If there is one thing I can be fairly certain about, it is that had I been on the Mission Control team during the Apollo 13 emergency, I would’ve earned my salary many times over. That may sound bumptious, but mainly it reflects a confidence in my ability to use Heath Robinson ingenuity to solve a problem of make-do-and-mend. I love make do and mend: it requires thought, creativity and trying stuff. It is about as much fun as you can have as a mature adult, because it demands we all become kids again, dismiss what we’ve been taught, and think beyond the rules.

Here at the French Roost, I’ve spent the majority of the last two weeks fixing things without the knee-jerk response, “It’s f**ked, let’s buy a new one”. My favourite compartment in the understairs workshop is the one called Odds & Sods. Like things worth a few bob in the attic, the Odds & Sods area is the way to feel better about yourself while destroying insane replacement-based globalist capitalism.

My love of doing that sort of thing may seem at odds with my detestation of what is generally called ‘DIY’, but it isn’t at all. You see, DIY is about using physical skills and tools to fashion things like straight-hung wallpaper, pipe racks, shelves, door-hinge insets, and many other things that were always meant to be made by professional artisans who – thanks to B&Q – now find themselves unemployed and fecklessly absent fathers. When it comes to anything involving the transformation of wood into a practical object, the hardest thing to discern is who has the higher IQ – me or the wood?

The other problem with mainstream DIY is the way it always involves grazed hands, things too small for human digits, things too complex for two limbs, and idiotic design whose sole intent seems to be to reduce the DIYer to axes and hammers as the only answer. An example from today (which hasn’t been a great day on the whole) will suffice to illustrate my point.

Bit by bit since my arrival here, I’ve been reclaiming old outside lights, renovating them, and transforming one outside light of truculent performance with a beam aimed largely at Venus into four outside lights that all work properly in the right places for them and me. Part of this involved testing whether it was an interior blown switch or simply a defective floodlight that was causing no light, flooding or otherwise, to appear. As an older example of the form, this particular floodlight had junction boxes where the contact screws can fall out if you over-undo them.

Now it’s bad enough having given yourself terminal finger cramp getting the bloody wires into the holes in the first place: but it’s pretty galling to then watch the tiny tightening-screw fall out and disappear into the long grass beneath. But when you walk all the way back to the house in search of a modern junction box – and discover that the task of getting a screw out of it at all within half an hour involves Stanley knives, surgical chisels and calculus – the word ‘ironic’ doesn’t really cover the frustration involved. Especially when you carry the precious liberated screw carefully back to the floodlight’s junction box, only to watch it fall out again almost immediately.

So if you see what I mean, it’s the solving of the apparently intractable breakage problem (not the wrestling with too many double-jointed wires in enclosed spaces) that attracts me. It is the invention of a better version of the modern loo-plunger flush system using a lift mechanism made from culinary cotton that stimulates my interest, not the challenge of trying to embrace the cistern while turning a balloon-screw with that third hand I don’t have.

I do genuinely believe that, if the household-goods factories of the world churned out fewer, better-quality units with more spares availability (instead of vast but unsustainable profits going to remote and disinterested shareholders) the Dow would be at half its current level, factory workers making spares would still be employed earning about 60% of what the few left with a job do, and parts replacement would be less lucrative…..but would employ more craftsmen to fit them. We would be a happier culture with lower prices, less unemployment, lower blood pressure, and far shorter hours.

But this is, I know – because so many experts tell me – a silly idea. There really is no alternative to the entire globe being bankrupt, and everything one buys beginning to flicker within a week of purchase. For there is no alternative, and we’re all in this thing together.

Earlier at The Slog: Greece emerges backwards into the Limelight