The new hinges have been in a paper bag in the press since the first week of December.
I bought them in a hardware shop in Tralee – proper galvanised hinges, the man said, and I took him at his word – and then I came home and put them in the press and did not think about them again until January got cold enough that the gate started refusing to open at all rather than just sticking badly. There’s a difference. Sticking badly, you could negotiate. Refusing entirely is a different matter.
So on Saturday I got the bag out and found a screwdriver and a hammer and went outside in my coat and stood looking at the gate for longer than I’d like to admit.
The problem with the old hinges wasn’t immediately obvious once I was actually looking at them. They seemed fine. Slightly rusty, a little loose, but fine in the way that things which are causing you daily grief always seem fine when you’re trying to remove them. I got two of the screws out and the third one stripped almost immediately, which I had not anticipated, and then I was committed to a project that had already gone wrong and I was still in the first five minutes.
Tom came up the lane at some point. He didn’t offer to help. He stood at the gate and watched, which was somehow worse. Bess sat beside him and also watched.
‘How’s it going,’ he said. Not quite a question.
‘Grand,’ I said, which we both knew was not accurate.
He stood there another minute and then walked on. I appreciated that he didn’t say anything useful.
The stripped screw came out eventually with a pair of pliers and a word I won’t write here. The old hinges came off. The new hinges went on in a way that seemed right but turned out to be about three millimetres off, which doesn’t sound like much until you try to close the gate and it catches on the stone post and stops dead. I took one hinge off and repositioned it. It caught on the other side. I repositioned it again. It was dark by four o’clock, as January tends to insist on, and I was working with a torch balanced on top of the wall and the cold coming off the stone in waves.
The gate closes now. You have to lift it slightly as you push – not much, just a little – and then it latches. I’ve done it enough times that it already feels normal.
I left the old hinges on top of the wall because I didn’t know what to do with them and I was tired. They were still there on Sunday when Donal rang. I told him about the gate and he asked why I hadn’t called Tom to do it, and I said because I wanted to do it myself, which is true but also not quite the whole story.
The whole story is that I knew it would go badly and I did it anyway, which is a form of optimism I can’t seem to shake.