In my life, I have successfully fitted a few toilet seats. I am not sure what the collective noun is for toilet seats.
A parliament of toilet seats? A smack? A crash? A clattering?
No matter. The point being that it is one of the few things in my D.I.Y. skillset.
Which makes what happened last summer a mystery…
Somehow, my toilet seat had become loose to the point that both long metallic screw spindle thingies – to give them their improper name – had unscrewed themselves from the metal discs attached to the toilet seat and fallen out through the holes of the toilet and onto the bathroom floor.
In normal land, I would just lift off the toilet seat, screw them back into the discs, align them back up to drop through the toilet’s holes and attach the washers and retighten the nuts to make the seat secure again.
Except, I had totally forgotten that was the way to reattach a toilet seat. I took one look at the long metallic screw spindle thingies and thought how the hell am I going to be able to lie on the floor with my head beneath the toilet bowl, align the seat discs over the toilet holes and blindly screw the spindles upwards through the toilet holes and into the discs? It would be Mission Impossible.
And so I left it. Having removed the toilet seat completely, day after day, I would sit on the uncomfortable, cold porcelain bowl. I spent three months thinking this was too tricky and I would only address the problem when I had a visitor.
Surely, that day would come?
And it did… In October.
I had received a letter telling me of an upcoming annual boiler inspection. Now, unless the boiler inspector wanted to check my bathroom radiator for air pockets, there was no need to fix the toilet seat. He wouldn’t have to visit the bathroom to know the seat wasn’t there.
But I thought I’d try and fix it anyway.
Like all things D.I.Y. related, I sought some help from YouTube. Here, it was explained to me how to properly reattach a toilet seat in exactly the same manner that I had previously reattached many toilet seats.
It was a Eureka moment.
I thought two things…
Firstly, that this was a genius idea and secondly, how had I possibly forgotten all of this?
And then I berated myself for being such an idiot for unnecessarily sitting on a cold, uncomfortable seatless toilet bowl for the best part of three months for the sake of a D.I.Y. job that would have taken ten minutes.
On the morning of the boiler inspector’s arrival, I set to work. I diligently attached the spindles to the discs; put the rubber protective disc mats in place on the toilet, aligned everything up, dropped the spindles through the toilet’s holes, placed the washers and tightened the nuts. Job done. Hallelujah! Except it wasn’t…
The boiler inspector arrived and went about his boiler business. I, once again, pretended to do work on my PC whilst this time, secretly looking at toilet seats on Amazon.
At which point, after having run a few taps, the boiler inspector inevitably asked if he could borrow my toilet?
I wondered how this borrowing agreement would work in practice? Would he rip out my toilet and take it home with him and bring it back at the weekend? Would he want a toilet-share arrangement for alternate days? That would really be too inconvenient. Would there be a payment involved?
Would it be a regular thing, like taking semi-parental custody of a child, where every Saturday he’d take it to McDonald’s and sit miserably looking at the rain trickle down the window like he was a character on the fringes of society, examining his struggles in a black and white Jean-Luc Godard movie?
Despite the uncertainty, I agreed.
I mean, what was I supposed to say in this situation? I couldn’t leave him to do a rain dance in my kitchen, hopping from one foot to another. It’s not the kind of risk I could take because, after all, this was my washing day.
So now would be a test of my workmanship. He was in the bathroom for a while. Had something gone wrong? Had he been the victim of a strange toilet seat accident?
Strange toilet seats accidents make up 74% of casualties admitted to A&E departments on weekdays and twice as many at weekends.
Had the toilet seat come loose again and fallen off? Was he now fixing it himself? Did he have a dietary problem? Was he being ill or unable to control his bladder or bowels? Was he bleeding the radiator? Or worse, had he fallen down the toilet and was bleeding himself?
He eventually emerged, seemingly unscathed and thanked me.
When he finished, he got me to sign my signature with my finger on an Etch-a-Sketch pad and we both cursed modern technology for this ludicrous invention and mutually agreed that neither of our signatures looked remotely like our real signatures and it would take someone from Bletchley Park to identify who we actually were.
He left.
I went into the bathroom, lifted the seat and realised that it was wonkier than it was when I’d reattached it earlier and wondered how close he had been to becoming one of those 74%.
I decided to remove the seat completely and ordered a new one from Amazon to arrive the following day.
It arrived and I managed to fit it and connect it all together within ten minutes and polished my hand on my chest. In the space of 29 hours, I had become a D.I.Y. toilet seat fitting genius.
But my biggest pleasure was that this was my very first soft closing toilet seat.
It means that I can have races against it. Maybe others have discovered this too, which might explain all the strange toilet seat accidents?
Can I unfasten and pull down my jeans before the seat touches the bowl? Can I pull them up again and fasten them before the lid closes?
Can I successfully wash and dry my hands before the lid closes? Well yes, if I’m not doing the pulling jeans up and fastening challenge at the same time. It’s an either/or challenge really.
But who knew that toilet seats could be so much fun when you’re not spending three months trying to work out how to fit them?
Russ Writes 
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