The change of season is so sudden it catches me by surprise. In the morning I go to the shops in a T-shirt and think: why is this trip so unpleasant? Then I notice the sting of a cold wind on my bare arms and think: this is what the weather is supposed to be like in October. I try to remember the last chilly days of spring. How did I leave things? Did I have a coat? If so, where did I put it? It is past nightfall when I glance at the overnight temperatures on my phone and realise it’s time to bring the tortoise in for the winter. It takes about half an hour searching by the light of my phone to find him – wedged between the legs of an old iron plant stand, behind a bench. I have to lie on my belly on the wet bricks to prise him out. “You’ll like it inside,” I say. The tortoise hisses in protest. After leaving him tucked under the dog’s bed, I find my wife in the living room watching television. “Why are you covered in leaves?” she says. “I was getting the tortoise,” I say. “Why is it warm in here?” “I was just thinking that,” she says. “It’s never warm in here.” I walk over to the radiator and rest my hand on it. “Why is this hot?” I say. “What’s going on?” “It must be something to do with Mark,” she says. Mark is the man who is building new cupboards in our bedroom. He’s also putting boards in our newly discovered loft, as well as tackling half a dozen other small jobs that those first two have occasioned. These days, when good things happen for no reason, Mark tends to get the credit. “What could this possibly have to do with Mark?” I say, touching the radiator again. “I don’t know,” my wife says. “I’ll ask him.” Mark’s overall competence may be changing our lives for the better, but it’s also highlighting the extent to which my overall incompetence has, over many years, kept our lives the same, or made them slightly worse. I am not simply content with doing a half-assed job, but prone to boast about it, too. A week ago I sent my sons a picture of three sections of newly installed garden trellis, captioned “LOOK ON MY WORKS YE MIGHTY AND DESPAIR”. The older one texted back saying, “Wow did you do that?” Yes, I say, I did. But that’s not the whole story. The photo is artfully angled to make the trellis look straighter than it is, and so you can’t see that the first upright post is held in place with only three expansion bolts, instead of the required four, because I couldn’t get the fourth one to line up with the pre-drilled holes. Also, there are no pictures of me crying. And while it turned out that those three bolts were more than sufficient, the mistake set a dangerous precedent: the third post along only has two bolts holding it and, had I not run out of trellis sections, I would have sooner or later put my one-bolt-is-probably-plenty theory to the test. My wife has now commissioned Mark to rebuild the rest of our collapsed garden wall. He’ll probably end up putting the trellis on top of it as well. Mark’s continued presence is changing my life for the better, although I have to get up slightly earlier, because it’s embarrassing if I’m still in bed when he turns up for work. Late on Monday morning I walk across the garden from my office shed to the house. The day is bright and cold. The tortoise is in the middle of the kitchen floor, eating a lettuce. Above my head I can hear Mark hammering. My wife comes in. “He says the loft will be finished today,” she says. “Good,” I say. “I can’t wait to fill it up with useless shit.” “I also asked him about the warm living room,” she says. “And?” I say. “Because of the cupboards he had to move a radiator,” she says. “So his son, who’s a plumber, came round.” “His son?” I say. “Anyway, when they drained down the system they found a leak, and now that it’s fixed the pressure has gone back up, or something.” “His son is a plumber?” “So that may be why the central heating actually works,” she says. I look down at the tortoise, his head angled sideways to get more purchase on the lettuce. “Told you you’d like it in here,” I say.