BEFORE
AFTER
You might think he looks cute. You might look into those brown eyes and coo like a baby at the little doggie-woggie, but this canine is Cerebus reincarated (minus the extra heads, natch). A few weeks back we tried to get Alex the Wonderdog an appointment with the local dog groomer. We’ve gone their for years and they’ve always moaned a little bit about how difficult he is to groom. An appointment was made and on the day of the appointment, a mere sixty minutes before I was due to drag him to his doom, I received a call hurriedly cancelling. Before I could reschedule another appointment, the woman said “We’re retiring. The business is closing. No more dog grooming” before putting the phone down on me.
Luckily, my mother recommended a new groomers in town and we got an appointment really quickly for a Saturday afternoon. The plan was set: we’d drop Alex off for his grooming, head for the shops to do some maternity shopping for The Missus (who know resembles a small elephant) and then head to the pub for a quick pint (for me, not the Missus who is booze-free these days, poor cow). This plan wasn’t to pass as we soon received a desperate phone message from the groomer asking to come over immediately. Thankfully, The Missus had done her clothes shopping and so we trudged back to the groomers. No pint for me.
Inside, we found the young lady who runs the groomers struggling with Alex and she’d called her father in. He was doing his best to hold our dog still but the little swine was wriggling like a greased pig. So I stepped in and did my best to restrain Alex while she continued to cut his fur. Her father retreated back to his day job. So for the next 90 minutes I struggled and gripped and did my best to stop this wild beast from biting the groomer. Several times he slipped his muzzle in a feat of escapology of which Houdini would have been proud. Once he jumped free of my grip and clawed down my inner forearm. Another slip of the muzzle and Alex got a mouthful of scissor as he tried to bite back. The groomer apologised but I told her the little git deserved his tongue cut off the way he was behaving.
So in the end we managed to get the shaggy carpet reduced to the sheep-like figure in the latter picture. I was covered in dog hair and spitting the stuff. After the ordeal was over and his lead and collar was on, the little sod trotted out of the place as if nothing had happened. He really is a devil dog.
Now as his fur is a lot shorter for the summer, all those allergens are getting to his skin. This means his skin condition has flared up and on Monday we had to take him to the vet. Now he likes the vet marginally less than he likes the groomer and again I had to act as a man-sized restraint to the dog. Luckily, no fingers were lost during the consultation, though you should have seen the look of surprise on Alex’s face when the vet stuck his digit up the dog’s rectum. Yes folks, we got Alex’s anal glands cleaned for free, which meant that I had to deal with the stench of rotten fish in the back of the car on the way home. The smell is so bad I nearly threw up.
The result of the consultation is that I have some more pills to give him and this means I have to find new and inventive ways in order to dupe Alex in order to take his pills. The white ones he doesn’t mind, but the pink ones are abhorrent to him. No matter how I disguise them, he manages to leave them behind or spit them out (and how the heck does a dog spit when it has no lips?). I’m sick of being outwitted by a West Highland White. Hid it in a sausage and the little blighter still manages to leave the pink tablet behind. Methinks some brute force is in order.
But despite all this, he’s still my dog and I realise he’s just like me: unpleasant, anti-social, strong-willed to the point of belligerence, a complete beast. But he’s my beast, I guess and he’d have been put down if I hadn’t got him…
Category: Diary
So what would you do if you found an half-empty tin of Dulux white matt paint on your travels? Many of us wouldn’t probably even notice the tin and go about our business without turning a hair. But there is money in that discarded tin. Here’s how…
Firstly, you retrieve the tin and then take it home. Prepare a bucket of hot water and cleaning implements to clean aforementioned tin. Carefully remove any paint from the outside of the tin with a rag and plenty of elbow grease. Remember to pay close attention to the rim of the tin and to clean any dried paint that had gathered in the ferrule. Clean any paint from the lid of the tin. When the tin is clean to a level that you are satisfied with, refill the contents of the paint can with any dregs from any old white paint that you might have lying around. Replace lid and you now have a full tin of Dulux white matt paint – except it ain’t – it is a ringer.
So why am I telling you this? Well whilst sitting in my back garden yesterday afternoon my neighbours returning and began working furtively on such a scheme. One of them spoke very loudly giving instruction and what’s best for cleaning a paint tin. I had a little nosey and lo-and-behold one of the inbreds was cleaning said tin, readying it for refilling. The scheme was to refill the tin and then return the supposedly “new” tin of paint (again, remember it is ringer) to the local B&Q or Homebase for a refund.
“You can only do this with the whites,” advised the lead monkey-boy rather loudly, “As they won’t take back coloured or mixed paints. Lots of people buy too much white, so you can get your money back”. He was very confident that his scheme would work and then inadvertantly regaled me (sitting behind the fence out of view) that he’d done this many times before and had even returned thrown out items of electrical equipment as long as they had their original box. I suddenly felt as if I was living back in Dickensian London and that Fagin and his crew were living next door.
After spending half-an-hour working on this cunning plan to defraud the local DIY store, the three Stooges scurried off with their paint pot, excited at the prospect of getting £14.99 for nothing. Of course, you are probably nay-saying me and purrumping negatives, but this all unfolded rather loudly in front of me (albeit behind the garden fence). It’s just I’d never ever thought of such a scam and its amazing how some people’s brains work, innit?
I kind of miss our old neighbour…all she’d ever do in the back garden is feed the birds and sing to them quietly. 🙁
And the next line is for all you Googlers out there coming to this page via a search engine:
paint dulux scam rip-off homebase b&q return free money
Heigh ho!
Don’t you find it freaky when dead stars turn up to appear in TV adverts. I always remember the very first one I saw back in the 1980s where Alfred Hitchcock (another Leytonstone boy) made a comeback to flog some product. Since then anyone from Marilyn Monroe to Gene Kelly has been digitally revived and employed by nefarious advertisers intent on parting you from your cash.
However, one good use of this virtual body-snatching technology is to revive the late, great Bob Monkhouse and to get him to warn us men about the perils of the disease that killed him, prostate cancer. Bob was a great and his brilliance is missed from our TV screens, so it was both nice and somewhat disturbing to see the advert:
But it is in a good cause and you can donate money at: www.giveafewbob.org.
Of course, The Missus told me that she’d read that one of the best ways to stave off the onset of prostate cancer is to keep your bits working properly and some experts recommend that frequent masturbation helps. This is why I am currently wanking like a safari park chimp in order to squeeze a few more years out of my pathetic life.
(That last bit was a joke, OK?)
Selling your home is a strenuous activity. To sell two, multiplies the general air of panic. I’ve never sold a property before as we were first-time buyers when we moved here, so the challenge was there for me to embrace. My initial strategy was to make sure everything look spick and span and to really try and impress the viewers with my sales patter. In the first couple of days of the house being on the market, I saw dozens of people and after a while I realised that my sales patter just wasn’t working – so I toned it down in stages until I was almost grunting at them.
“Living room…kitchen…cupboard…garden…bathroom…toilet…small bedroom…cupboard…large bedroom…cupboard…massive scope for expansion.”
You get the idea. One fellow, who we shall call Mr B, was very interested. In fact, he was the first person to view. However, he required subsequent viewers and I was very accommodating, smiling and pretending it was OK when he turned up at 9.45pm with his Eastern European girlfriend. Trying not to be offended when he reappeared suddenly with a burly “builder” friend who virtually called me a liar when I said that we’d had a quote for a loft conversion and they believed you’d have to get planning permission from the council for such an extension (like duh). These people left greasy fingermarks over the paint surfaces and the loft access panel. And then two more people turned up from his party to view. The effect of them turning up late meant that all my subsequent viewers were queuing on the doorstep and even when Mr B and his party left, they spent a further 45 minutes outside my house visually examing the roof and eyeing up my further appointments as they arrived and left.
Mr B made an offer, but I didn’t think he was serious and I didn’t like him much as a person, so I pushed him up. He backed down and the offer fell. I was glad because this guy was going to rip out the heart of the house and build, build, build. I know I am not a big fan of my neighbours, but not even I would put them through the possible mess and chaos caused by such invasive building work.
Anyway, more people arrived and some appeared interested and some were just here to have a nose. The Missus said at the beginning that we’d sell in a week, but I said it might take longer. She was getting a little concerned about the lack of serious offers, but I said that we needed to wait and that a man would come and he would buy both. I knew he was out there, I just needed him to turn up.
All the while I was also trying to sell the bungalow next door. The bungalow isn’t in as good condition as our home, so it needed a little more of a push. A queue of people came and went, but no offers. The only sniff was a couple of chancers who threw in £110,000 – which was just stupid. So we waited. And then my man arrived.
Mr K turned up early Saturday morning, but before I can talk about our deal I must tell you what happened on the Friday night. It was about 12.30am and we were heading up to bed when I received a call from my mother telling me that there was a gang of youths outside the house and that they had ripped up our “For Sale” sign. I went up to the bedroom window and spied out into the blackness and a group of 6-8 “youths” were staggering off into the night, peppering the air with expletives and threats to each other as they went. I put my boots on (the ones with the steel toe caps, so I was ready for a fight) and grabbed my claw hammer in order to do any repairs.
When I checked the damage, the little scrotes didn’t quite manage to rip the “For Sale” sign off our gatepost, but ripped the entire post from the ground and left it propped up against the tree in the front garden. Now this was our good post – the post that still stood firm and held against the elements. It wasn’t our slightly droopy, not so good post that was wonky and caused the gate to swing at a funny angle. I was mightily pissed off, so I set off after them but by the time I had reached the corner of our road, the group had disappeared around another corner and I decided it was a little too far to wander on my own. So me and The Missus did our best to secure the post, but the damage was such that it wasn’t going back into the ground and it would not hold. As we tussled with the sign, a lone figure staggered past the house: it was one of the little shits who had been with the group that damaged our gate post.
I confronted the guy, but here’s a handy psychological tip for those of you who want to get to the truth. Always choose your words carefully and create a verbal trap for your protagonist to fall into. Here’s my example:
“Hey, why did you feel the need to rip up my gatepost?” says I.
“Why would I want to rip down your ‘For Sale’ sign?” the little bastard replies.
Now notice what I did there. I didn’t say “For Sale” sign – I said gatepost and our “For Sale” sign was out of sight to the casual observer, so it was patently obvious that this was my man. I squared up to him and gave him a verbal bollocking. I so desperately wanted him to take a swing at me, but the guy’s balls suddenly deserted him.
“Why would I want to rip down your ‘For Sale’ sign?” was his mantra until the Missus smartly interjected: “Because you’ve had a shit night and you want to ruin ours…” There really was no answer to that. Realising that I wasn’t going to get a fight out of the fellow, I told him to be on his way and that he had no right to damage our property.
The funny thing is that when I was a younger man, I’d done the same thing: I ripped down a sign outside a house. Ahhhh, but before you roll your eyes and call me a hypocrite, dear reader, let me explain. A good few years ago, we were letting a flat in Leytonstone and it was right near the tube station and it was very busy. The terms of our letting meant that there had to be a “Let By” sign outside the property at all times. This invariably got pulled down so many times I lost count. But whenever one got ripped down, a new one would almost automatically appear thanks to the magic lettings fairy. One night, after a boozy evening with works colleagues, I returned home to find the “To Let” sign at a funny angle. Someone had unsuccessfully tried to pull it down and I was so pissed (off and drunk) that I finished the job with a drunken roar. Don’t worry, the sign was replaced a few days later. So people damaging this signs are a bit of a bugbear. I can’t stand the damn things, but when you sign the contract with agent, there’s little you can do about it.
SOooo…back to my dream man. The man who was going to buy both our properties. He arrived on that following Saturday morning and I wasn’t in a good mood. The sign was in our front garden, lying on the lawn, looking a bit crappy. The gatepost was missing and I hadn’t bothered to tidy the place. But as soon as we finished the viewing he named his price and we shook on it. It was as easy as that. Then I took him next door and the same thing happened. He named his price, we haggled and then we shook on it. I took a slightly lower price because I wanted an easy life and a buyer taking on both properties makes it a lot easier arranging completion dates, etc.
Anyway, the next viewers arrived about an hour later. There were three of them: two men and a woman, all in the latter stages of middle age. They were very keen and I think they must have caught the reek of booze when I opened the door. In the interceding hour, we’d had a celebratory lager between us and were a little ebullient with the sale. At the end of the viewing, one guy said:
“You are going to sell this today.”
“I already have!” I remarked with a chortle.
Sure enough, these people made a higher offer on the Monday morning, but I turned them down. While it would have been nice to have the extra cash, I realled wanted Mr K to buy because he was a nice chap, who wanted the bungelow for his ailing mother and he was like me: a no-bullshit kind of guy. Of course, we’ve still got to get through surveys and contracts, but I wish the guy well at this old place because it has been a real home to us and I hope it is a real home to him. So after twelve days and 24 viewers, we were one step closer to selling up.
Today, just after writing my previously entry, I managed to sell both properties for the figure I had in my head. It is done. The weight has been lifted from my shoulders and another pigeon step has been taken. Exciting, innit? On Monday, we ink deals and engage solicitors. This phase is over for now and barring anything falling through. We move forward. Hurrah!