There I sat, playing a game of "Dinosaur Race" with LittleBear. Surprisingly, this does not involve me having to run up and down pretending to be a dinosaur, it's actually a board game that finds yet another permutation on the "teaching children to count and pattern match" board games churned out in apparently infinite variety by Orchard Toys. I heard a peculiar yodelling noise, but the radio was on, and the front window was open, so I shrugged and went back to my Pachycephalosaurus. Then it happened again. And I realised that perhaps I recognised the dulcet tones of BigBear.
I trotted upstairs to check what was going on, confident that I was imagining things. To my surprise I found BigBear trapped in the shower. Stark naked. Holding a mostly-detached bifold shower door in both hands, to prevent the whole thing crashing down. Detached enough it couldn't support its own weight. Attached enough it couldn't be removed. Off I scampered to find a screwdriver to finish the detachment, trying not to laugh too much at the predicament BigBear had found himself in. And I grovelled on the floor of the shower removing the final screws, until BigBear asked, rather plaintively, "could you at least pass me my pants?"
Fortunately we have alternative washing facilities, so BigBear was able to retire, dignity somewhat restored, to shower in peace un-assaulted by malevolent, malfunctioning bathroom fittings. The rest of the day passed relatively uneventfully.
I woke with a start in the early morning. I'd heard a noise. Listening again, I heard the faintest high-pitched keening noise, so I leapt out of bed and dashed into LittleBear's room... where he slept peacefully and quietly. Stumbling back into my own bed, I heard the sound again, and realised that it was in fact a rather peculiar whistling-out-breath snore of BigBear's.
Aside from featuring instances of me hearing a faint noise and it turning out to be BigBear, nothing much seems to tie these two events together. You're beginning to wonder if I've lost the plot completely. Well, no, not completely.
The thing that connects the events is in fact the broken shower door. Because I then spent the next hour and a half lying awake plotting in my head the various manoeuvres I would need to undertake to mend the shower door. Whether I would be able to drill out the sheared off screw. Whether the soft aluminium would withstand that. Whether the door could be mounted back to front, or upside down, to make use of different mounting holes that haven't already been chewed up. Whether it would be possible to hold the shower door in position and screw it in place single-handed, or I'd have to wait for a weekend so BigBear could help. Whether I should Get A Man* In. Whether in fact the whole shower door should be condemned, and a new one bought. In which case I'd definitely need to Get A Man* In, but it wouldn't need to be a full-blown bathroom fitting man*, except it would need to be someone who'd definitely be capable of forming a watertight seal because I am categorically NOT returning to the nightmare days of water oozing out around a poorly fitted shower door and dripping through the downstairs ceiling. And. And. And. Round and round in my head for an hour and a half. How many different ways is it possible to think about removing sheared stainless screws from an aluminium channel? Quite a lot, as it turns out.
Five minutes of giggling at BigBear's discomfiture was categorically not worth a non-functioning shower, 90 minutes less sleep than I wanted, and all the stress of getting the bloody thing sorted out.
* Or woman.
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