"The roof needs painting," said my boyfriend.
"I know," I said. "I’ll get a man in."
"I am a man," he said. "I’m a Yorkshireman."
Being from Yorkshire seems to mean that there is nothing you cannot do, or withstand, and absolutely nothing you would pay another person to do.
"I am a one-stop shop. You will never need another tradesman again."
The Yorkshireman is already a tradesman, which is a bonus, and stoic. Not stoic like the mayor means — when you are forced to endure something because rather than not as bad as it could be, things are instead very bad; but stoic like when I drive into town from Pūrākaunui to do the grocery shopping, the Yorkshireman bikes in, for fun. The first elevation is 6km straight up.
When he gets to town, he is not tired. "Shall we go for a swim?" he says.
From what I have learnt about Yorkshire childhoods, it seems likely he spent his living with 150 siblings in a shoebox in the middle of the motorway, getting up each morning two hours before he went to sleep to eat a handful of cold gravel before working down the mill for 14 hours a day for 6 cents a month and being thrashed to sleep every night by his father. But you try telling young people that today and they won’t believe you.
After he has been here for the weekend, it takes me three days of going to bed at 7.30pm to recover.
When we first met, it was nothing but rainbows for months. Literally. Everywhere we were there would be a rainbow over the landscape, refracting off a surface, on a billboard. He reckoned the universe was trying to tell us something. I said that kind of crystal-waving twonkery was up there with sound healing and reiki, but all the non-stop rainbows eventually wore me down and I’m prepared to concede that maybe, just maybe, some things are meant to be.
I’ve never trusted a guy I was dating to do anything at my house properly, or at all, but after the Yorkshireman built me some shelves and I came home from work and just stood there, blinking, I surrendered.
Turns out he is also a member of a secret society which he persistently and over-strenuously denies the existence of: the English Mafia. This seems to be, as far as I’ve been able to piece together from observation and eavesdropping, an interconnected, clandestine network of English immigrants (bar Londoners) who operate behind the scenes, eating sausages and beans, doing secret handshakes and constantly going to see a man about a dog. The English Mafia know where all the bodies are buried, metaphorically, I think, should you ever need some timber for your new bird’s gaff.
Happiest pottering around, chopping firewood, decapitating the grass, spraying the slippery deck and setting fire to parts of the garden that seem weedy, or too weak to fight him — rather than be annoyed that someone should take such liberties (how dare someone come into my life and try to make it better), this rainbow-endorsed union feels like being in a proper couple, with one person able to do DIY, whether it’s a leaky faucet, a malfunctioning appliance or a squeaky door and the other person ... um ... OK, I’m not going to start wearing heels and a ’50s dress and bend over all the time, dusting and looking over my shoulder, but I do smile a lot.
