Colin shits in his nest

Nevertheless, after this unpleasant experience we returned to Westmead much later than expected to discover yet another unhappy sight. Colin had closed the workshop for the day but had left behind him a ‘dog’s breakfast’ that he had clumsily concocted during the afternoon. Laid before us was his bungling attempt at fitting the new screen. Mon fucking dieu, he had hacked at the scuttle top to bodge in the screen. Carving two symmetrical troughs on either side he proposed to accommodate the curved aluminium screen brackets The sunken pair were hideously covered in tete, bound by parcel tape, precariously held in place by string, screw drivers, wooden blocks and sticky backed plastic. 

Wide eyed we both gazed in disbelief at the mess. This was not the work of Colin, the craftsman, but of some fourteen-year-old spotty youth on a YTS scheme. “Why has he done that?” repeated the baffled, but annoyed Chris. “It will be impossible to maintain the contour of the bonnet unless he intends to remove a sizeable amount of the scuttle; just look at it, it’s a piece of shite, what has possessed him to do that?” “I told him not to do it that way, but that’s typical Colin he will always insist ‘his way is the only way’, he can be a stubborn bugger. I still can’t understand why he has chosen this method?” Chris was becoming dangerously annoyed and simultaneously aggravated. Colin’s motives now became the issue.

It was clear that he had performed this operation knowing that we both otherwise engaged, unable therefore to sanction this course of action.

The debate about this predicament continued down at the Oak. Chris having had a phone conversation with Colin on the route felt that his attitude was glib; Colin advocated that it was impossible to fit parts that were not designed for the car implying also that if we persisted in buying the ‘wrong bits’ there would be nothing he could do ‘except make a bollocks of it’. This was precisely the sort of argument that never fails to raise Chris’s dander, it was both irritating and tactless. Chris ruminated constantly over Colin’s throw-away lines. He resolved that Colin had purposely sabotaged the project to teach us a lesson, to state his indispensability or just to be simply bloody-minded. What ever his reason d’etre he was in the Ka ka. He had well and truly shit in his own nest.

Chris left for home to re-examine what we had already decided was Colin’s statement. Phoning at 9.30pm he was still wound up. “It was worse than I had first thought, listen, listen, the mans a lunatic, he’s not right in the head, he never does what you ask him to do, he’s good, but I’m not having him dictating to me” steamed Chris.

This has not been a good day, especially if you suffer from high blood pressure.