So Mish and I are separating again.  This time is different.  She’s the one going.  The kids are grown-up.   Sex is no longer on the menu.   I guess I better tell Mum.   

Her house, the house where I was born, and where she still lives,  frowns in grim stoicism against the grey British suburban drizzle.   I walk up the front garden path with trepidation.

I get the Fixit attitude  from my mother.  She it was who would repair everything when I was a kid.  Like my socks. Who the hell mends socks nowadays?  As a child, I had a permanent limp, because one of my socks invariably had an irritating darning-wool scab which I used to detest the feel of on my heel.

In fact most of my clothes were patched-up hand-me-downs from my brother, though we were not poor.   My books too, were usually sticky to the touch,  held together with Band-Aids and  duct tape.  

All of which is no doubt admirable in its way, but, sometimes I wished my mother could just throw old stuff away.

 My father, a writer, clever as anything when it came to solving  a Times crossword or reading the weakness of West Ham United’s defence,  was not a Practical Man,  despite his working-class sympathies.   His younger brother, my uncle Dave,  on the other hand, had the rough, nicotine-and-paint-stained fingers of a worker.  He was a “jig-and-tool maker”, a profession which died with the British Empire, as did his employer, the famous toy train manufacturer “Hornby”.

My mother and father were happily married for most of their sixty years together.   Oh yes, he shouted and ranted, she wept and ran, but they stuck to each other all the way through, bound by love, politics and a fair bit of my Mum’s band-aids and duct tape.

I started exhibiting Fixit tendencies early in life:  Encouraged by my father  who swallowed hook line and sinker the post-war  optimism  about  the power of science as a social panacea,  I developed a passion for technology, particularly electronics.    When my parents’ giant walnut-veneered valve wireless radio finally bit the dust,  when I was ten or eleven, I acquired it and soon fixed it.  I plugged in a hundred feet of wire for an antenna, which criss-crossed my bedroom ceiling, suspended from an elegant, but  utterly pointless system of hooks and pulleys.   I would eavesdrop with an illicit thrill  to the police band, and through it eventually learned the  complete Romeo Alpha Delta India Oscar Alpha Lima Papa Hotel Alpha Bravo Echo Tango.

Nowadays,  my Mr Fixit tendencies have led to my office/recording studio being an animal rescue centre for computers  and music equipment.   I have dozens of keyboards and speakers, PC carcasses,  their brains, their gizzards and their CD trays.  Late at night,  particularly during a thunderstorm, I put Bach’s Toccata and Fugue on loud, and laugh demonically as I create an entire living computer, out of an array of lifeless parts, or revitalize a moribund one.   

All of this attitude originates, of course, in a very healthy awareness of the value and cost of our natural resources.    Recycling was the standard practice in 1950’s Britain, before “recycling” even had a name.    Plastic was a rarity.  Glass, paper and food were recycled or reused as a matter of course.  My mother still has “white-metal” cooking utensils, made of recycled WWII junk metal.  To the British of the 1950’s,  America, with its flashy consumerism was regarded (with no little envy) as a country of garish, ostentatious, heartless and above all tasteless excess.  

The trouble with the Fixit attitude is that the way things work nowadays means it’s often cheaper to scrap than to fix.  This inequality is, to my mind,  one of the evillest and ultimately most destructive aspects of  Capitalism.  Capitalism, by nature is antithetical to thrift.   But anyway, there it is, an undeniable fact:  And it means that if you’re a Fixit kind of person you end up  “pouring good money after bad”.  For instance:   The beautiful, famously reliable and economical Grey Volvo Amazon with Red Leatherette upholstery  which my father bought  new for £1,400 in 1966,  had cost me about £20,000 in repairs by the time I finally gave it away for free to a neighbour in 1992.    For the last five years I owned it, it had become everything my father had not bought it for:   It was totally unreliable and was costing me a fortune.  It had definitely outlived its use.  But I just found it impossible to just let the thing go – so many memories, so many Road Trips.  

Actually, now I come to think of it, I guess it was the trauma of what I did to Mingus that made me so afraid of scrapping the car.

Mingus was my hamster when I was twelve.  It was a nasty brute that gave my latent nurturing tendencies absolutely zero chance for expression.  On my first and last attempt to stroke it, it bit me, which required a Tetanus shot.  I would  get my own back by devising fiendishly difficult mazes for it to solve, for which the reward was a single shelled peanut.   One Winter day Mingus, cold and fed up with mazes and peanuts, decided to hibernate.  When a hamster hibernates its body temperature decreases to almost the same as the surrounding atmosphere – that is to say, it feels cold to the touch.  And it breathes ever so shallowly, perhaps once a minute.  And its heart rate drops to almost nothing too, so that to all intents and purposes it looks dead. 

You see where I’m going with this. 

So the peacefully sleeping Mingus was literally thrown onto the compost heap  in my back garden, where he was promptly gobbled up by the local crows.   A few days later I realized my terrible mistake, when a more knowledgeable fellow hamster-owner asked me if Mingus has started to hibernate as hers had just done. 

The moral of which is “Don’t Throw A Hibernating Hamster on The Compost Heap”.   I’ve sewn this into a sampler, which adorns my office wall, and is no doubt partly the reason for the profusion of un-recycled computers there.

Okay, now it’s time to cut to the chase:  My twenty-three-year-old marriage:  Is it a clapped out Grey Volvo Amazon with red leatherette upholstery, or is it merely a hibernating hamster?  The truth, as with so many things, is that it is both of these. 

And over the next few weeks,  my defiant  and wounded marriage,  will come to and end.  I hope that thereby our love, which after all, is what really matters in life,  will be salvaged.

Mum answers the door.   To the lines of sorrow in her face I add one more.