In my mind it does anyway. And once my smooth yet violent transition to world dictator is complete, it shall phonetically as well. Any linguistic scholar who wishes to diffidently argue the point, shall suffer death by killer vole. The ninja badgers are behind held in reserve for the first person who refers to themselves in the third person.

Rather than a planned ride/drink/hospital visit weekend in the Lake District, fate cruelly dealt me the joyless hand of painting the front fence instead. So forgoing the life affirming experience of bouncing head first onto sharp pointy rocks while admiring the view, I excavated the shed in search of paint, brushes and some enthusiasm. Two out of three ain’t bad.

Now, according to those lost souls who sacrifice their weekends on the alter of home improvement, a professional finish relies on painstaking preparation. Heeding such advice, my preparation involved leaving it for about five years until the Neighborhood Watch assumed the house had been abandoned. This apparently isn’t exactly what they had in mind, so firstly I zoomed up and down the flakey picket with power tools accompanied by plane noises. A satisfying if ultimately disappointing approach which rapidly low teched its way down to a scraper and bucket of water.

Is this the best 21st century technology could offer? Apparently so – yet it was only four hours later when as much as one third of the fence was cured of flaky leprosy. Much of this time was spent cussing the idiot who had previously slapped on some cheap paint in a style I came to think of “looks ok must be ok”. According to my wife, that idiot was me, although I have no recollection of it whatsoever. Probably therapy was involved to blank it from my mind.

My mood was in no way improved by the entire neighborhood strolling past in their guise of self appointed members of the piss taking committee. While one particular individual launched her jolly japes into a sea of misery (you know the kind of thing “oooh you missed a bit” and “at this rate, you’ll be finished by Christmas“), I painted her dog. Needless to say, there is no way that poor mutt is going to win any prizes at the next kennel club; “That’s never a pure bred dalmatian, it doesn’t have any spots”

She was right about one thing tho, this was taking bloody ages. The fence seemed to stretch out to infinity whereas my patience was stretched to about snapping point. Boredom took over at an inopportune point, as by this time I had the pain(t) brush grasped firmly in my mitt and was waggling away in the style of “happy slappy“. The collateral damage included two new derivations of well known flowers – “the hoster gloss-paintus” and the “Buddlea White-Spot”

What a dumb way to spend the final 8 hours of your holiday. Honestly, it was so bad, I’d have preferred to have been at work. Which is exactly where I’ll be the next time to subsidise a proper tradesman who has the requisite painting skills and stratospherically high boredom threshold.

Or I’m concreting over the entire garden and renting it out as car park space.