Dusters at Dawn « Cherry Menlove

Dusters at Dawn

It was all set to be a pretty good end to the day. I had been running around for most of it and now, late in the afternoon, I was settled and began to bake some pink fairy cakes as I’ll be having a visit from Jo-Jo and the monkey doodles tomorrow. All I had to do was make sure I was in the house for when the man from the damp company arrived. I was in when the man from the damp company arrived and so was he …….IN A BAD MOOD!!!!!

I wasn’t quite sure what was happening at first as he seemed fine. I told him briefly about our damp situation and how we were told that we had damp on one wall before we moved in and that now we had decided to pull up the hideous dark orange tile that currently resides on our kitchen floor we thought we really should get it dealt with. So far so good. He said that needed to do a quick sketch of the “downstairs living area”, I asked him if I could let him get on with it and it all seemed OK.

I switched the Kitchen Aid on to continue with my cake mixture and thought nothing of it. It wasn’t until he came back into MY KITCHEN and I very innocently and in a ’simply trying to make conversation because you are in MY KITCHEN’ way that I asked him if it was very damp, as opposed to just a little bit, that he said “If you don’t mind not asking me questions like that until I have finished doing my checks” Err……..O.K. I looked at him slightly incredulously but he was already far too busy trying to get out of MY BACK DOOR, which was locked. It was at this point that Mr Damp Man asked me just how the people who had told us that our back wall was damp knew that it was damp when it had kitchen cupboards all along it. To which I replied that they must have done the test from the outside. You’d have thought that I’d suggested that his mother come round for supper and I cook her boiled eyeball and scrotum stew because the DISDAIN with which he said “If it had happened to have been raining when they did the test an outside wall is going to show up as damp, ISN’T IT?????” At this point my entire face dropped and I put my ‘dead eyes’ in. LBH has been known to mutter “Oh God” when I have put my dead eyes in and I was fast approaching a point when this angry, young damp man was going to be seen FLYING across my town with butter-cream filling all over his red head. His entire attitude was one of utter rudeness. His company may not need the business, who knows, but unless they come back and say they’ll do the work for a tenner then they’re not getting it from us. The best bit happened when he was about to go. He had finished asking all of his questions and the visit had come to it’s natural end. So I stuck my hand out, as all polite people do, to shake his. In return he hugged his “folder” to his chest and left me standing there with my arm extended while he proceeded to tell me that they could email me the report if I’d like to tell him the best address. Well, when I told him my email address cherry (at) cherry menlove dot com, WHICH IS MY NAME, he seemed to get the ‘Cherry’ bit easily……….and then the punk started on my surname!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Let me tell you something, I grew up with kids teasing me over my surname every day of my life. I love it now as it’s mine and it’s part of me, it represents my family and I’m proud of it. So when Mr Damp Man convulses into FITS OF GIGGLES when I have to SPELL OUT my surname to him before he can manage to write it down I almost had a fit.

You see that big pink blob of butter-cream filling, sitting atop my palette knife? I’ll leave the rest up to your imagination……………………………………….. This article first appeared on my on my blog in Jaunary of 2008

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