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Cutting it in a woman's world
Conrad Astley28/10/2005
I NEVER paid attention during woodwork.
My attempts to stick a bathroom cabinet up meant it was hanging
precariously off the wall several months later, and I admit to
having imaginatively placed posters over huge gaping holes which
have been left in the plasterwork of various flats.
So when a DIY course came up, I thought this was the chance to
learn these vital skills I missed out on during my misspent
youth.
There was one small problem - the two-hour sessions were intended
for ladies.
Organisers at Black and Decker had advertised it, saying "as men
become more and more lazy around the house, women who are a little
tired of their husbands and boyfriends not doing the odd job can
learn for themselves how to put up shelves and even make their own
bread board!"
However, I didn't see any reason why I couldn't tag along and find
out how to make a bread board for myself.
After all, the one I'd bought for a couple of quid from the
supermarket just didn't cut it any more.
So I turned up at the Lowry Designer Outlet Mall to take part in
one of the sessions, as the only lazy bloke in a room full of women
intent on bettering themselves.
Presumably, they'd only ever sat around in the drawing room making
embroidered pictures of little fluffy kittens before and had never
picked up a power tool before in their lives.
But then again, neither had I since that incident during
woodwork.
I was thrown in with a smaller group of women, and we made our way
around various sections, where experts talked us through the manly
equipment.
Some of this did come across as a Black and Decker sales pitch -
with a handy guide to what was available in the stores - but it was
also quite interesting.
They talked us through various drill bits, from one used on a
plasterboard wall to a full-on masonry bit, used to bore straight
into solid stone. Nice!
Fortunately, I was much better at this than the women, for the
simple reason that you had to put your weight behind the machine,
and I had more of that than they did.
Next came the serious part, where we went through the various
stages to making that elusive perfect bread board.
First was a section on sawing, with one of Black and Decker's top
men telling us about the various implements for hacking through
bits of wood, plastic and even metal.
Our job, chopping off pieces of pine about 2ft square, wasn't the
most complicated in the world, but still required a steady hand and
a good power tool that could do the job in seconds, instead of that
cumbersome hand-held implement which used to veer off in every
direction apart from the one you wanted to cut.
Next came the really fun part - grouting.
This involved a fairly specialist bit of kit that even the most
fanatical garage-dwelling DIY enthusiast would be fairly unlikely
to possess.
Even the expert using it told us when he was a joiner, his workshop
had one of these machines, which nobody knew how to use until he
read a book on the subject.
We used the device to cut the square bit of wood into a circle -
and our bread boards begun taking shape.
Unfortunately, mine slipped in the process, and so we had to begin
again, carving an even smaller circle inside the original circle to
do away with the error.
The timber-cutting expert insisted this was his fault, as he hadn't
fitted it to the wood properly, and I wasn't going to argue with
him.
However, this did have the unfortunate effect that my board was
much smaller than anyone else's, but I consoled myself by saying it
could be used as a cheese board, which is something I didn't
possess.
The process was finally completed by smoothing the board down with
various sanding implements.
Apart from my new cheese board, I didn't go away empty handed, and
left the event proudly clutching not only a free electric screw
driver but a laminated certificate from the University of Black and
Decker.
The cheese board took pride of place in my fridge, while the screw
driver was, of course, placed in the special drawer reserved for
things that are unlikely to ever leave their packaging.
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