First - it's the end of Eid al Fitr, which is the feast at the end of the fast of Ramadan. Hope all our Muslim readers had a great one.
Then on to wallpapering. Well, not quite. Little Barbara isn't tall enough to paper a wall and there's no way on earth she'd be allowed anywhere near a ladder. And we don't paper the walls of new-build houses anyway. We paint them. (Good reasons for this, mainly to do with the length of time it takes brand new plaster to breathe and properly dry out).
What we sometimes do (for show houses and for special requests) is run a paper border strip horizontally around the walls of a room. Sometimes at the edge where it joins the ceiling, sometimes lower - generally about a third of the way up the wall. That's what I was going to be doing this week, and what Barbara was going to learn to do.
Permission was a lot easier this time, and came through a lot quicker. It was a "oh, you've done this before so we'll just say yes now" thing. And it didn't need a lot of preparation.
She wore her miniature painter's whites. (Actually a bib-and-brace- overall style of kiddies' dungarees). And her plastic (toy) hard-hat. It didn't matter that it was a toy one because, by the time we reach internal decorating stage, the houses needing work aren't in a hard-hat area. Though I wore my hard-hat so that we looked the same.
The most difficult bit was finding something that looked sufficiently like (and worked well enough as) a wallpapering brush, but that was small enough and light enough for her to handle. I eventually found one in an ironmonger's, it was marked as a crumb brush (to dust a tablecloth) but didn't have the little handle they usually have. It was plastic rather than wood but it looked the part and would work quite well.
Her mother brought her over after morning tea-break. First we mixed paste. That got a little messy. Her third attempt was perfect. (The first too were a trifle runny). Then we got the paste-table set up and I showed her how to cut the right length of border, and how to paste it without getting any paste on the table. She did pretty well at that.
I'd already marked the wall up with a guide-line. I wasn't going to overwhelm her with technical details like plumb-lines and chalk and string and spirit level and how to get a level line to work to.
I showed her how to fold the pasted paper so it would unfold easily as she pasted it to the wall. She liked being able to hold the strip in one hand. Then I demonstrated how to paste the paper to the wall, whilst unfolding as you walk, and smoothing it out to get rid of air bubbles all at the same time. She managed it perfectly. She's a smart little kid. I cut the corners in (the border design was little flowers and it needed experience to match it properly), but she did the rest. And she chatted nineteen to the dozen.
We stopped for lunch. She sat beside me with her sandwich and crisps and juice as I ate my sandwich and crisps and drank my coffee. And she still chatted. And looked as proud and as pleased as it's humanly possible to be.
We did two more houses (one room in each house) after lunch, before her mother came to collect her at 3pm. She chatted the entire time. She was ecstatic. She loved every minute of it. She was even more bouncy about a bit of wallpapering than I was about the Olympics!!
When she left I gave her a certificate that said she was now a qualified apprentice paperer's mate. And she hugged me. Her mother said she would frame the certificate and hang it next to the painting one. Which hangs above her bed. I got a little choked up about that. If I wasn't such a hard bastard I might even have got emotional.
She's a great kid. I told her that her mother was happy to let her then she could come to the site every time she's off school, for as long as I'm there. And she hugged me again. And skipped off (actually skipping, the way kids do), chattering the whole time about her friend the building lady and how she was now an apprentice.
That kid is going to be a painter-and-decorator when she grows up, no doubt about it.
See you next week. Goodnight and may your God/s go with you.
Ze
