Negotiating nine flights of stone stairs while carrying a stainless steel sink is not, I find, the easiest of tasks.

But it is a breeze – pun intended – to what happens when I get to the exit of the NCP car park in Bradford, and am suddenly buffeted by the tail-end of the gales that have buffeted the city, as the wind comes roaring down Hall Ings.

The sink flaps alarmingly and I wonder how far I would get if I actually took off. The sort of thing that would be funny in the Beano seems to be, in real life, a highly likely and horrible death which people would be unable to speak about for years without a smirk on their faces.

I manage to maneouvre the sink around the corner and away from the worst of the wind. From then on it’s just a short hop – just one beep on a car horn and a bang on a bus window from a gang of kids – to my destination.

Rewinding slightly, the reason I am carrying a sink through Bradford – and no doubt becoming the subject of “guess what I saw today?” conversations when people got home last night – is that for the best part of three weeks – two weeks and six days, to be exact – the kitchen tap has been bust.

“Get a plumber in,” says my wife.

“No chance,” I say. “It’ll cost a fortune. I’ll do it myself.”

She raises an eyebrow. “Just so long as this doesn’t turn into the boiler fiasco when you tried to fix it for three weeks and we had to get someone in anyway.”

This is all in the week before Christmas. On Christmas Day we have loads of family over. With no running water in the kitchen, unless I am crouched in front of the sink with a screwdriver, turning the valve on and off. It is a Christmas miracle that we get through the day without a row.

New Year marks the turning of not just 2011 to 2012, but also the two-week point we have been without water. Things are desperate.

I attack the sink with all the tools in my arsenal. The tap will not budge. The sink does, though – just lifts straight off. I disconnect all the pipes and throw the whole thing in the back of the car in disgust.

So thank you, the very nice men at Edward Foster’s plumbing merchants in Bradford. Thank you for not laughing much when I walked into the shop holding a sink, thank you for telling me the tap was goosed, for selling me a new one and not ripping me off, for fixing said tap to said sink, and for showing me how to connect it all up again.

And most of all, thank you for allowing me to get this job done within my three-week deadline. By one whole day.