I hated school snitches as much as I dislike lockdown curtain twitchers

STEP 1 Choosing the right paint for the job is paramount and there are different paints for different surfaces. Even simple white comes in many lustres and compositions. STEP 2

Safety first. Look for the VOC rating on cans or tubs. Oil-based paints tend to be high, while water-based ones are generally low. You need good ventilation if you’re using high VOC paints.

Use a universal primer and undercoat if you’re not sure whether the previous paint was oil or water based. Otherwise the paint might not adhere properly. Be cautious using old paint. Oil-based paints will keep for longer than water-based ones that degrade if they are stored somewhere liable to frost. It’s not really worth using old paint, so generally buy new.

STEP 5 STEP 3

Broadly, it’s emulsion paints for walls and ceilings and gloss or satin paint for wood and metalwork. But even emulsion paints have variations from mat and supermat to silk, and even if the colour is the same, if the finish is different, it won’t match.

STEP 4

Use rollers for larger areas and a brush for the edges. When applying oil-based paints, don’t put too much on your brush otherwise you may create runs on the surface. Two light coats is better than one excessive one.

STEP 6 Instead of washing out your paintbrushes and roller after each use, wrap them in cling film or a plastic bag to keep out the air and they will remain usable for days.

WHEN I was at school, the kids no one liked were the snitches – the little sneaks who went running to the teacher at every opportunity telling him or her about all the terrible things the rest of us had been doing.

In my case the snitches were hideously overworked. In fact, had there been a union for snitches (The UFS perhaps?), there’d have been complaints due to the amount of work I was making them do.

Yes, I was naughty and I was at school in the days when a blackboard duster across the knuckles was an acceptable punishment for wrongdoing as was a smack across the back of the legs and the teacher chucking chalk at you. Oh, and we also had to stand in the corner which I quite liked because there was no pain involved in that.

All of the above happened to me with monotonous regularity thanks to a few of the snitches in my school. One of them was particularly bad and she hated me because I didn’t want her in our gang. (When I say “gang”, we weren’t selling crack cocaine – we were just 10.) So when I was being punished for whatever she’d grassed me up for she’d watch me with a sly, selfsatisfied smile on her face.

I did get my own back – I pulled her hair and wrestled her to the ground one day when she was walking home from school. But of course she snitched on me and my mum was called in to see my teacher.

Anyway, the reason I’m telling you this is because I hate snitches today every bit as much as I did back then.

And lockdown has brought them

IT IS so important when staying at home to keep moving for the benefit of your physical and mental health.

Now we are able to go outside for exercise, award-winning fitness coach Julie Bartlett has taken her next set of exercises to her local park. If you have

been following Julie’s routines, you

out in droves – peeping out from behind their curtains to report neighbours for supposed transgressions. These are the people who at the start of lockdown would report those who’d taken two walks a day instead of one and were hitting Tesco twice in a week. Don’t get me wrong, I stuck to the rules (apart from maybe an extra trip to Tesco) but lockdown has given these little jobsworths an actual job, a purpose, albeit a nasty one. But the thing is I don’t like the idea of neighbour turning on neighbour or communities being divided thanks to small-minded, spiteful people.

And, no, I don’t accept all the people who dobbed other people in it were doing so solely to stop the spread of the virus. I think they were doing it because that’s the kind of people they are – pandemic or no pandemic.