Wuff with the smooth: The trampoline

I have often said that I use this column as a form of catharsis and on the basis of a recent discovery, it must be true.

It’s true because I wrote the following column weeks ago and then promptly forgot that I’d written it. I only found it again when looking for an entirely different document on my laptop. This forgetfulness tells me I was able to unburden from my soul the terrible events of one particular day and move on.

Have a read and see what you think…

At the time of writing, I feel as though I have been hit by a bus, then put through a mangle and then danced on.

Saying I am sore would be a gross understatement, like saying that Mrs Brown’s Boys is a bit rubbish. I am in agony – and the pain isn’t merely physical.

Santa (in his wisdom) managed to wrangle a trampoline down the chimney last Christmas, although the fat, lazy H stopped short of assembly. That task fell to me yesterday (the Sunday when Ireland were rugby-ing against Scotland at Murrayfield about a month ago). I had intended on watching the rugby but Waffle and the trampoline and the infuriating instructions had other ideas.

If you’ve ever assembled a 12-ft trampoline on your own you might appreciate what I went through but add in design flaws, those aforementioned instructions and a hairy thief and I would contend that my experience was more extreme than climbing Everest in the nip.

First of all, yesterday was just a degree or two above freezing, which didn’t help matters when trying to manipulate fiddily bolts with numbing digits.

Next consider that there was a vicious easterly howling across the land, which resulted in the useless instructions being repeatedly blown across the garden. Consider too how peeved I became when some of the parts didn’t fit together as the designers had intended and I had to correct the flaws using a wooden mallet. I may also have struck my cold left thumb from time to time with said mallet as I was trying to fit things together. Everest. In the nip.

In all honestly, things had begun smoothly enough and I was pleasantly surprised when I unboxed all the bits and pieces of the trampoline before assembly. There weren’t too many and in some instances, instead of bolts, things were supposed to click into place. You know the phrase: Don’t judge a book by its cover. Well, I have discovered that a person shouldn’t judge a trampoline by its bits.

I won’t bore you with a blow by blow account of the protracted fiasco except to say that I started the trampoline at 11.45am and I didn’t get it finished until 5pm. Within that time-frame I completely lost the head six times – and to say the head was gone would be a gross understatement, like saying working at the bog isn’t much craic.

The head first went when I realised the pieces wouldn’t fit together and I had to use the mallet and then again, when I built a section only to later realise it was wrong and it would have to be dismantled.

The worst part though, was when Waffle started stealing the instructions and I consequently lost the head twice and on both those occasions, I let a roar outta me, you wudda heard me in Fintona. Both times, I had to stop what I was doing and retrieve the instructions before them were chewed into confetti.

The fifth time I lost the head was when I realised the instructions were completely useless and so I crunched them into a ball and fired them into the hedge.

True to form (that form being a thran fool), Waffle retrieved the instructions just as I clicked the last piece of the trampoline support beam into place – five and a quarter hours after I had first started. Belatedly Waffle spat the instructions at my feet and even without bending down I noticed something on the front cover that I hadn’t previously noticed. I can’t remember the exact words but it more or less said that assembly for this particular trampoline was a three-person job. Surprisingly, I didn’t lose the head for the sixth time at that point. The assembly was, after all, finished.

The sixth head-loss came as I was headed back to the house to inform the little humans that the trampoline was finished.

On the way I happened to stop and glance back at my towering achievement and who was standing, leg cocked, peeing up against the trampoline? One Waffle J Devlin.

You wudda heared me in Fintona.

Everest. In the nip. Alone.