By the time I got up, the paint was already being applied. Once the woodwork in the lounge and my bedroom had been cleaned and the kitchen ceiling painted, it was time for the doors. I helped by pulling up a load of the reddish carpet tiles (super-classy) in the lounge and filling a binbag so full it couldn't possibly support its own weight. The atmosphere is saturated with the dust of 60 years of out-of-date decor with tantalising hint of dog.
The doors are from the bedrooms. In the 1950s the style of the 4-panel Victorian solid wood doors went out of fashion, and everyone wanted flat doors. So the easiest way was to tin-tack a bit of hardboard to both sides of the door, hiding the panels and making it exceedingly boring. Nowadays, of course, the fashion is to remove the hardboard, strip the paint off the door, lament the damage caused by the tin-tacks, and to enjoy the wood as nature and the original makers intended. It helps if you wax them a bit to make the wood happier: the man at the Strip Joint told us to get BRIWAX, the best, apparently. Briwax is very whiffy stuff in a tin and it gives off noxious fumes that make your head go whizzy and flashy if you breathe it in. This is why it's banned in the States. Srsly, though, can you really imagine the youth of the USA loading up on Briwax at £12 a tin and going forth into the world to wreak havoc? (Woah, I got totally Briwaxed, man.....) Back in the 1970s the 'in' thing was to have a gobbet of glue in a crisp packet and to sniff it. Have we really moved on to furniture polish? Anyway, the doors look really good.
While Jof painted skirting boards, she said we really needed fresh air that didn't have Briwax in it, so we got my bike and made it out of the house for 530 pm or so and visited the Health Centre park (small but strong on giant climbing logs and teenage girls) and made the long hop to the Pyramids beach for a promised ice cream. Everything was shut so we climbed on the WW2 tanks and threw some rocks into the sea, finally finding a shop by the sunken garden and I had my raspberry Cornetto.
On the cycle home I was again floored by my nemesis, the pavement outside the Old Gravediggers Pub. The gap between the man and the car wasn't quite enough and I crashed. Later, the live band playing at the pub over the road were still going, and a fight broke out onto the pavement.
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