DIY chromosomes working overtime

That’s when we men — supposedly on holiday and supposed to be sitting in miles of motorway traffic jams and having pleasant family arguments — start stirring from our home improvement hibernation state and, putting our housing responsibilities to the fore, we herd on down to the British DIY aisles to get stuff.

According to B&Q, we buy 1.2million litres of white emulsion paint; 930,000 light bulbs (and that’s just at B&Q); and 150,000 B&Q grow bags. Groan.

There’s a pretty strict hierarchy of favourites for Easter time working, too: first comes shelving, then assembling furniture, filling holes, sanding, painting, electrics, tiling, stripping wallpaper… No more delaying: it’s time to get things sorted. There’s more — and we haven’t even mentioned ‘the garden’, yet — but I’m getting tired just thinking about this unending list of drudge.

Indeed, had Easter been a couple of weeks later, like now, the grass would have been growing so fast that we’d not have been able to open our back doors if we hadn’t rushed out to buy new lawn mowers to curb it. There’s even a DIY Doctor’s blog to make sure we don’t get injured in the process! And why not. The accident statistics certainly justify this nannying: DIY disasters include falling off ladders and breaking furniture; spilling paint or white spirit on the carpet and furniture; dropping things on glass tables; and drilling or hammering into pipes and cables.

So why should a holiday be such a fraught liability for us? An opportunity to ‘catch up with all those things we’ve been delaying for so long’? And get ourselves injured into the bargain? Is it all just good marketing? Probably. But as a nation of male DIY mad workers, we’re missing an opportunity to focus on what we men do really well: cook.

Yep…we’re the best. We featured exclusively as finalists on BBC’s  MasterChef on Wednesday night and, since the re-launch in 2005, only one woman has won it. Ha! That Y chromosome certainly knows its stuff in the kitchen.

But do we get any encouragement for it? Nope. It’s not ‘poach that lobster’ or ‘reduce that jus’ or ‘make that mousse’. No. It’s ‘fix those shelves’, ‘Allen key those shelves’ and ’sand blast those walls’.

Sadly, women don’t like the heat of the ‘male dominated environment of the kitchen’, according to the Independent. Good.  Everything’s in its place at last and now we know where we should be: a man’s place is in the kitchen.

As soon as he’s selected it, assembled it, fitted it, wired, tiled and painted it. Pass the bradawl, love.

By Neil Cowan
http://blogs.chemistrygroup.co.uk/newbusiness/