Last week one of my neighbours decided to paint his side of a wall bordering our properties, but he overestimated the quantity of paint required and was left with this …
… a nearly full 15 litre container of masonry paint worth about £25 ($38), which he offered to me for free, suggesting that I may like to ‘brighten up’ the walls in front of my house.
As you may have guessed, I’m not much of a ‘DIY’ enthusiast (I think the word is ‘bodger’), but as he was doing me a favour (at least I think it was a favour) I accepted his gift ‘with good grace’, dug out a paintbrush from the garden shed, put on some old clothes and commenced to transform my grimy fungi stained walls.
Now I should say that I live in a very quiet neighbourhood. That is apart from a few barking dogs and kids on their way to and from a local school. Most residents are old farts like me and are only seen when tottering along to post their mail in the box on the corner of the street, so seeing some old bloke wearing a sweaty T shirt, with his arse hanging out of a tear in his paint stained trousers and a dripping paint brush in his rather unsteady hand must have ‘made their day’; for I had plenty of.. “Good mornings” … “Nice day for it” … and many long and short conversations about local happenings, the price of property and, of course, the ‘good old days’. I even had people I did not know waving to me from passing cars, and a ‘white van man’ stopped to ask me what paint I was using. I may have imagined it, but I could swear that I was ‘chatted up’ by a couple of grey haired old girls. Perhaps it was that tear in my pants that attracted them ?
Much time and effort on my part resulted in …
OK, so it may not be ..”Like painting the Forth Bridge” .. but, by the time I had finished ..
… It bloody well felt like it !
bigjohn 
