They say the sound of running water can create a soothing atmosphere around the home.

The belief in this notion has led to the proliferation of water features in modern Australian society.

As yet, I am not one of the believers. I have a dripping toilet down the hall from my office which is doing nothing to relax my soul.

Regular readers might have gathered that I am quite the frustrated home handyman.

As I generally work from home, I am unfortunately quite handy when something needs fixing on the domestic front, which often leads to frustration for me and all others who dwell here when I attempt to do my manly duty and remedy things.

In my book, there are a number of golden rules of home maintenance to follow.

Rule one is: Wait to see if the problem fixes itself.

The extent of the problem and physical threat to family members or the environment should determine the length of wait in this circumstance. For example with a leaking toilet, you can’t wait too long because it is bad for the ecosystem for two obvious reasons:

1. It wastes water.

2. The dripping sound is driving me so crazy that I might have to go outside and pound my head against a tree, which could have a flow-on effect such as hurting bark, knocking small birds from their nests, troubling my dog, etc.

However for something like a knob falling off the television (back when televisions had knobs – along with a mysterious channel called 5a which you could never see anything on except the occasional extremely fuzzy outline of Magic Roundabout), the waiting period could be eternal.

This was the case during my childhood when the television knob disappeared and surprisingly did not reattach itself, obviously happy in its new home of the dusty netherworld of beneath-the-couch with its newfound friend, the missing piece from the Spirograph set.

With an important episode of Tonight with Dave Allen approaching, my father made the judgment that enough time had elapsed for the TV to fix itself, and decided to take matters into his own hands.

And that’s how the pair of pliers came to rest on the top of the set for what seemed like 12 years.

Even after the arrival of the first remotes, which were attached to their tellies with a cord, I remember the question being skitefully put in the playground: “D’you avva remote?”

To which I replied: “No. We have a pair of red-handled pliers – good ones though, Stanley’s.”

Rule two is: Jiggle the problem area and stand back. In this case, the potential danger of the problem should determine just how far you should stand back.

For example, for anything to do with gas cylinders, I would recommend The Tropic of Capricorn.

I had mixed success with rules one and two when it came to fixing the toilet – both worked for a while and then stopped working, usually in the stillness of the night when the sound of dripping water is scientifically at its loudest.

Consequently, I was exposed to rule three, which is: When rules one and two inevitably fail, your wife’s insistence that a professional be engaged will become increasingly difficult to ignore.

Accepting this fact is always a massive dent to the ego but history has taught us that dents to the ego repair faster than dents that hammers make to walls and other non-target household surfaces when clueless husbands try fixing things themselves.

Sure, it’s admitting you’re not a real man.

You become the opposite of Fonzie when he jumped his motorcycle over the trash cans in the car park at Arnolds even though he knew he was going to crash, heralding the stirring catch cry: Fonzie is tough, but our chicken isn’t.

You become the antithesis of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid when they leap off the waterfall, and you also land yourself at the other end of the bravery spectrum to the Phantom when he enters the bar filled with desperate roughnecks and orders a glass of milk.

It’s a very real feeling of inadequacy but it eventually goes away, unlike the dripping noise which, despite my impatient waiting, interspersed with frantic jiggling of the silver button and standing back, continues to torture me.

So you will have to excuse me, as I need to call a plumber.

It’s not so bad.

I’m sure my ego will mend all the more quickly in the soothing environment created when that maddening sound of running water is taken care of.