Miracle on Victoria St – 40 year old man completes odd job around the house after procrastinating 3 years – loses power of speech.

“You are using that tone again Dad!”, my son says to me. “What tone?” I reply. “The cranky one you use when you ask me to shut the front gate”.

It’s true. The front gate has been an entrance of contention for the last three years. Time, overuse and treated pine combined to create a saggy gate that needed more effort than could be reasonably expected to get to shut and stay shut. It’s the last in a long list of paper cuts in the morning routine, and often the one that’s most likely to result in a large exhale of frustration from one or all of us.

The 40 year old man’s father dropped over a couple of spare coach bolts from his ample collection to finally fix the gate. To the surprise of the entire street these two bolts did not get subsumed into the mess of odds and ends under the house.

Cars were stopping in the street, and amazed onlookers were taking photos with their mobile phone of the man, formally known as The Procrastinator, simply screwing in the two bolts so that the gate shuts properly.

When asked by his neighbour Danny, what was his secret, he was mute. Later he said he was just so happy to finally get the job done that he temporarily lost the power of speech.