In times of stress, I attack the garden. And the garden retaliates. After a long day’s toil, working up quite a sweat despite the cold, I was a mess. There was dirt in places dirt had no right to be, and flecks of blood on my arms and face where the brambles had bitten back.
I put my clothes straight into the washing machine. There could be no time for them in the limbo of the dirty basket. Things had gone too far for that. Nor could there be any delay on my getting in the shower, no stopping for a drink or a snack. I was shrouded in a cloud of bad odour, like Pig-Pen in the Peanuts cartoon.
But then disaster struck. The water was stone cold. Even though this felt like strong evidence that there was no God, there was something biblical about my nakedness before the torrents of icy water, my face a study in anguish and despair. I’d gone from Pig-Pen to the subject of a Munch painting. On my bare knees before the boiler, quite literally in prayer, I pressed buttons and switched switches for all I was worth, but in vain. It had conked out.
As this terrible truth became apparent, something strange happened. Every single problem that had been on my mind – every worry and concern that I’d been twisting and catastrophising out of shape – simply vanished. There was no head space for anything other than one burning – or rather not burning – issue: how to fix the bastard boiler. This was therapy, but not as we know it. Clarity at last. Some kind of primeval hard-wired brain circuitry kicked in: give me warmth. Nothing else mattered. In its own desperate way, it was refreshing, liberating.
I invoked a curse on all oil-fired boilers of all time and for all time. Apart from being environmentally rubbish, they can never, but never, be relied upon. They will always let you down in the end. A pox on them all. Bring on the air source, ground source, any bloody source other than oil.
In the gloaming left by the fading winter sun, I called and texted every number I could find for anyone to come and coax the thing back to life. I wimpered, I begged, I implored, and eventually a semi-retired engineer called Michael said he’d come in the morning. I croaked out some words of gratitude.
My inner caveman now made the best of things. I lit a fire for warmth but, after several flinching, gasping attempts, had to admit I wasn’t caveman enough for a cold shower. So I just sat in front of the fire, warm but stinking to high heaven, with the heady honk of heating oil now part of the pong. But here’s the thing: I didn’t have a care in the world; I was happy. Because Michael was coming in the morning. And then I went to bed and, though I was cold and woken every now and then by a whiff of myself, I slept like a baby. Because I knew Michael was coming in the morning.
He was there by nine. I have never been so pleased to see anyone. I offered him tea, breakfast, anything he wanted. He tinkered away until he diagnosed a knackered pump, or something. So he left (gulp) but returned (joy) with a new thingy. And soon, lo, the wretched thing was coaxed back to life. It was all I could do to refrain from hugging Michael, burying my head in his shoulder and crying salt tears of thanks.
A day later, I am warm and clean but all those issues in my life I had been worrying about have come crowding back in. How I miss being cold and smelly with only one thing in the world to worry about.
• Adrian Chiles is a Guardian columnist
