BOWELS, BOOBS N BITS

I had hoped that life at 55 would be a long succession of beetle drives and afternoon tea dances but alas, I’ve discovered this is simply not the case.

It seems the only things filling up my social calendar these days are medical appointments and so I find myself contemplating my latest lot of NHS letters inviting me to get bowels, boobs and lady bits seen to.  There have been more exploratory expeditions to my nether regions in the past few years than there have been to the outer reaches of the Mongolian Desert!

I guess I should feel chuffed that I’m still young enough not to qualify for a free bus pass yet old enough to meet the age requirements for both bowel cancer screening (55) and mammograms (50).  The days of firkling about with a Davy lamp and handheld mirror in the bathroom trying to locate lumps of the unexpected variety about my person are no more as the NHS will now kindly do this for me for free. 

Although the thought of lying there with either my baps out or my arse in the air doesn’t fill me with joy, it’s important to keep these appointments as you never know when lumps of the unexpected variety may actually show up on your doorstep.  Knowing my luck, it’ll probably be when I’m busy on Ebay.  

WALL PANELS FINISHED

Miracle of miracles – we’ve finished the wall panels!  

I applied two coats of Jasmine White paint quickly with a small sponge roller and I mean quick as this Dulux Quick-dry paint doesn’t take long to go off. 

Preparing to paint

This is going to take ages

I thought of my brother and his MDF spray painting as using a roller does leave that slight stipple finish but I’ll take that over visible brush strokes.  You can only really notice the stippling if you get up close to the panels.

The overall visual effect from the bottom of the stairs is superb and I’m glad I decided to paint the panels white in the end as this has helped to symmetrically balance them against the white painted stair spindles.  It might have looked a little odd with one side painted beige and the other white.

Almost done

So our staircase transformation project is almost at an end.  There are only the risers left to paint white and a second coat of yacht varnish to apply to the stained wood but that will now have to wait until summer time.

Before - starting of the transformation

After - beautiful Art Deco look hallway

With a bit of imagination, a lot of hard work and infinite patience, you too can give your house a Hollywood makeover and live in a posh gaff.

COUCH POTATO (Not)

Calm down!  Calm down!  The scallies at the University of Liverpool have just published research spuriously claiming that it only takes a fortnight of couch surfing for you to be on the slippery slope to an early grave.  So I’m sitting here wondering if I can find a way to capitalise on this illuminating piece of media spin namely to get early retirement on the basis that my office job is now as bad for you as a holiday in Chernobyl.

Walk to work?  Of course I could, after all the office is only a mere 10 miles away from home.  I might have to leave a bit earlier in the morning (say 5 am) and spend about £9,000 on a future knee replacement operation but it would be a small sacrifice to make if I want to live to be a hundred.

Better still, I could persuade my boss to outsource my job to Mumbai where they seem less bothered about the population’s inactivity levels or put in a business case for automated treadmills to be fitted under each desk so that pen pushers like me could spend the day spinning about like a hyperactive hamster whilst sitting at the PC.

Shame on you Daniel Cuthbertson!  Nobody wants to go back to washing their sheets in a bathtub and wringing them through a mangle just to keep fit or satisfy the current trend for fat bashing.  I dare say there are those out there who could do with a bit of a rocket under their arses but if I found any potatoes on my couch there’d be all hell to pay as we have a ‘no eating in front of the telly’ policy here.

Perhaps your research grant would have been better spent examining the correlation between the inability to lose weight and all the antibiotics/steroids that are pumped into the meat we eat.  If the animals we consume are super-sized thanks to all the Franken-food they’re given then what hope is there for those that then tuck into these beasts? 

“Don’t just flop on the sofa at the weekend” advice printed in The Times on Good Friday.  Sofa?  If only I could but after two solid days of painting wallpaper, my joints are tighter than MI6’s recruitment policy and if I sat down, I’d probably need a forklift to help me back up again.  Now pass me a crème egg.  

Painting wallpaper

Extendable pole for those hard to reach places

Upstairs hallway done

Nutmeg white very subtle wall colour

One step closer to completion

ASSET LIQUIDATION

Asset liquidation, the posh middle class way of saying I’m selling my tat on Ebay.  I’m down-sizing my life by getting rid of all those dust gathering knick-knacks which for decades have cluttered up the house.  

Wrought iron wall clutter

Floor standing clutter

Why?  Not out of love but from the need to pay for a new hallway radiator whilst at the same time saving for a holiday in Italy and with this cold wintry Easter weather, Ebay beats freezing your butt off at a car boot sale. 

Looking at buying one of these radiators

Ebay or Gumtree are by far the easiest way of recycling everything you don’t want into everything you do want without having to resort to a costly home improvement loan from the bank.  (Credit isn’t free!)  Proceeds of sales to date have almost covered the cost of 1 new radiator but there’s still the plumber to factor in so I’ll be scouring the house for anything else not chained to the walls. 

Shelby’s hiding out in my wool bag in case she gets listed.

She'll never find me in here