Phil & Ted's Pointless Adventure

With the new baby now little more than five months from splashdown, Vanessa bought a new pushchair online earlier in the week which converts into a "double."

It was delivered yesterday afternoon (that's the box pictured above) but she waited until today when the "man of the house" (i.e. me) would be around before trying to put it up.

But the trouble is I'm a poor excuse for a man about the house, particularly when it comes to screwing things together. Linked to this is my normal apology that I can't possibly screw things together on this occasion because the manufacturer forgot to put one or more parts into the box.

It was therefore no surprise that I got no further than step 2 of 26 before declaring that something was very wrong.

I was trying to put the mudguards on and, according to the instructions, they required two screws each. But not only were there no screws in the box, but there were also no brackets to screw them into. Needless to say I cried foul (and several less polite words).

But what to do? Because, deep down and based on previous experience, I reckoned that everything probably was there and I wasn't reading the instructions properly. However, after checking and re-checking said instructions several more times, I was still at a dead end.

So I saw two options. The first, and easiest, was to phone some wee girl in a call centre, blame it all on her and send a plague upon her house, herself and her family. The second, more defensive, approach would be to drive to Mothercare in Bradford, see one of our buggies already built and take pictures.

We chose the latter and, to my surprise at least, found that we were actually right and that our buggy was missing the brackets and that our mudguards were actually a different model from those in the instruction manual.

It was therefore back to base to get the wee girl on the phone and demand that she accepted some abuse.

What happened next was a surprise - but irritatingly so.

Vanessa made the call before eventually passing the handset to me to hear some techy stuff from the wee girl.

The long and short of it was that the manufacturers - "Phil & Ted's Most Excellent Buggy Company" - had changed the design of the mudguards and the way there were attached but hadn't bothered to change the instructions that came with the buggy. (A "Most Excellent Company" my ****).

Phone call over, Vanessa and I went back downstairs, attempted to attach one of the mudguards as instructed and - bingo.

We stopped at that point because, quite frankly, we were bored of the buggy by then although I might "try" to finish the job myself later when Vanessa goes out on another pregnant lady J2O binge in Leeds. But I might not.

All in all, though, not the Saturday afternoon we had planned.

But, with the house to myself (and Jamie), it's a day that can yet be rescued with the help of beer, steak and sport on TV. In fact, I'm quite confident that it will be.