sure it’s the right size?” he asked looking dubious.  “Well it has to overlap the opening so that we can anchor it onto the pillars on each side” I replied thinking it did look a bit large.  “I was thinking it looked a bit short” he said.  I had measured the gap the previous week-end after one of Neil’s legendary barbecues – the kind where the fire is lit at dawn and you have to drink your way through a wall of crated beer in order to get the meat on before dark – so doubt was etched on my face by this time.

It is an unwritten rule that the alpha male must take charge in situations like this and Neil did not shirk his duty.  Picking up the metal grid he made his way to the bottom of the garden wearing the traditional dress of the South African DIY warrior – navy rugby shorts and a T-shirt (bare feet).

With fingers hooked through the grid and holding it above his head he picked his way through the still wet undergrowth aiming resolutely for the gap in the wall.  I waited with coffee cup poised half-way to my mouth, hoping I had measured correctly.  The grid was raised into position and I was relieved to see it fit perfectly.

“It fits!” Neil called as he turned back to us, simultaneously touching the metal grid to the recently installed and still very much alive electric fence.  The grid performed a high arc, coming to rest in the branches of a nearby lemon tree, dislodging a few lemons in the process which fell to the ground neatly punctuating some choice additions to the pre-cast walling expletives hall of fame.

It would have been impolite or injudicious of me to laugh at this point but my mother-in-law had no such qualms.  A dual explosion issued forth.  The first remains a mystery as I thought moms simply did not ‘do’ that and the second yielded up a coughed up piece of toast closely followed by gales of laughter and subsequent weeping.

Those who know my father-in law will have a mental picture of him with a lot of perfectly groomed silver hair.  It would be an exaggeration to say that each hair was standing perfectly to attention but let’s just say that Don King had competition that day.

Returning to the patio very much more awake than he had left it and with a wild gleam in his eye that belied his calm demeanour he said “Well at least we know it works!”

I only found out many years later that it was not the electric fence to which he was referring but rather to his not likely to be needing Viagra any time soon. 

How does anyone survive to adulthood?

According to the World Health Organisation, someone born in South Africa in the early sixties, (e.g. me), could expect to live forty seven years.  

Unaware of this somewhat disturbing statistic, but with seeming instinctive brilliance, I moved to New Zealand at the age of forty six, where life expectancy is about ninety five.  Scandinavians are apparently tracking very near the one hundred mark, but the extra years didn’t seem worth the extreme climate and learning a language with little circles above the A’s and all the O’s crossed out.  My hope is that I have a reasonable chance of beating the system with just the bad hair I already have and a fake Kiwi accent that I am working on by watching a lot of day-time TV.  

It’s not that I am paranoid, just that I was present during all of life’s attempts to end mine prematurely and I do wonder how I made it this far.  In fact I am continually surprised to see fully mature specimens of the male persuasion thronging the planet.  I am sure any one of them selected at random would be able to reel off a dozen or so accounts of running/falling/climbing/jumping into/off/ through a glass door/river/gorge/tree-house.  Not to mention external forces like fire, water, ice, their brother’s chemistry set, their father’s drinks cabinet or their mother’s car.

Naturally, every boy’s memory of events past tends to be somewhat unreliable, with stories of near-death experiences taking on seemingly fantastic proportions in the re-telling.  One theory is that this is in preparation for being able to recount interesting boyhood stories to one’s grandchildren, but in my own experience I think the accounts of what actually happened are modified immediately to avoid having your life terminated by your parents when they find out what you did.

This also explains why everyone knows it is dangerous to run with scissors, and yet no-one has ever been injured doing so or has ever heard of anyone who has.  It’s because you know that if you stabbed yourself while running with scissors your mom will kill you, so instead you invent a story where a boy you have never seen before (and will never see again) attempted to sever your femoral artery with a blackboard compass during double geometry.

In speaking to my father, I have learned that my close brushes with extinction began long before 1962.  Himself a veteran of beating the system, he recalls that as a boy he would play a game involving cutting loops of rubber from a motorcar inner tube and shooting them into the overhead power-lines where they would become stuck, to be shot down by other boys with their loops of rubber - the idea presumably being to see who could dislodge the most loops.  I am surprised that Sony has not formulated a version of this game for their Playstation as the concept sounds riveting.  

You can imagine the scene - a dusty street somewhere in the suburbs of Johannesburg, everything in black and white with the corners of the buildings yellowing and cracked (the way they always are in photos of that time), and all the cars with no inner tubes of course. 

My father and the rest of the flannel shorts brigade have managed to get all their loops stuck in the power lines.  Someone suggests throwing their shoes up to dislodge a batch so the game can continue but my father points out that none of them have had any shoes since the war.  By this stage a small crowd has gathered and a minor scuffle breaks out when someone volunteers his sister’s doll in a bid to get the game going again.

I guess it is just in the nature of boys not to give up and being the carrier of the stupidly heroic gene in our family, my father offers to climb the pole and manually release the loops.  I guess there is something to be said for a country where wood is plentiful but that country is not South Africa.  The math goes something like this: bare feet plus metal pole plus 380 volts of three-phase power at an elevation of one mile up in the sky equals a whole new way to entertain the street.

In a move that was to become a regular in the arsenal of survival tips for later generations my father landed on his head and was therefore un-injured by the fall apart from sustaining a broken arm, no doubt from the whip-lash effect.  Being left-handed and therefore fairly useless anyway, he hardly noticed the impairment but apparently my grandmother did start wondering why the jerseys she knitted for him from then on had one odd-shaped sleeve...