Tuesday 14 August 2012

Body builders


I'm glad my husband hasn't got a man in tomorrow.

He's had an electrician in, he's booked a chippie and a decorator who've both been for a measure up and for the past week there's been a builder in the garden who bares his cleavage whenever he can. 
sexy builder, body builder, building work, brickie
Not my builder

When the sun even threatens to come out in a minute (if you're lucky) he pulls his shirt off.  Glance through any window to feel like a voyeur.

He does have a near-Olympian body.  (Boxer rather than 100 metres.)  But what is it about builders that they treat the bodies they flaunt with disdain?

His sun-baked back, never plastered by sunscreen, is as red as the bricks he's digging up and occasionally moving about.  He doesn't wear a protective mask when he saws up things that he shouldn't inhale.

He stops sawing and has a fag and asks for three sugars in his tea.  "When you're ready, love."
 
The body he's building won't look so good in a year or two.

A roofer arrives and before you can say Health and Safety he's flat out on a dodgy roof cuddling the old asbestos before beating it with a hammer.  Without a mask. 

The senior builder arrives and says stop worrying, he's moved tons of asbestos lately:
 

"You don't need a licence, love.  Just common sense." 


     

Friday 10 August 2012

FARMERS' MARKET TIME TRAVEL


Time travelling is easy.  Go to a farmers' market.

Not a poncy sun-dried goat's cheese  farmers' market.  A market with farmers, in a proper market town.  Selling sheep and pigs and ducks.  One where they warn you when you park that your car could get dented by an escaping bullock.  "Happened last week."

In the madding crowd there are canny groups of Thomas Hardy men, conferring about the price of calves and black-face sheep, which are the coolest sheep at the market. 
suffolk sheep, farmers market, black-face sheep
You expect to see Bathsheba Everdene any minute, turning heads and bartering sharply for sheep feed.  You certainly see her nightie in the indoor market, hanging on a rack with several more.  Pristine, but definitely Victorian. 

You see Mellors and his jacket with all the smeared waxed pockets and his young pheasants.  And his gun, among a lot of other guns and cages for ferrets.  And ferrets. 

There are the odd jarring notes.  Dayglo harnesses and jackets for ferrets.   A few men like Mellors's mates, if Mellors had mates, selling night-shot videos about catching pheasants and rabbits. 

And an iphone on a water trough, in a sheep pen with straw on the floor.