Luckily I woke early yesterday, because there was a knock on the door at nine.

There were three blokes there, and one stepped forward and shook me by the hand.  He said something but he was foreign, so I haven’t a clue what he said.  He stood and looked at me as if I was supposed to be expecting them.

After a minute of this, he got impatient and the three of them marched into our living room.  They were big blokes, and I couldn’t set Herself on them because she was still asleep.

They looked at the walls, and they looked at the ceiling.  They pointed at things and asked me questions.  I hadn’t a clue what they were talking about so I nodded.

One of them mimed at me that he wanted me to take him for a drive.  That was fine by me as it was a nice day.  So we headed off.  He told me where to steer by pointing.

We ended up at a hardware store.  He was out of the car like a flash and I had to run to keep up with him.  He grabbed a trolley and filled it up with tins of paint.  He then rushed over to the check-out where he stood looking at me like a lost puppy.  Obviously he expected me to pay, which I did.  Luckily I had my selection of credit cards with me, so Olusegun Olakojo of Nigeria paid for that lot.

We drove home to find that the other two lads had moved everything out of the living room, and had locked Herself in the bedroom where she was protesting loudly.  Whatever they were at, they went up in my estimation for that.

I got an atlas and brought it into them.  They looked at me blankly.  I opened the atlas and pointed to it, and then the three of them.  They flipped through the pages and pointed at Romania. At least I had that sorted out.  It also explained why I couldn’t understand them as my Romanian is crap and my Romany is even worse.  I left them to whatever it was they were doing.

Soon the smell of paint permeated the house, and it gave me a headache.  So I spent the day with the windows open and chewing Syndol.

At six, they vanished.

They had put everything back where it belonged and the walls and ceiling had all been painted.  The glare off the bright paint added to my headache, so I was forced to put on sunglasses.  In fairness to them, they had done a brilliant job, whoever they were.  I went off down to the pub for a few pints to get away from the smell.

I got home at around eleven and remembered that Herself was still locked in the bedroom, so I let her out.  She made a rush for the bathroom.

It was all her fault.  She has a habit of ringing strange phone numbers that she finds hanging on the local shop notice board.  She had phoned one and had obviously given the impression we wanted work done.

She bitched for the rest of the evening about being hungry and the smell of paint and everything else.  We had to sleep with all the doors and windows open.

That’ll teach her to leave those phone numbers alone.