Well, I can't believe that. I just broke a toilet seat lid with my knee while fitting a bit of insect screen inside a bathroom fan. It was a tight little area in the corner of a small bathroom and I couldn't reach where I needed to reach without putting my knee up on the toilet lid and leaning a bit. But the lid had absolutely no give whatsoever; I barely pressed on it when there was a great cracking sound and a sloshing of water and there was my leg sticking through the jagged remains of the lid and my foot in the toilet water. The lid had cracked like an egg shell. The toilet is only a few months old and the lid looked really thick and strong but it must have been made of melamine or some even cheaper substance that China is now producing. What is it with stuff here? The toilet seats in Canada are at least flexible, or were when I was living there. Why, the cheapo toilet lid in the mobile home where we spend our summers isn't much thicker than a yogurt lid — absolutely wimpy and won't suffer any kind of weight — but it'll flex way down if you sit on it and spring back up again when you get off.
The worst of this is that unless I manage to find an exact replacement toilet seat before tonight when M gets back from his business trip he's going to know that I put my foot through the old one. It won't be the end of the world or anything — he's not like the husband from Sleeping with the Enemy — it's just that this is not the first household furnishing I've broken while applying my weight to it and I'd prefer that he didn't find out. True, this incident isn't as humiliating as the chair that buckled under me at the dinner table nor as ripe for jokes as the collapsed bed but it isn't the best thing that could've have happened either. It is a toilet that I broke, after all, not something serious and dignified like a chest of drawers or a roll-top desk. M will mention it to people, you see. And there will be questions. "Put her foot through the toilet lid? Well, how did that happen? What was she doing in there?" To my knowledge M has never broken any furniture himself and how earnestly I wish that he would. Even just a stool or a fold-up camping chair. Something. The thing of it is, if I was slender and willowy there would be no issue. I could hurl myself recklessly on to a sturdy armchair causing it disintegrate beneath me in a pile of dust and it would be wholly the fault of the chair, so demonstrably of substandard construction. But lumbering around with an extra half-person on me turns the sympathy in the chair's direction and is apt to generate a look or a few words pertaining to my dietary habits and it's just a little mortifying.
Anyway, I need to go out and look for that lid replacement. And maybe grab a milkshake while I'm at it (ah, just kidding, come on.) Wish me luck then.