Rather than spend my day wallowing in wrappers and mourning the loss of my freedom, I was volunteered by Mother to go and help Father at work. Whoop.
I used to work with my Dad a lot, he's a self-employed builder, so it's pretty easy to turn up with him. If I ever needed extra cash as a young-un I could go and give him a hand all day and earn some dough. I have never understood why he pays people in bread. Nor why people accept it. I tried doing some stand-up material about my life as a plumber/builder once but apparently it was believable. Short of bringing my PAYE slip and a portfolio of newly installed shower cubicles, there was little I could do to convince the Steve Bennett's of this world and so I moved on to talking about poo. Poo is believable. No one wants you to prove a poo is real.
So, I'm a comedian with IBS...."Prove It" You asked for this...
So today I was tiling with Dad. I was tile machine...for a while. Tiling is immensely satisfying. Sometimes on a building site you can do an entire day's work and the whole place still looks like a pile of rubble and you leave wondering why you bothered. Of course, if you're demolishing something then that's a massive achievement. There's nothing better than turning up to a building in the morning, smashing the crap out of it and then leaving that night with a big pile of bricks where the building used to be.
No amount of prissy emails I send in my current job quite equates to the feeling of a sledgehammer in your hand. Mary-Janes are also no match for my steel toe-cap boots either.
I started out as quite an effect tiler - they were going on the wall, they were staying on the wall and they seemed to be in lines. It was like paving the way for some immense cross-word writer to swoop in and turn my griddy architecture into a real doozy. The first wall went up in no time.
The second wall seemed to be fine, until I got to the middle. The tiles were sticking to the walls with absolutely no problem. I was gluing them quite firmly. The only problem was that I found myself holding the tile, with the portion of wall I had glued it to still clinging to the back.
Technically I was still tiling, I was just tiling portable wall now. Sort of making the changing room suitable for the life on the road. I wondered how impressed my Dad would be if he came back to find lots of tiles neatly adhered to a wall that was now laid out in piles across the floor...
...he wasn't very impressed.
I was dispatched to do something less challenging (making tea) while Dad fixed my mess. I'm not sure what he did but it involved more swearing than I've ever heard from Bob the Builder. Perhaps Bob isn't classically trained.
The second wall was completed. Unfortunately, I had let the tiles 'drift'. I thought this was fine, when I was at school I wish I'd been allowed to drift more often. I tried to explain to Dad that I was letting them reach their creative potential and that not everybody liked parallel anyway.
Dad explained to me that people don't like to feel nauseus after swimming because the tiles are swirling round the walls.
I called Dad a chauvinist.
Dad wondered why he had brought me.
We both briefly thought of texting Mother to tell her this had been a bad set up.
Dad fixed the problem while I made more tea and scrubbed some stuff with a brilo pad. I spent most of time scrubbing wondering who had decided to make brilo pads green? Mr Brilo must be the only person in the world with a lot of green stuff that needed scrubbing - in my experience a Brilo pad is no more effective than a normal cloth with your nail behind it and tends to leave everything an odd foresty colour.
Perhaps Mr Brilo had one of those awful avocado bathrooms. In which case he probably invented the Brilo pad to scratch his eyes out. Makes sense.
Dad and I then went home. Where Mum asked why I had worn 'that' to work (referencing my now ripped jeans and adhesive covered cricket t-shirt). I asked her what I should have worn to work and she said 'something disgusting'. I wondered for a while whether to ask her why anyone would own (and pack for their holidays) something so disgusting they were willing to ruin it but instead went off to was the grout out of my eyebrows...I bet Feivel never had these kind of issues.
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