Paul Carter Author | Author
Paul Carter Author
Reviews
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21.01.2022 Before the soap holder parted company with the wall of the shower, I had been peacefully passing the holiday unwinding from an exhausting first year of retirement, having spent just a little over a week sitting in the sun at Port fairy, doing sod all. Although that is not quite true because, for two of those days, I spent much of the time focussing on keeping my foot in a bucket of iced water to settle the gout resulting from the trayfuls of oysters on which I had pigged out... when we first arrived. With my foot now pain-free and back to a normal size and colour, I was pleasantly contemplating also doing nothing for the second week on the holiday when, whilst doing the nits, pits and dirty bits, I leant on the soap holder in the shower and it came away in my hand. When she saw what I had done, Gilly made the ridiculously sensible suggestion of phoning up the agent and getting someone over to fix the problem. Like Jerome’s Mr Podger, however, I dismissed the idea out of hand. ‘Don’t be ridiculous woman,’ I said with what I thought was an authoritative tone. ‘There’s no need to bring anyone in to fix a little thing like this. I have some tools in the garage,’ I added and went looking for them. I found an incomplete set of Alan keys, some picture hooks, a roll of gaffer tape that I couldn’t find the end of, a tube of silicone as hard as a rock, and an impressively heavy hammer. Back in the bathroom, I assessed the situation in detail and, with only four trips to the hardware store, I eventually rounded up all that I needed to knock the job, even managing to return everything of the wrong size and application with only minor skirmishes about packets having been opened. By the end of the second day the job was done, and I stood back in pride as Gilly carefully placed a bar of soap on the reinstated masterpiece. ‘See,’ I said smugly, and felt the warm glow of self-satisfaction of a job well done right up until two o’clock the next morning when the holder slid off the wall again. Back at the hardware store, buying yet more supplies, I pretended not to notice the sniggering from behind the counter. ‘The job’s gone well then?’ I was asked, and I rather haughtily replied that it was going just fine, thank you very much. By later on that evening, the job was finally done. As I tugged on it to make sure that it was now indivisibly attached to where it was supposed to be, I reassured myself that the holder would still be in place long after the rest of the en suite has fallen down. And apart from a small chip off the corner of one of the tiles, I thought that the job had gone pretty smoothly. ‘There you go,’ I said to Gilly, ‘and to think that there are those of us,’ I laughed as I gave her a bit of a nudge, ‘who would have thought of getting someone in.’ I expected her to be impressed, but she had all the hardware dockets in her hand. ‘Well, there is one thing,’ she replied as she held them up for me to see, ‘it would have been a great deal cheaper.’ See more
14.01.2022 In the garden at the farm we had grass. At the new house we have lawn, which is very different. When we first moved, never having had lawn before, I hadn’t appreciated just how big that difference is. Grass is something you mow when it starts becoming a fire hazard, when the boss tells you to, or when there are folk coming over for a barbeque. Lawn is something on which you lavish constant love and attention, something you care for on a daily basis. At the farm, I rode on th...Continue reading
12.01.2022 Whilst everyone else was sorting out photographs on their i-pads, renovating their bathrooms and getting fit on-line, I spent the Corona months in our garden. I worked in the area behind the hawthorn hedge, where I converted a weedy slope of clay into a terraced, loamy wonderland, bordered by a bluestone piece de resistance: The Great Wall of Covid. My wall may not be visible from space, but it hasn’t fallen over, and I am mightily pleased with it. The transformation behind...Continue reading
10.01.2022 Port Fairy launch of Yet More Tales of a Country Doctor at Blarney Books.
