You know it’s cold in the house when the Nutella completely solidifies in the kitchen cupboard. Yes, it was that cold. The boiler had, you see, decided that enough was enough.

It had been dropping rather heavy hints all over Christmas – depressurising and that sort of thing. But one morning last week, I woke up to the solidified Nutella and tried to repressurise the boiler... nothing.

“No problem,” I said. “I can fix this.”

Three days later, it was evident that I couldn’t fix it at all, my over-arching contribution to boiler repair being to stare quizzically at it with a spanner in my hand until it does what it’s supposed to.

That didn’t seem to be working. It was time to bring in a professional.

“What seems to be the problem?” asked the man who can fix boilers.

“It just keeps depressurising,” I grunted. For some reason, whenever I deal with tradesmen, I always lower my voice by several octaves and adopt a much more gruff, Northern tone.

I suspect it’s because on some subconscious level I must see having to call in someone to do a job around the house as an epic Man-Fail, and I must compensate by being as manly as possible in the face of this shame to claw back some dignity.

He set to work. “Was it firing OK?”

“On and off,” I barked like a distempered labrador.

“Did it seem to be filling all right?”

“A lot slower than it should,” I growled.

“What error code was it showing?”

My answer was so low and gruff and brusque that the only people who could hear it were my Neanderthal forefathers, who nodded agreeably at me across the vast chasm of time.

The problem was a stumper, so another chap was called in. I told him that I’d been shaving in cold water for a week, so he knew he was dealing with a proper bloke. Just one who couldn’t fix boilers.

A morning’s work and the radiators bloomed, Spring-like, into life. Hot water gushed from the taps. I excitedly called the wife at work to tell her that normal service had been resumed.

“It’s like those thermal springs and geysers in Norway,” I laughed delightedly as I spun the taps amid rising clouds of steam, neither knowing or caring whether or not they had thermal geysers in Norway.

However, the next morning, the boiler was flashing a malevolent red warning code. The Nutella was rock-hard.

I immediately got on the phone. “Boiler’s bust,” I rumbled.

The nice chap said he would be around as soon as he could. That may well be just as you are reading these very words. And that most un-manly, piggy-like squeal you hear on the still winter air?

That’ll be me. I’ve probably just been given the bill.