Paint Me Down

I don’t know how you would best describe your own smell, but we all have one don’t we – a mashed up remix of centuries of hormones and chemicals that is uniquely ours and should lead our partner, blindfold in a room full of naked sex bombs, straight to us without stopping on the way for any pungent temptation.

If you want an exaggerated sense of what you smell like, then try this. Don’t wash for a few weeks, jump in the wash basket on a hot day, and inhale. Then imagine that you are trying to attract the opposite sex with this as your calling card. It’s amazing any of us ever find someone, isn’t it?

Anyway, this is the time of year when my usual smell is replaced by something much more macho and for the next four or five months I will not be making your eyes water with sweat, cologne or after shave, but you will still be sniffing the top notes, getting excited by the bottom notes and trying to tie down the fragrance to a particular plant, or cedar wood.

Well, to save you a lot of olfactory effort, the perfume I’ll be wearing is from the House of B&Q Superstore and it’s called Turps or, to give it the Parisian tortured artist slant, Paint Brush Cleaner. More Harry Lauder than Esteee Lauder, I’m sitting here the day after painting a balcony outside my house and the smell of the spirits is still in my nostrils and in my hair.

Whenever the sun is out I put on my old scruffy dungarees and get busy with the DIY which usually means painting something quickly and then spending hours trying to clean the brushes with stuff that seeps so far in to the lining of my nose that it enters my dreams. Last night it was The Joker throwing paint stripper on my face and laughing as I melted and became hideously deformed, turning in to Russell Crowe .

I’m also constantly worried and embarrassed at this time of year when sitting next to people on the train in case I smell like a down and out alcoholic who’s embraced the recession by moving on to the cheap stuff. I think of myself as a DIY enthusiast, eager to make the house look nice and anxious to get repairs done, but perhaps I simply come across as an old wino.

My wife says I’m just a cheapskate who won’t pay for a professional and she may well be right as I find it hard to really get in to the whole decorator’s multi tasking thing – ringing the bookies every few minutes while eating cold sausage rolls, having a fag and reading the Daily Sport all at the same. I admire it but I can’t do it, so perhaps my wife is right and I’m just playing at DIY to be mean.

And to back up her ideas on my meanness, I guess the real DIY that interests me is reading those tips that are supposed to take us back to some sort of war spirit of “make and mend”. I read the other day that if I drop my mobile ‘phone down the toilet or mistakenly take a call when I’m scuba diving or in the bath, then the way to save spending on a new ‘phone is to take the battery out and plunge the ‘phone in to a bowl of uncooked rice for a few days. The rice draws out the water from the ‘phone leaving it brand new.

It all sounds good to me but this tip has the disadvantage of being useful only in silly circumstances as I can’t imagine sitting on the loo chatting to my mum while going about my business. It’s obviously a disgusting waste of good reading time.

So I tend to polarise with my money saving tips, preferring the really good ones or the totally stupid. On the good side there’s the problem I constantly get of my computer keyboard sttttticking on the letttttter T now and again when I’m typing. In the past I threw the keyboards out and bought anew but I now know I can disconnect it and put it in the dishwasher then let it dry overnight and it’s back to normal. I also use WD40 for everything from protecting silver from tarnishing to removing tomato and lipstick stains from clothing.

Now I realise that I am probably coming across as Scrooge’s great grandson but there’s a recession on you know, tho’ I do admit it’s the daft money saving tips that really get me excited. They were started, as far as I can see, by Viz comic years ago and never fail to make me laugh. Typical of these would be “To save money on chewing gum simply take some rubber bands and cover them with a dab of toothpaste. Delicious!” Or how about one that suggests saving money on personalised number plates by simply changing your name to that of your licence plate? That was suggested by Mr KVS 734Y.

These tips then get downright cruel but they do lead to fun. “Buy a TV set like your neighbour’s and then annoy the hell out of him by standing at his window changing channels.” Or, “Jump on the roof of your garage and dangle a fish on a bit of string outside your kitchen window. Your wife will think the house is underwater.”

If you have any great tips then pass them on. I’m especially looking for ones on how to get the smell of turps and white spirit out my nose. Next time you sit next to me on a train, please let me know.