The Decoration Game

Blokes love stuff.  They just do.  Those chaps that live in caves subsisting on rice and calm thoughts, they are all very well and may go for minimalist chic atop a Hymalayan pea but, given the choice, by which I mean given an Argos catalogue, they’d swap zen for a karoke machine and a snack and sandwich toaster faster than you can chant ‘Om’.

Bluntly, blokes acquire stuff because it is useful.  William Morris (inventor of many wallpaper prints and the classic Minor) was of the opinion that you should have nothing in your house that is not beautiful or useful.

And it’s that ‘or’ which allows blokes to possess items such as replica sonic screwdrivers because, while they may not actually be able to defeat an actual Dalek, they are jolly nice to look at, and hold, and play with when the wife is out.  Screwdrivers plural of course because let’s face it, if you are the sort of chap that owns a replica sonic screwdriver, you are the sort of chap who is going to own more than one replica sonic screwdriver.

Chaps of a blokish tendency, however, tend toward the useful possessions, and oddly enough this too involves collections of screwdrivers.  To begin with, you need at least two types, normal and Phillips head.  Then you need different sized ones, and ones of different length.  Then you need an electric one because once you have used an electric screwdriver, you will be wondering why you have been wasting your life tightening and loosening screws like some sort of bloody serf from the dark ages.

Obviously you will need a shed to store all of this stuff in.  Luckily, you have an electric screwdriver, so putting one together will be a doddle.

Gear is useful, it’s a fact.  There comes a point in a man’s life when he will finally have as many tools and as many jars of assorted nuts, bolts and screws as his father did.  It’s quite a proud moment and one to be celebrated with a cup of tea and most definitely not telling the wife how right you were not to throw anything important away for the last two decades.

The right tool for the right job is important.  A bad craftsman blames his tools but I can tell you with absolute authority that a bloke decorating who discovers on the second brushstroke that his brushes, or roller, are inferior is instantly on the web to Screwfix, in the car to pick it up his order and back in time to pick the moulting bristles or roller pile pillings from the still moist emulsion, and then do the job right.

I have recently been decorating.  There is nothing quite like being in a room with all the windows closed on a baking hot day wondering if the paint is supposed to be that colour or if the fumes are making you hallucinate, listening to Radio 5 because that’s the law.

The latest discovery to vastly improve my life?  Selotape for carpets.

Previously, to protect carpets one would spend time and masking tape sticking down sheets of polythene, or sheets of newspaper.  Not any more.  Now you can buy these big rolls of selotape that stick to the carpet.  Down they go and you can start splashing the gloss about the place without fear of sticky stains on the tufted wilton.  Fantastic.

I am for anything that makes DIY less of a chore.  If you have the means, I heartily recommend getting somebody else to do it for you, but if you must DIY, then at least try to get some cool kit out of it.

My decorating collection is not quite complete.  I rather fancy some working lights, that permit one to do a decent job after dark.

I also rather like the idea of one of those paper suits to keep the paint off you.  Although, one person’s ‘disgusting track suit bottoms that you never wear anymore and looked horrible when you bought them what were you thinking?’ is another man’s Painting Pantalons.  And remember, a shirt is never at the end of its useful life until it’s rigid with dried emulsion.

Climbing the scaffold

Property prices being what they are, and inertia being what it is, many are choosing, instead of moving house to get more space, to go up, up, up and convert their loft, hitherto only used for the storage of Christmas decs, porn, and the desiccated corpses of deceased family members, into an extra room.  This means that houses all around the country have been sprouting cubes of shrouded scaffold wrapped around their roofs, turning them into giant Minecraft mushrooms.

Scaffolding is an interesting trade, you turn up, you erect a framework of metal, you wrap it in plastic sheeting then, after a couple of weeks, you rock up and unwrap the sheeting like a giant Christmas present – revealing a roof more or less exactly as it was before, but now sporting a dormer window.

Scaffolding is an all-weather profession and the scaffolders in the village at the moment are in their summer plumage – tee shirts and shorts.

It’s unusual for professionals not to be health and safety obsessed.  Your average builder is head-to-toe armoured like a medieval knight, from hard-hat to steel-capped rhinoceros-hide boots, with a high-vis jacket in the middle and, probably, Kevlar knickers.  The scaffolders’ sop to safety is that their shorts are cut-off denim jeans.  The only leather they sport is their tool-belt.

Possibly their swashbuckling attitude is party a result of their profession, they swarm up their framework with the confidence of animated monkeys and the assurance of a tall ship sailor going aloft for a spot of grog and buggery in the Crows Nest (the lookout point on the ship, not the popular homosexualist pick-up bar in Portsmouth).

The only people that exceed scaffolders’ disregard for health and safety measures are, well, the public.  Specifically, anyone that doesn’t work in the building trade but has a job to do that involves hiring equipment.  Very specifically, anyone who hires a chainsaw.

And I mean a Chainsaw.  Not one of those hedge-clipper things that are one step up from a male grooming product and run on electricity, no - a chainsaw, the sort that runs of petrol.  Leaded petrol, a machine that runs on dead prehistoric trees and the remains of dinosaurs and is wielded in popular culture by men wearing checked shirts, or masks made of teenagers unwise in their choice of vacation-spot.

When the hire company hire out a chainsaw you also get the safety kit, and a lecture even more frequently ignored than the ones given at the start of airplane flights.  The safety kit involves overalls, gloves, and a helmet with a mask (Perspex, not tanned teen).  All you need is a shield, lance and charger and you could joust the tree to death if you wished. 

The trouble is that in the shop, they show you the chainsaw first. 

Now, from first seeing the chainsaw, a chaps attention span before he succumbs to images of himself plying a manly trade, honestly despoiling the environment through deforestation rather than the usual method of being too lazy to recycle, is about ninety seconds.  This is long enough to cover the basics – petrol goes in here, pull this cord here to start the saw, make sure it is pointed away from you.  It does not extend to cover the safety briefing.  While the shop guy does his best to explain the precautions and equipment required to ensure that, should the fellow ever want to take up a career as a juggler in the future, this remains an option, and the bloke’s wife is nodding along, our hero has moved on from fantasies of Sylvanian desolation and is wondering what sort of damage this surprisingly heavy bit of kit could do to, in ascending order of disturbing – fruit, a marrow, anything for the barbeque, that old shed he’s been meaning to knock down and that fucking cockerel his neighbour has acquired.

Of course, the most effective safety briefing for a hired chainsaw is the first time you fumble and it buries itself in the ground half an inch from your big toe.  A ten minute break to change into all the safety gear, and new trousers, and you’re ready for action.

Workplace of heroes

‘Netflix’ is astonishing.  Looking at the billboards across town advertising the US remake of ‘House of Cards’ you would think that Netflix is all about original (or nearly original) high-quality programming.  And it is, the US remake of ‘House of cards’ is so glossy that if it were a magazine, the ads would be so incredibly discreet that you would be left wondering if they were for mineral water of watches.  Of course, Netflix has no ads, just a monthly subscription charge.  And one of the selling points of ‘House of cards’ was that all episodes for a season were released on-line in one go.

Because original programming aside, Netfix is actually all about the binge watching.

How to describe Netflix?  Simple.  It’s like somebody driving a warehouse of box sets up to your front door.

It’s a binge bonanza and ideally suited to those with no real discipline (‘OK, just one more episode before bed’) and real patience (‘OK, apparently it only starts getting good half way through season two, but you have to watch the whole first season to really appreciate it’) and real time to indulge, or a real ability to ignore a very real need to do anything that involves going outside.

It also allows you to rediscover shows that you stopped watching because either they were on too late or you just missed them or because, at the time, you thought they were a bit shit.  Because thanks to the internet many a cancelled show has been reappraised and it turns out there wasn’t a problem with the show, but rather it was those jerks at the network who didn’t give it enough of a chance, or kept moving the timeslot and killed it off.  Also, since you’re paying for it anyway, you may as well give it a try, because the internet says I should like it and the internet is hardly ever wrong about cultural stuff.

The odd thing is, you’re more likely to dip back into something you stopped watching than you are to start watching something new.  It’s telly, it’s nostalgia, it’s instant, it’s more fun than jet-washing the patio, what more do you want?

It also let’s you determine consistent themes that appear across different shows.

A few years ago, there used to be a programme on teevee called ‘Reaper’.  It was about a seemingly ordinary bloke who worked at a huge DIY store called the ‘Work Bench’ but who turned out to be a bounty hunter for Satan, with responsibility not just for flogging automatic toilet roll dispensers or whatever, but also for dragging escaped souls back to Hell.

Then there was ‘Chuck’.  Chuck worked in an enormous electrical store called the ‘Buy More’.  Chuck wasn’t just a guy who could sell you a digital toilet roll dispenser or whatever, he was also the unwilling repository of ‘the intersect’, which sees all of the American government’s most secret secrets implanted in his head, yadda yadda yadda.

Obviously, there’s a format here.  If you want to cast an unlikely hero in an everyman occupation, it needs to be something that requires him to wear and apron and a name tag.  Buy not a hair net, as fry guy at maccydees was obviously an invitation to litigation, and so peon at huge store was the occupation of choice.

That much makes sense, as it would explain why there is never anybody around in the fucking timber section at my local DIYosausous to help you out when you need something cut to size, that size being short enough to fit lengthwise in your car so that you don’t have to transport a fencepost home vertically, which can result in your driving under some low electric cables and transforming your car into an enormous, impromptu, spontaneous dodgem, or under a bridge, transforming it into an impromptu convertible.

So far, so sustainable.  What doesn’t ring true is that in both cases, insanely hot, but also charming, women work with our heroes.  In the Reaper’s case, in the store and in Chuck’s case, at the sausage shack next door, in the same retail park.

Now, I am the last person to make personal comments about the sort of people who work at B&Q/Homebase/Retail Park ‘Restaurants’, but if pressed, I’d remark that in terms of looks I think you’re less likely to think ‘hottie’ and more likely to think ‘somewhere, there’s a bridge unattended with goats just skipping on over it’.

‘Reaper’ actually makes quite a decent fist of locating their extraordinary Joe in such a mundane location and to be honest, the lovable misfits goofing around in the store is a lot more enjoyable than the segments when he is forced to do battle with budget CGI effects.  ‘Chuck’ is more of a straightforward spy thriller but you get the sense that the fan base for both of these shows were the sort of men who have a job involving a name badge.  No doubt knowledge of this demographic emerging had something to do with no season three onwards being available for either series.

The Feast of Leftover

The period between Christmas and New Year is, perhaps, the most orphaned time of year. By which I mean it is perhaps the time of year with the least significance attached to it, it is merely a period that we pass through, on our way to time of resolutions and renewed gym memberships.

This is perhaps because this slack period does not have a name. It is not really Christmas, nor is it New Year.

More probably it is because it has not yet been the work of a memorable piece of fiction. Throughout the year seasons and seconds are celebrated, especially so at this time of the year, where the simple wave of a remote control could summon any of the three versions of ‘A Christmas Carol’ playing, leaving you to settle on Alistair Sym, Patrick Stewart or muppets as your Dickens vehicle of choice. Myself, I favour Bill Murray’s outstanding performance in ‘Scrooged’.

New Year finds favour with filmmakers, featuring prominently in everything from ‘Radio Days’ to ‘When Harry met Sally’.

Or maybe it’s just the mood. Everyone is bucolic and possibly melancholic. Or maybe they are back at work and so sullen. It’s been days now since anyone had anything approaching a normal meal, featuring vegetables, and one is usually still in the process of trying to get through the Christmas booze so that one can be temptation-free come New Year and the inevitable detox.

Hence, I have decided to celebrate this time of year, which I christen The Feast of Leftover.

There are many reasons to be cheery during this period. The first is that cheeriness is not mandatory. The second is that one can lie on the sofa with one hand stirring a tin of Quality Street in the hope that there may be a toffee left among the wrappers, for hours, and not have this used as evidence in a speculative diagnosis of depression. The same goes for still sporting pyjamas and a dressing gown until well after lunch. Which brings us on to booze. It is acceptable, at this time of the year, to have a glass of port, or two, with a cheeky slice of fruit cake. On very few other occasions does such behaviour constitute ‘lunch’ but, on this occasion, one can get away with it.

Not that it is all sloth and inebriation. There are presents to be enjoyed, books to be read, high scores to be racked up and weapons and car upgrades to be unlocked.

Best of all, there is the Feast itself. If one is lucky enough to have surplus food one should also realise that it is a sin to throw away food. That is why this time of year features an unusually varied diet, as one seeks to use up all the food in the fridge before ‘normality’ returns. And it’s Christmas food too, leading one to question the wisdom of ordering so many picked walnuts. By which I mean any.

If you are excited by the prospect of having a cheese board for dinner, then this is the time of year to go for it.

The Feast of Leftover is also celebrated in our shops. This is the time of year to purchase your Christmas decorations and cards (tip: put them somewhere handy, not somewhere ‘safe’, so when you come to look for them in eleven months, there’s a chance you’ll actually be able to find the bloody things and not have to buy more), retail Christmas leftovers on sale at bargain prices or, actually, prices more suitable for what is a bit of plastic dipped in glitter. Tempting this year were the small artificial Christmas trees on sale for a couple of quid at a DIY store. I wanted to buy loads, take them home, set them up and then stomp through them pretending to be a giant, or recreate the Battle of Endor.

However you choose to celebrate this time of the year, be it with cheese, pickled walnuts or pickling your liver, may I wish you a very happy Feast of Leftover.

Now, having just seen a gap in the greetings card market, I’m off to fetch the card and crayons.

This Government hates booze

The British summer has continued to thrill and frustrate at every turn. Thrill because anyone loving statistics will practically get a boner every time the weather forecast comes on and the forecaster explains that this is the dullest summer since 1882, or that we haven’t had a rain of frogs like this in Newton Abbot since records began. Frustrate because it would be pleasant to see the sun on a weekend occasionally.

Lack of rain has also had a profound effect upon my vine. Installed last year, I had great expectations of Jeremy, and he hasn’t disappointed. Earlier this ‘summer’ there were little bud things that I was assured would turn into grapes. This, I thought, was great! I would take the grapes, make my own wine and finally become self-sufficient in booze!

Thanks in part to the weather, the Gallo family don’t have to shut up shop just yet. I believe that vines, however hardy, really want to grow on the sun kissed slope of some Mediterranean country somewhere, with easy access to hours of sunshine and cheap labour during harvesting time as gang-masters beat the Eastern European pickers and gap-year students looking for an authentic travelling experience senseless if they don’t pick round the clock.

My vine does have grapes, yes. They appear to be perfectly formed, yes, even though I had a nasty moment when I saw them turning a dark colour and thought I had vine-rot or something (I’d forgotten I’d bought a red grape variety vine) but as to the size? I actually think I’m the first man to successfully grow raisins.

I have, as a result, scaled back my expectations accordingly. Gone are the plans for a 400 gallon stainless steel tank to hold the end product, back in come the glass demijohns as the fermenting vessel of choice. I’m also trying to scrounge those little wine bottles that they give you on airplanes. On the plus side, my label-printing costs will be much less than expected.

All this makes me feel like an outlaw. I’m not sure what this Government hopes to achieve by clamping down on the more sensible aspects of enjoying alcohol. For an administration that appears to chase popularity the same way a fat kid chases an ice-cream van, it’s odd to make having a quiet pint in your local boozah more expensive and less convenient while at the same time letting giant supermarket chains sell blue alcohol to youths who drink it on street corners. Maybe the Government suspects that sedition, as well as hops, ferments in the taverns of England.

Drinkers today are getting that same feeling that smokers got twenty years ago, with ‘no drinking’ notices springing up about the place. In a couple of decades, the only place you’ll be able to drink is in your own home and the only stuff you’ll be able to afford to drink is stuff you’ve brewed yourself.

English men will love this. It will turn home brewing from a smelly pastime into a necessity and will mean that they never have to take their wives anywhere ever again. It will also mean that every home with space will have two sheds, one for keeping garden tools, compost and porn in, the other to be converted into a small brewery tap.

Along with home brewing, the home pub snacks industry will develop. God alone knows how they make pork scratching, but I suspect all you need is a pig and a giant pencil sharpener, how hard can it be?

Men love making stuff. Recently, there’s been no point in making stuff because men used to make things like shelves and, er, other stuff. These days the demands of domesticity are a little more elaborate and it’s harder to knock up a DVD player in your shed than it looks, especially when you can buy one from China for twenty quid. If the Government thinks it will drive men to virtue by depriving them of their pubs and brewery beer, they are sadly mistaken. Rather, men will gather in their sheds, sup their home-brew and talk dissent. Until summoned to the house by their wife for their dinner.