Colm O'Regan: There's history in how we 'fix' the weird things in our houses

Comedian and Irish Examiner columnist Colm O'Regan pictured in Cork. Picture: Denis Minihane.

Necessity mightn’t always be the mother of invention but necessity will definitely mind invention while its mother has to do a few messages.

I like the small domestic inventions in all our houses. The little hacks that only work in one place and situation. They will never be backed by venture capital. They are ephemeral. 

They only exist where storage is bad, or design is weird, or money is short. But they have their own little genius, and I think we should all look at our weird house stuff and record them. 

Because when ‘the thing gets fixed’, the workaround is gone. And with it, a bit of the memory of the person who invented it.

My parents were definitely child-minders of invention.

GOOD RECEPTION

Years ago I came home from The Big Job In Dublin one Christmas. I was, as usual, full of notions. 

Ready to be impatient with my parents because I was no doubt right about everything. We had systems in my job. Procedures. Here was chaos.

Back then - and I deeply miss this - one way of catching up on what had been happening was to see what photos my father had developed. 

They weren’t all great photos but I am so grateful for them now. Fields at different times of the year. A dog-rose in bloom. The dog chasing a football. An untidy kitchen. 

This time was different. Most of the photos in the Agfa envelope were of the TV. On the TV, Martin King was doing the weather forecast. 

I couldn’t figure out what my father was doing. That’s because I didn’t have his lateral-thinking brain.

I asked him and he told me. Turned out I was looking at the TV when I should have been looking at the aerial. 

Dad had taken photos of his aerial in positions for good TV3 reception. Because Coronation Street had moved to TV3. 

An entirely homemade solution to an external threat. Not only the moving of Coronation Street but also the moving of the aerial by interfering adult children.

My mother would save on stamps by writing slightly cryptic messages on the envelope of letters she forwarded.

“We’ll see you at the weekend. If we’re in Ballincollig the key will be in the usual place.” No WhatsApp encryption needed. The message was hidden in plain sight. No hacker could decipher it. Well, I suppose they could. The key was clearly under the gas drum. But still.

GAS TICKETS

Neither my father or mother needed a degree at MIT to fix another problem.

There was the television where the channel-changing knob broke and my parents discovered that the knob of the Para-Glo paraffin heater fitted it. You don’t see so many Para-Glos now. 

The Japanese kerosene heater that just burned oil in the corner of the room and let the fumes out into the rest of the room.

Visitors to my parents’ house were puzzled to find the microwave in the sitting room. Food arrived from two different directions as if prepared by competing chefs. 

It was there because there wasn’t enough room on the kitchen counter for one because, well, there wasn’t a kitchen counter. (Old farmhouses are often grudgingly designed for humans and more with an eye on where the layers of mash might be put, rather than where you’d prepare human food).

And more recently in my life I appear to have married an “inventy woman”. 

My wife may not have been the only one, but she invented it in our house: using a vegetable peeler to slice cheese. It works a dream. The cheese slicer oligarchs are panicking.

So look around your odd houses with the mad stuff that infuriates you but that inspires you to think of a workaround. There’s history in that. 

And before you ‘fix’ a thing, take a photo of the workaround.