Instead of washing that paintbrush, do this instead

I’ve been painting the outside of the house (with some help from my resident hat genius). But the part I hate is cleaning the brushes afterwards so they can be used again.

I clean them for two reasons:

1. I might just be able to reuse them. That sometimes – rarely – does happen.
2. I can feel my Dad’s pained expression at the thought of the waste involved in using a brush just once. That’s the main reason.

Do you have those brushes wrapped in plastic bags or propped up in empty containers that once held white spirits – long evaporated? As the days and weeks and months and years pass – the brushes harden into a state that makes them worthless by the next time you come to use them.

And you think to yourself, who was I kidding? I should have chucked them in the bin back then, instead of having them cluttering up the place.

But throwing a perfectly good, albeit painty, paintbrush away just doesn’t seem right. Sometime during the period between you storing it and then retrieving it, the morality shifts. But when exactly it becomes OK to bin it, is hard to pin down.

So the charade is repeated.

But what if there was an alternative

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The day I met… Frederick “Day of the Jackal” Forsyth

Just imagine, you finally get to meet your idol, only for it all to go terribly badly wrong?

Perhaps they disappoint you and disillusion sets in? Perhaps you throw up in their cumberbund? Or perhaps – like me – you manage to make an awful first impression.

I’ve received some great entries for this blog’s The Day I Met… competition. Some funny. Some poignant. All you need to do is email me your story – doesn’t have to be long – and I’ll publish it on this blog – a new one each Wednesday as long as it lasts. The competition details are here. But really, it’s as simple as emailing me at paulwaters99 @ hotmail.com (just remove the spaces in that email address). If it’s a funny story – all the better. And you’ll get a prize – the book of your choice from the list I’ll send you. But never mind that – just think of the prestige. Aaah.

Anyway – I need more entries – so please email.

And – just like junior army officers leading the charge on World War One trenches – I wouldn’t ask you to do something I wasn’t willing to do myself. So I’ll kick off with…

The Day I Met… Frederick Forsyth. 

This was not how I had imagined things would go. Since internationally famous best-selling writer Frederick Forsyth popped up on the local scene, I’ve been secretly nurturing the hope that we’d have a chance meeting – over a pint in the local perhaps, followed by a quiet chat and erudite conversation about commonly held interests – the BBC, Africa, writing and local goings on.

Millinery maestro (huh!) Frederick Forsyth

Who knows where it might lead? Not to the disastrous encounter of the other day