Anton Savage: Helping a friend out can give rise to that sinking feeling
Thanks to YouTube, we may be in a golden age for taking on one’s own DIY jobs, but lending a hand in someone else’s house is a whole other world of anxiety
I never understood the notion that a good deed could leave you burdened with perpetual responsibility until recently, when I fixed a friend’s sink.
I have fixed a lot of things over the years, none of them well. But they always fell into two categories; stuff I owned, or stuff someone else owned where I was The Help and therefore not liable for cock-ups. This somewhat Jesuitical definition has, for instance, absolved me of all feelings of guilt for paving the front step of a friend’s house with a fall towards the middle, so it holds a puddle of rainwater for days after the surrounding county has dried up. It was his project. I was “helping”.