Don’t follow in my footsteps. I run into walls.

Anon.

Apologies if the title has led you to believe that you are about to read an article about America’s celebrated architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s most famous project.

You are not.

You’re about to read a story about how accident-prone I am. And I’m afraid if you’re going to follow this blog with any kind of regularity, you might as well get to used to it.

For I, dear reader, am clumsy. Not every single minute of every single day. But frequently and without mercy. I fall down things. I fall over things. I drop things. I accidentally bash one thing off another thing and end up breaking them both. I slip. I trip. I spill. At school I laid claim to the dubious honour of having most entries in the accident book. Not just for my year group. But from the beginning of time. 

If I am carrying something precious from A to B, I say a prayer. If I am carrying something precious that belongs to someone else from A to B, I say two. 

When I was around 13 I bought my mum two china mugs for her birthday. I didn’t want to carry them through the house in case she saw me with the bundle. Why, I’m not quite sure, though it seemed important at the time. I can only imagine that I thought she would use x-ray vision to see through the bag, thereby spoiling the surprise. So I set them on the outside windowsill of my ground-floor bedroom, headed round the house and through the front door, meaning to open the window and collect them from inside my room. Far away from my mother and her startling solid-defying vision obviously. Unfortunately (though not in the least surprisingly) I forgot that my bedroom window opened outwards. As I threw it open, it immediately and with one swift motion, swept the mugs onto the concrete path below with an ominous and sickening crash. The mugs were smashed into eleventy-gazillion pieces. I had owned them for a total of an hour an half. 

I thought this was all quite normal until I met The Beloved. He has a step with all the surety of a mountain goat and was amused and alarmed in turn at early examples of my affliction. How he laughed the first time I accidentally walked into a plate-glass window! After the third time he began to mutter about permanent brain damage. 

The clumsiness gets worse if I am tired or distracted. If I am under pressure I try to do too many things at once and my limbs turn into a circular blur, like Tom after Jerry has left a puddle of oil for him to slip on. This often bodes disaster for the household chores. If I try to do too many things in too much of a rush everything just ends up in a mangled heap at the bottom of the stairs. Usually with me lying on top. With two broken toes (true story). 

So one day I was looking at my to-do list and I thought “You know what would really spice things up today? Cleaning out the fish tank!”. (To be fair, I think it was the fish writing ‘Mayday!’ on the gunk inside the glass that really forced my hand). But the very idea was a mistake. There were already too many things on the list for that day. It was not the right time to squeeze in one more. But I never learn. I should also say that the fish tank is not mine. It’s the Small One’s. But she’s nine. And I am weak. And of a nervous disposition. 

Having lugged the clean de-chlorinated water up the stairs and lifted all the faux plant life and plastic ornaments out, and cleaned them, it was time to begin syphoning out the dirty water in preparation for the water change.

It’s a tricky job. I have to make sure that one end of the hose remains in the plastic bucket catching the old water (because who would want dirty fish-poo water all over the carpet? More on that later) and the other end remains in the tank hoovering up all the detritus in the water, and in the substrate, whilst simultaneously not vacuuming up any of the fish. It takes a lot of concentration. But I was in the zone. Mindful of the to-do list, I hoovering at top speed. All the fish were accounted for. All was well.

Once the water level in the tank had drained to the requisite point, however, I began to be aware of a curious anomaly. Whilst the water level in the tank had steadily lowered, the water level in the plastic bucket catching it had not risen in a commensurate fashion. This really bamboozled me. What a mystery! Where could it have gone? Evaporated? Slipped into an invisible wormhole? 

It was then that I noticed the unusual trickling sound. This was alarming as I could not recall that a trickling sound had ever before accompanied fish tank cleaning sessions. I looked closer at the bucket to ascertain from whence it came and suddenly noticed the water. Not safely contained within the bucket as it should have been. But running. Freely. In a beautiful fast-moving stream across Small One’s bedroom carpet. 

On closer inspection it became clear that the bucket had not one, but two, long splits in the plastic from which all the water was joyfully pouring. The river was, by this time, already well on its way to creating a delta, having already formed several tributaries, which were drawing the smelly fish-poo and other detritus-filled water under the bed, desk and wardrobe respectively. How long exactly the water had been pouring everywhere I couldn’t tell. I had been too busy not murdering the fish to notice. 

“EEP” came the strangled scream of shock from my throat. Some very complicated mathematical equations in my head quickly led me to the conclusion that there was now approximately 40-50 litres of water sloshing across my daughter’s (new) bedroom carpet. 

I did, at least, have the presence of mind to drop the syphon, thereby preventing any further water being filtered through the now useless bucket. I rushed to the airing cupboard and began ferrying every single towel in the house to the scene of devastation. Soon Small One’s floor resembled a locker room after PE, having a mismatched jumble of very wet towels covering its entire surface. It also smelled like a hot day at the docks after the tide has gone out. 

Plus, there was still so much water. So so much flipping water. It was still moving, pooling on top of the towels and escaping into every nook and cranny. The Build-A-Bears must have soaked up 10 litres alone.

Remembering the only thing I ever learned from geography, namely that wet things are more absorbent than dry things, I began lifting the towels, with the aim of wringing them out before placing them back on the carpet in order to absorb more water. As it turns out however, wringing water out of an enormous soaking-wet freezing-cold chenille beach towel with “Fun in the Sun!” written on it, is much harder than one might have imagined. It would have been easier to wring out the Build-A-Bears and mop up the spillage with them.

At this point I stopped wringing the towels and started wringing my hands. What to do? What to do? If only there was such a thing as a ‘carpet syphon’ I thought. Why had no-one thought of such a thing before? For the 110th time I thought about how I really should keep a list of all the amazing inventions I think of mid-catastrophe. And then it came to me. Such a thing had been invented before! Surely carpet cleaners could suck water out of carpets?

One phone call and an hour and a half later and two men in a van turned up. They were very cheerful and regaled me with tales of having seen it all before. They had initially worried me by suggesting that the carpet might need to be lifted, industrially cleaned, then dried and re-fitted (quelle horreur). But when they surveyed the damage, much to my profound relief, they pronounced this to be unnecessary. They lugged a giant sucky machine and some smaller blowy machines and various other brushy and swooshy things up the stairs. Within half an hour Small One’s bedroom carpet was once again smelling sweetly (possibly even more sweetly than before) and gently steaming as the blowy machines finished drying it. 

Then, disaster averted at last, exhausted, following the longest fish-tank-cleaning-related episode in history, it was time to collect Small One from school. Upon return she looked with some surprise at the industrial fans now filling her room. 

“Oh don’t worry about those” I said airily. “I decided to get your carpet cleaned.” 

Small One computed this for a second and then said, 

“Did you use the water from the fish tank to clean the carpet mum?”

I followed the line of her gaze and realised that I had forgotten to actually put the fresh water back in the tank. The fish were still confusedly swimming around in about 5 inches of water. They had to keep easing past each other like polite British tourists at the breakfast bar. 

Obviously I immediately rectified this mistake and soon they were once more easily gliding around in their sparkling (ish) aquatic paradise. For her part, Small One, who was lying on the bed keeping one eye on me and one eye on her tablet during this performance, languidly remarked (with the air of someone else who has also seen it all before), 

“I just can’t help feeling there’s something you aren’t telling me mum”. 

Oh, if the walls (and the fish) could talk.