A Public Service Announcement
Posted By Judith on 5th February 2018
It was a cold Tuesday in January and I’d gone to Louth to do some shopping and visit the bank.
I was walking back along the main street heading for Morrisons and decided to pop into ‘Wilkos’ as I was passing to get a tub of ‘All Purpose Filler’.
I’d completed my purchase and turned right out of the door to continue my journey, it was lunchtime, about 12.45, suddenly a mans voice just behind me said, “I’ve got to come back at 4 o’clock as they didn’t have enough tablets for me”
I looked over my shoulder expecting to see one of our neighbours, but instead it was a complete stranger. He was about 55-60 years old, clean shaven, dressed in dark winter clothing. Not scruffy, smelly or obviously drunk, he just looked like a regular bloke.
As to who ‘they’ were I wasn’t sure, so I just sympathised in a general way, not wishing to be rude.
I thought that would be enough and expected him to walk passed me and on his way, but instead he walked with me, ever so slightly behind, so that the entire conversation was conducted over my right shoulder.
We discussed heart pills, pharmacists, the N.H.S and doctors, by the time we got to Morrisons we had moved on to World Darts!
All the time I’m wondering how you would recognise a mad axe murderer if he didn’t have his axe with him. Surely I’d be OK in broad daylight on a busy street, but who knows, you see such terrible things in the news these days.
I was beginning to feel like I’d fallen into a Victoria Wood monologue (fans of hers will know the one I mean) but as luck would have it, as I walked into Morrisons store, he turned off down the side of the building and disappeared in the distance.
Which brings me to the real point of this story, ‘All Purpose Filler’.
Before Xmas we bought some in a plastic tube, not the sort you have to fit into a ‘gun’ but just like a big tube of toothpaste. We thought it would be a handy way of dispensing small amounts into specific areas with no waste. How wrong we were.
When Peter first used it he couldn’t get any to come out of the nozzle if he only squeezed with one hand. In the end a simple ‘one person’ filling job became a ‘two man’ operation. I held the tube, nozzle down (gravity) and squeezed with two hands and all my strength to produce a ‘trickle’ on to his filling knife.
So when a few weeks later I attempted a small filling job on my own I knew I would be in for a struggle.
I poked the congealed filler out of the nozzle to give myself a fighting chance, then squeezed with all my might. Nothing.
Finally I thought I’d try kneeling on it, surely my weight would be more than a match for what was essentially a big toothpaste tube. Sadly not, no amount of rubbing my knee up from the bottom to the pointed end had any effect.
In desperation I laid the tube carefully on the floor then dropped on it with my knee and all of my 9 stone from a great height. What happened?
Well the filler came out alright, but it came out of the wrong end meaning I had filler all over the floor and all over me. So much for ‘no waste’.
So there we are. Sometimes it’s OK to talk to strangers, but never EVER by ‘All Purpose Filler’ in a plastic tube.
