You Tube keeps you warm

I hate to start with a cliché, but we really can learn from our children. Let me illustrate how this has hit home for me through the use of You Tube. It started when we had a couple families around to our home to join us welcome in 2011 on New Years Eve.

The boys decamped to one room to follow the aged old tradition of shooting the bad guys. Before I was a child it was with toy soldiers, in my childhood it was with Action Man and now it’s using the paddles of an X Box. The girls headed to the largest empty room to start planning a dance routine to latest Olly Murs album (2010 Runner up for the UK’s X Factor).

During the great tidy up the next day I found that the CD player that the girls were using was broken. Using all the deductive powers of Sherlock Holmes I asked my daughter how the dancing had gone and to my surprise she was full of how they had learned a new routine. And how did she play the CD I enquired? “Oh we couldn’t get that to work its broken. We just logged on to You Tube and followed the dance routines there.”

Fast forward a month to one of the last precious weekends before we have a screaming baby in the house, and I came home from work Friday to find the radiator had mysteriously fallen off the wall in my son’s room. Don’t get me started, I have a stream of consciousness on that little gem, but we’re not here to explore the father son dynamic of family life.

Following a ram raid on B&Q for extra strength raw plugs, I drained and re hung the radiator and after proudly packing my tools away tried not to think too much about it. The following morning when we needed our central heating system it started making noises like my wife’s stomach after a curry. Loathed to pay for an emergency plumber I spent half an hour staring the big thing that holds the hot water in the cupboard that keeps the towels warm neither me or the kids were starting to smell any sweeter.

So with the sweet sound of my wife’s nagging ringing in my ears I headed to my new source of how to do everything, You Tube. A charming man with a Yorkshire accent helped me discover I have a combi boiler, how to check it’s water pressure, how to increase it’s water pressure, and most importantly by combing all of this new knowledge - how to stop the nagging ringing in my ears and stop us all from smelling.