Brexit Day + 85
Terry… I’m sorry but not surprised you’ve had such appalling experiences with your prospective kitchen fitters. I was going to say you can’t get the skills these days, but that would be being disingenuous and unfair. We had no trouble at all with the bloke we used – a one man enterprise.
First words out of his mouth when I told him we needed a new kitchen were “
Change is the essential process of all existence.” which I thought was very profound for a kitchen fitter. Then he did a few calculations on a glorified 1960s calculator and quoted a very reasonable price and a precise time and date of completion for doing the job (March the 29
th, if memory serves me correctly).
He turned up exactly as promised, in his big van – a VW Transporter. He worked solidly for three days, eventually finishing about fifteen minutes before his quoted time. But he looked quite perplexed. When I asked him what was wrong, he replied
“It’s illogical, Mister Pain. My calculations cannot be in error, but I seem to have worked more efficiently than is half-humanly possible.” Then I noticed he’d got his clunking great 1960s calculator out and I thought, yes mate, you’ve got it wrong and now you’re going to ask me to pay more. But no, all he said was “
Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Unbelievably, he then deducted fifteen minutes of his time from the final bill.
For a few days, we were really pleased, then we thought we’d made a bit of a wrong choice with one or two niggling details; nothing serious and certainly not enough to put us off our brand new kitchen. Perhaps we should have thought about some aspects of it a bit more, but we’d been promising ourselves a new kitchen for the past three years. So I decided to give John, the fitter, a call and see if he could do a few tweaks. He was great about it and was round before I’d put the phone down – he must have driven at nigh on the speed of light. After I’d explained what we wanted changing, he came out with another of his weird thoughts: “
It is curious how often humans manage to obtain that which you do not want.” and refused any further payment. As he was leaving, he gave a funny sort of wave – as if his fingers were affected with arthritis (resulting from his job?) – and said “
I have been and always shall be your friend.” What a nice but strange bloke, I thought.
I’m not sure if he’s still in the business these days – I heard he was knighted (sounds unlikely) – he was near retirement. If you pm me I’ll look out his contact details… John Red… something or other. One thing I must mention, though, is that he had this peculiar habit of trying to sing in some foreign language all day long, like this:
Mae hen wlad fy nhadau yn annwyl i mi,
Gwlad beirdd a chantorion, enwogion o fri;
Ei gwrol ryfelwyr, gwladgarwyr tra mād,
Tros ryddid gollasant eu gwaed….
Carnation... I'm not overly keen on chocolates - can we have toffees instead? But please, no fudge - we've had a bellyfull of that recently and we're all feeling a bit sick of it!