Danger of power
In driveway maintenance as in controversial debate, it pays to keep your distance, writes Kevan Christie
They say an Englishman’s home is his castle. Well, I can attest that this wellworn maxim applies to the good people of Scotland as well, dear readers, after a week spent power washing the driveway leading up to the grounds of my Fife estate during an early summer “holiday”.
I say a week but it was really four hours split over two days – but it definitely felt like a fortnight, if you follow me.
Granted, I had a “nice bit of kit” for this onerous task, having inherited one of those black and yellow Karcher things that lurked in the deepest recesses of the Double G and I thought was a Hoover, or vacuum cleaner, if you like.
Now on paper, playing with a power washer seems like great fun and the spirit of my inner eight-yearold self was definitely channelled as I put on the waterproofs and the swimming goggles.
As a former cub scout I approached the task like the adult equivalent of bob-a-job and, as the Dundonians say, I definitely thought I was Erchie.
My sense of elation must have lasted all of five minutes, however, before the first Mount Etna style eruption of five years worth of mud exploded and hit me square in the puss.
A few more of these heavy dunts, with the swimming goggles proving useless, and I was all for downing tools and paying the 200 odd quid it would cost to get the job done... properly. “Where there’s muck there’s brass.”
I did what I always do in times of stress and asked myself: “What would Tony Soprano do?”
The answer to which was, he’d have definitely paid someone else to do this – or at the very least told them he would before making them disappear.
This was quickly turning into a nightmare of epic proportions and