A FEW of you may recall that back in November, I was bemoaning the fact that I would soon be required to assemble and erect a new bathroom cabinet we had bought the previous March.

There are some things that can only be put off for so long, and some weeks ago, Mrs Hextol appeared in my peripheral vision, with foot tapping and engine running, and demanded to know when I would be putting together the pride of B&Q, which had been gathering dust for too many months.

With a sigh, I assembled a vast array of tools, including the dreaded drill, and started work. After 20 minutes, I had managed to open the flat pack box.

After a further 20 minutes rummaging amongst dowels and trunnions and multiple other mysterious devices, I was able to announce smugly that the job could not be done – there were no instructions in the box.

After a thorough search of the many yards of corrugated cardboard which are compulsory with any flat pack product, Mrs Hextol was obliged to concede that the instructions were indeed absent, and demanded to know where I had hidden them.

After convincing her of my innocence, I started packing away my tools – but was stopped by a thunderous look of pure venom.

“You’ll have to get in touch with B&Q and get them to email you a spare set of instructions – I can’t have this big box lying around any longer.”

I sneeringly pointed out that the successors of Messrs Richard Block and David Quayle offer many hundreds of flat packs of many varieties on their shelves, and even the hordes of eternally helpful orange-clad elderly assistants had better things to do than search for an idiot’s guide to assembling an item bought six months earlier, that was probably no longer stocked.

To humour her, I rang the company – and damn their eyes, they had emailed a full set of instructions within 10 minutes, and I had no choice other than to proceed.

It took a little over four tortuous hours to assemble the thing, with only a handful of bits left over, and then a further two hours to drill the appropriate holes in the bathroom wall, which to my profound amazement did not start spouting water from pierced pipes.

Astonishingly, I was able to lift the cabinet into place, and screw it to the wall at the first attempt/

And it has remained in place ever since, even though Mrs Hextol opens the doors with the exaggerated caution of someone who has had past experience of my DIY skills.

To her amazement, the cabinet has remained firmly in place, and for the past couple of months, I have been able to rest on my laurels – until this weekend, when Mrs Hextol announced that there was more to a bathroom than a cabinet, and it was about time I emulsioned the ceiling and glossed the door frame and skirting boards.

Now decorating is not my strong point, I have to admit, for while Mrs Hextol can decorate an entire room in her Sunday best without getting a speck of paint anywhere on her immaculate person, I only have to loosen the lid of a tin of paint to be covered completely from head to toe.

Doing ceilings is particularly bad, and I end the session with a thick crust of matt white turning my head into a cocoon.

It’s because I like to immerse myself in my work, as I do in my new role as an ostler when I have to fill hay hecks for many hungry horses each morning.

It’s a job shared by three other people, but while they complete their duties looking very much the same as when they started, I somehow manage to look as though I am auditioning for the role of a particularly unkempt scarecrow in a remake of The Wizard of Oz.

I am covered in enough straw and hay to bed down and feed the guinea pig house at Pets R Us for a fortnight,

And Thor Heyerdahl could make a new raft out of the reeds, seeds and weeds which have to be sluiced out of my belly button during my bath on returning from the stables.