I'm picking up bad vibrations

It makes absolute sense to me that you should arrange your home and your life in a way that optimises opportunities and confounds enemies, accentuating the positive and deflecting the negative.

Position your bedroom furniture so you can see who is coming in the door, for instance.

Who could argue with that? That's why people who lived in caves slept facing the entrance.

That way you had a better chance of seeing that sabretooth tiger sneaking-in to eat your leg, or snatch your children.

And the idea of creating good, positive energy vibes in your bathroom has to be encouraged.

That's why my other half put a bowl of pretty beach pebbles just above the flush unit, and why we always keep the loo lid down (to stop the good energy plunging down and away, silly).

Anyway, there comes a time in every busy bathroom where the loo seat needs to be replaced and that time came around a couple of weeks ago.

For some time we had experienced that sliding feeling whilst enthroned and it just got worse.

So I toddled off to Homebase and invested 20 in a new seat and lid and made my plans for the DIY operation.

Then I encountered Serious Problem No 1.

The screws fixing the loo seat to the bowl were rusted into position.

There was a user-friendly butterfly nut either side but they just wouldn't budge. Apparently, so a plumber told me later, it happens all the time.

Solution: get a hammer and gently tap away at the nut to knock it free.

Tap, tap, tap. TAP, TAP, TAP. Hit it harder. And harder.

Get cross with it. Miss the nut, and chip the ceramic. Swear. Hit it even harder. Repeat process the other side.

None of this works. The rusted screws remain defiant.

Solution No 2: Get a large screwdriver, insert under the loo seat fixing at the top, and lever it up.

Technically, this will not dislodge the rusted screws below, but it feels as if you are doing something.

Continue process for a a while and then use a combined attack of hammer plus screwdriver. Bash accordingly, with increasing velocity, until...

The large feng shui bowl of pebbles, which has been slowly and silently edging towards disaster with the reverberations of each blow, finally topples off the flush system and plunges down, smashing on the loo and slicing through a large chunk of your thumb.

Big, serious blood blobs all over the place.

A collection of pretty feng shui pebbles firmly lodged in the lavatory. Broken ceramics everywhere.

Later, with a white comedy bandage on my thumb the size of a tennis ball, complete with the obligatory red blood stain showing through, my other half told a feng shui expert what had happened.

"Wow" said the expert.

"Sounds like you have a serious negative energy problem in your bathroom".

You can say that again. And a very wobbly loo seat.