The burden of being the only handy person in the family

My parents have a very low-maintenance backyard. It’s pretty much just brick paving, a patio table, and a massive plant growing sideways across the yard – a split-leaf philodendron with a thick brown trunk you have to step over, flappy green leaves you have to duck under, and dangly Little Shop of Horrors tendrils that will knock the avocado out of your hand during Sunday brunch and make you put smoked salmon on your bagel instead.  Just do what it wants: don’t make it mad.

A few Sunday brunches ago my parents and I were sitting outside at the patio table, while the philodendron buttered my bagel (with margarine; it thinks I need to go dairy-free). I said, “This is ridiculous. You need to do something about this plant”.  Mum peeked out from behind a huge leaf and said “What can we do?  It’s bigger, stronger and smarter than us”.

I said, “Leave it to me”, then I got up, found a few old paving bricks, and stacked them under the plant’s trunk until the plant tilted skyward, it’s tendrils out of our faces, flapping around up high, confused, still holding a butter knife.

Even more confused were my parents faces: how was this possible? How could their offspring have come up with this plant-lifting solution?  How, over hundreds of generations of pure Katz bloodline, did one Katz arise who turned out to be a mildly-competent fixer-upper?

No Katz has ever been a fixer-upper: we are not naturally gifted with electric drills, or socket-sets, or even a hammer, unless it’s one of those hammers you use for flattening schnitzels, and then we wield it like a chain-gang sledgehammer.  No Katz has ever shown any interest in DIY-stuff: there is no nailing or drilling or screwing in my family’s historical record, apart from the fun kind, and even then our workmanship is a bit shoddy.  There has never been a Katz who was into any kind of renovating: hardware stores are for buying lightbulbs, screwdrivers are for tightening spectacle arms, gardens are for throwing pistachio shells and old used cooking oil.

For a long time I was a Katz like them: an untainted unskilled unfixer. Until I bought my first house and something happened: I got a powerful urge to fix stuff by myself, partly driven by a passion for self-improvement, partly driven by a writer’s income with a hefty mortgage.

I taught myself to be a mildly-competent handyman: I learned to fix leaky faucets temporarily, paint walls unevenly, renovate rooms unattractively, and I even developed a bit of a green thumb, a gardening one, not the kind my dad got that had to be treated with a topical antibiotic.

My parents are mystified by my mildly-competent fixingness, but they’re also proud. They haven’t shut up about my philodendron-brick-stacking solution, still gushing about it, reminiscing about the day it happened, even inviting friends round to see my handiwork.

“Look what my son did! He got bricks. He put them under the plant. It lifted the plant. Who knew anyone could find a use for bricks? I mean, bricks!”

Danny Katz is a newspaper columnist, a Modern Guru, and the author of the Little Lunch books for kids, now a new TV series on ABC3.