This weekend I was sweeping with a broom I had stuck together with sticky tape, a fistful of wooden skewers and determination.

 

Sometimes I feel like the things that happen in my life would make other people concerned for my welfare. I mean, if you chose to read it a certain way, particular incidences in my life in recent months would be viewed as red flags for an impending mental breakdown. Based on my Instagram feed over the past few weeks, I’m surprised no one has come up to me and asked, “Dannielle, is everything ok?”. Separately they’re amusing anecdotes. But when viewed as a whole, they paint a pretty bleak picture. Two out of the last five are dedicated to gravy. Another one is about my getting soup in my hair. There’s one there about how I was so cold I shoved cardboard in the cracks of my front door.

 

Sure, when you frame it a certain way, my life isn’t thrilling. I’m about to be unemployed, I’m quite poor and I live at least four hours away from my nearest friend. I spend my weekends watching DVDs I bought heavily discounted from one of the last remaining Civic Video’s closing down sale and counting the days until I move back to Queensland. Some people call this soul crushingly depressing, but I like to re-frame it as “character building”. So when another thing goes wrong, it’s not a kick in the teeth, but more a test of spirit, ingenuity and innovation. The more limited your resources, the more satisfying the victory.

 

You see, I like to think of myself as “resourceful” rather than “dirt poor”. I’m “inventive”, not “stingy”. I’m a great fan of Bush Mechanics, and I firmly believe there is a solution for every malfunction, even if it is a little rough around the edges. Only the other night I used the end of an ointment tube in the place of a flathead to screw the base of my heater back on. I have stapled my shoes together before. The two pairs of stockings I own have severe runs in them, but I haven’t needed to replace them because when you wear them both at the same time, they cover each other’s shortfalls. A fun bonus in this little scheme is that the double layers give you extra warmth and hold your paunch in like a pair of poor-man’s Spanx.

 

I have this broom right, which cost me all of seven bucks from a popular discount department store (we’ll call it Fay-Fart) known for its criminally cheap products knocked-off from people with actual ideas and mass produced by near slave labour. Because no one gives two shits if a malnourished seven-year-old Bangladeshi girl loses a hand in a sweatshop if it produces ceramic fucking pineapples at rock bottom prices, right? Anyway, because this broom was made with the lowest quality materials under assumedly horrific conditions, the handle split the other day while I was sweeping.

 

The handle kinked in the middle, with the bend making the cheap metal crack. As a result, the brush part and the top of the handle were only connected by about two centimetres of handle. It was like a straw with a cut in it. I could have gone out to buy a new one, but I prefer to spend my money on unnecessarily expensive hummus and magazines. I don’t think twice about paying $35 for a fucking candle (but it was four dollars off!), yet I can’t justify dropping $7 on a new broom. So I just carried on sweeping and returned it to its home ready for another use.

 

This morning, I realised I couldn’t live in my filth any longer and needed to get the swirling mass of hair, All Bran crumbs and flakes of my dead skin off the floor and into the bin. But unfortunately, I don’t have a vacuum cleaner.

 

So I had to break out the broom with a broken spine. The way it was cracked meant I could either sweep with no downward pressure at all or hold it just below the break and sweep like I was the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Instead, I decided to improvise.

 

I got the handle, some packing tape and a fist full of skewers to act as a splint. I placed the broom on my kitchen bench like a doctor prepping for surgery. I strapped a bundle of skewers over the crack and tightly wound the tape around the handle. Upon a quick test, I realised the handle needed greater structural support, and taped more skewers around the outside.

 

After a few tentative sweeps, I was thrilled. I caught myself saying, “look at that, no bloody worries mate” like I as Russel Coight hosting Better Homes and Gardens.

 

Everything was going great guns until I was sweeping up my final mound of floor scum. I realised I had stabbed one of my fingers on the points of the skewers and had covered the broom handle in splodges of blood. Ever the keen journalist, dedicated to reporting the up-to-the-minute news I decided to take a photo of my predicament for Instagram and harness my pitifulness for a few LOLs. I had to put the camera on my phone into selfie mode because the other lens was smashed and turn it around to face the broom (which meant I couldn’t see what I was taking a photo of because the screen had to face the subject) in order to take a clear shot of just how pathetic I was.

 

It was around about this moment when I realised just how sad this situation would have looked. I laughed deliriously and said “this is fine” to myself like that meme of the dog sitting in a burning house.

 

I move in less than seven days.