Thickos of the world, unite!

I sometimes wonder how on earth I managed to get to the grand old age of …erm…21….without accidently decapitating, electrocuting, marmalising or simply buggering myself to death.

It’s true that sometimes I can be a bit vague. My dear Mum is fond of describing me as ‘a bit scatty.’ My eldest sister prefers the less charitable ‘bloody liability’. My darling husband, not known for extravagant displays of affection, favours the rather more concise ‘fuckwit.’

Yesterday, I proved them all right. I managed to do something so arse-kickingly stupid, even I questioned whether or not it is safe for me to be at large.

There I was, in the kitchen, carrying out my chores in uber-wifely fashion. You know the sort of thing…leaping around with a broom, folding bed linen, polishing wood till it gleamed, scrubbing floor tiles on hands and knees with a toothbrush, picking the dog plop out of the soles of Sprog’s wellies with an old fork, cleaning the ashes out of the fire place... now this is where Captain Calamity comes calling.

I hate cleaning the ashes out of the fireplace. It’s boring. It’s dirty. And bloody pointless, because every day, there I am again, repeating the whole, never-ending process. So, I had an idea. A brilliant idea. One that would shorten the whole miserable exercise, making it much cleaner and more efficient.

Enter Henry the vaccuum cleaner. He’s one of those pull-along metal bucket style vaccuums with a powerful engine like a tractor – he’d suck up Bernard Manning from behind the sofa if asked (which is more than I would do). With the willing Henry, I proceeded to plunge his nozzle into the fireplace...and sucked.

I promise you, the ashes didn't look hot. They didn’t feel hot. But when Spouse (luckily, as it turned out) sauntered through on a coffee-seeking mission, to see me oblivious with my head stuck in the fireplace, whilst behind me, poor old Henry had flames shooting out of his ventilation shaft, threatening to set alight the kitchen table and a pile of delightful raffia tablemats…it wasn’t good.

Spouse swore. A lot. Very loudly. I cracked my head on the mantelpiece, surprised by his uncharacteristic freak-out. Then I started to run around like a headless chicken, bouncing off the walls, in a kind of fear-frenzy. Again, not good. Being a quick- thinking, non-thicko, Spouse switched Henry off, pulled the plug from the socket and ran outside, hurling him across the garden ….where he sizzled grumpily on the hard frosty ground.

What a ninny I felt!

Just to make me feel better…would you kindly tell me of something really stupid that you have done…I need some ammunition…Spouse thinks I’m the only person in the whole universe lentil-brained enough to have done something like this. Please tell me he's wrong.