'If you try to fix stuff, you usually end up making things much worse'

We had the same au pair, Kate, for 10 years, which is longer than we've had one of our children. There was a brief break when she left to get married, but then she came back with her husband. A month ago, imminently expecting a baby of their own, they finally moved out. Now if my children need parenting when my wife is at work, they must make do with me, unless the painter is here.

Although we required very little of Kate in the way of au pair duties in recent years (which is just as well; she had a job), one gets very used to having a free babysitter available at nine minutes' notice, or to being able to go away without having to think about what will happen to the cat. Two weeks ago we did go away for the weekend without thinking about the cat, so now I know what will happen: he will figure out how to open the cupboard, push the sack of cat food on to the floor and gnaw a hole the size of his head through it. This brings the number of doors he can open that he shouldn't be able to open - if you include his defeat of the cat flap's optional one-way setting - to four, and spells bad news for the hamster.

The cat episode made us wonder whether we should attempt to recreate the old arrangement. In principle I was against the idea, primarily because if people are in the house during my normal working hours, it makes it very difficult for me to eat an entire pack of chocolate digestives while watching Murder, She Wrote. But this inconvenience paled alongside my wife's scheme to make a permanent babysitter out of me, so we found new lodgers.

I won't use their real names, because at this point they have no idea what they've walked into. I won't even use their real initials, because her real initial is I - you can see how confusing that would get - and his is either C or K, I'm not sure. So I'll call them P and Q.

Q has the air of a man who is handy with things and, I can't help noticing, a tool box. Kate's husband Mario never had such an air, or any tools he ever showed me. Within hours of P and Q moving in, I discover that all the stair carpets have been tacked back into place. Excellent, I think, I'd been meaning to complain about the stair carpet. I see some tiles have been regrouted as well. I can grout, too, I think, but good luck to him.

A few days later, I walk into the kitchen. The youngest and his mother are standing by the sink.

"Mum, it's weird," he says. "The lock on our bathroom door works again."

"Q fixed it," she says. "He's good like that. He just gets on with things."

"Yeah. He's like the anti-Dad."

"How dare you," I say.

"What? You never fix anything!" he shouts. "You always say you'll do it later, later, later, but then you just don't."

"I fix many things you don't know about. Things you never knew were broken." I realise I'm staring at a drawer that is hanging off.

"Name one thing."

"I prefer to work in secret," I say, perching gingerly on the chair we call the bad chair, because the back legs shoot out from under you.

A few days later, Q puts a nail through a heating pipe while securing a loose floorboard. The call-out plumber he rings manages to disable our boiler while repairing the leak. I see this as a small vindication of my quietly held theory that if you try to fix stuff, you usually just end up making things much worse. This is true of everything, even relationships - although the only time I ever told anyone that, she broke up with me, which again sort of proved my point.