I first met Erica at a ‘Stanley Tools Focus Group’. I caught her eye after she stunned everyone with her observation that, ‘Sometimes in life you get a heap of shit and no pony’. She had that too many Benson and Hedges voice, just like a middle-aged Bonnie Tyler in overalls spotted with blue circle finishing plaster. Several questions; a short interlude, when the marketing man discovered he’d left an important part of the presentation in his car; and a pointless discussion on the flexibility of the ‘Stanley Five Metre Tape’ later and she was off, faster than Ronseal quick drying varnish.

                     We next met as we duelled for a cut-price, brass dimmer switch in the bargain bin at B&Q. Our eyes met across the scribbled red price sticker, and when our rough hands touched for a moment, the chemistry was stronger than neat Thompsons Water Seal. That, as we say as we tighten the last compression fitting on a full re-plumb, was it - we were in a dusty, scruffy sort of love. Over a 20p machine coffee, that looked like tea and tasted like soup and a Twix, I covertly looked for a wedding ring. No ring - no wedding finger in fact. Lost almost unnoticed in a circular saw accident in 1989, I was to find out later over a post-coital cigarette. She wasn’t just gorgeous she carried the scars of D.I.Y.

                     The shafts of sunlight that penetrated the dust lifted the smell of putty into the air and shone a beam of holy, sincere and true light onto our two differing shades of French blue overalls that lay hastily stepped out of, on the bed sit floor. On the Lloyd Loom wicker chair I’d picked up for a three pounds and a bag of cement and painted apple white, sat the double brass dimmer.

                     After that afternoon of hammering, banging, screwing andjointing, things seemed to go at the pace of a Bosch 3/4 chuck reverse bit hammer drill. It was crazier than buying a cheap spirit level.We’d sometimes just sit and talk long into the night about linseed oil, putty and 7mm plate glass. I made her laugh herself nearly sick with my tale of the time I converted two attic bedrooms back into a loft. We seemed to just talk and talk. Once we spent six hours wandering around St George’s Hall, soaking up the craftsmanship. We rubbed hands simultaneously across a fine dove-tailed joint, gazing at each other through marvelously detailed stained glass. I hugged a Lignum Vitae statuette of Queen Victoria and Erica took a picture. My admiration for the monarch dwarfed by my awe at the detailed carving and expertly applied lacquer and varnish. Sure, we drew some strange stares from on-looking security guards, but we didn’t care. It was quarter past eleven and we were in D.I.Y. heaven.

                        Unfortunately, like the demise in the quality of Black Forge tools, this period of bliss was short lived and things didn’t remain all sweetness and light fittings - It soon went emulsion side up. It started to crumble like poorly mixed plaster not long after we’d spent a weekend at the N.E.C. for a hand and bench tool convention. Erica had borrowed my Estwing claw hammer to slate and baton a large gazebo in a garden in Southport. She kept the hammer for a week and then to my absolute horror, returned it in rather poor condition - the leather grip was severely grazed and a spot of blue paint scarred the bright steel shaft that I had fondly polished like the stainless steel leg on a sons caliper, no more than a week before. I didn’t mention it to Erica, but I made a mental note and scar of it all the same. ‘She’ll not be borrowing that again! I affirmed to myself, in a voice from the fifties, as I used some 500 grade Swedish stainless steel wool to caress the shaft back to its former brilliance. Next, with some reluctance on my part she borrowed my Stabila spirit level essential equipment for a sandstone wall job in Tuebrook. Telling me her own had been stolen by a gang of teenage tool thieves. She gave me it back two days later and my heart sank and began to beat faster than a grundfoss central heating pump. There was enough mortar on Long Julie to point two square metres of seven-inch brick. I registered my displeasure by stamping my steel toe capped boot that conformed to British Standard 732 several times but it seemed to go unnoticed.

                       The final straw, the straw that broke the work benches back came when, in good but fading faster than a jigsaw on number 5 faith, I’d allowed her to borrow my 2 inch Harris ‘no loss’ hog hair paint brush.This was my little lady, but if I was to continue this relationship I had to give Erica some ¾ hessian rope.

                           A week later around at her place, after a lovely day trawling the timber yards for useable off cuts of mahogany and then a pleasant evening putting a final coat of Glassurit hi-gloss stain onto a splendidly robust monk’s bench we’d rescued from the back of the bread shop on Shaw Road, I was in the kitchen making a nightcap, I reached for the Ovaltine in her kitchen cupboard, (which by the way was secured to the wall with 17mm rawlplugs instead of the right and proper 22mm), it was then I caught sight of my little lady. She poor girl, had been shoved, without love, into a pint glass of turpentine, the handle, once a gleaming deep maroon with the words ‘Harris Professional’, picked out in gold leaf, was now a Jackson Pollock-esque haze of dribbled, splashed and smudged gloss.

                        My hand shook with anger as I stirred in another spoon of sugar. Erica sat in the living room, blissfully unaware, watching a Black and Decker instructional video on the RC35 Router and Planer. I took two steps towards the living room and then turned back and stomped into the kitchen. I slammed the Ovaltine onto the 35mm double-edged Formica worktop and swung the cupboard door open again. I had to take a second look. My gal had been bullied, like a small boy coming home from school with leg bruises, a ripped blazer and a fat lip, I felt the anger of a failed and hopeless parent. I took the glass from out of the cupboard and marched into Erica. I held it behind my back.

‘Here you go’, I said. Erica reached out for her steaming mug of Ovaltine. I handed her my abused child. She looked at me like Bambi. I unbuttoned the top button of my shirt loosened my free Stanley Tools tie to register my disgust.Exactly thirty nine seconds later, I had hastily thrown on my council donkey jacket and was out of the 39 and a half inch, six panel, Brazilian mahogany door.

                        Erica shouted after me, but I was in no mood for explanation or excuse. ‘The sooner they bring back hanging, the better ‘, I mused, as I tried to make sense of it all. I was that mad, I didn’t even notice the quality of the coachwork on the bus. I was in no mood to care.

                          The next morning, on the 30mm quarry tile self leveled with some waterproof grout, in the porch, with my subscription of ‘The Woodworker’ sat a full set of Harris ‘no loss’ hog hair brushes in a clear polythene bag. There was a note attached to the handle of the three inch. It was simple. It said, ‘Sorry - Erica’. However, ‘Sorry’ was no good, the damage had been done.  She obviously didn’t understand how I really felt. The next day it began, the harassment. She was waiting outside Wickes, so I got back in the car and drove to B&Q across the road. I had to pay 30p a pound more for my 22mm clout nails but sometimes it just has to be done. The next day she was stood in the doorway of Focus, I looked straight ahead, sucked hard on my Victory V and walked past with the purpose of a man on a mission for six sheets of 8 by 4 particle board and a roll of carpet tape. She followed me in and I caught glimpses of her in the plumbing aisle, where she pretended to be looking at 2 inch Yorkshire elbows. I looked straight at her in the loft insulation isle, and gave her a sly look as she feigned a half-hearted interest in a bale of tank lagging. To top it off, she almost fell on top of me by the 5 litre tubs of waterproof grout. She shouldn’t have bothered, our daliance was over. I couldn’t forgive or forget. How could anyone?

                       Even the tight, ‘I Get Laid With Cemetone’ T-shirt, that had on at least three occasions, set uncle perct to swell mode and my heart racing like a Bosch sander, now looked ordinary. It didn’t get any better. The following weekend when dragging a cwt. bag of cement off a pallet, there, on a bag underneath, in heavy black marker, were the words, ‘I’m sorry – Erica’. She’d known that I was about to lay a mock-Victorian York stone path and would need at least seven bags. The messages soon took a more sinister tone. In the personal column of ‘Practical Woodworker’, she put ‘You’ll be Sorry’ in bold type.

                      I found my photocopied and mutilated picture in the ‘bargain bin’ at Do It All, shed cut of the drills I was holding in both hands. I’ll give Erica one thing, she was certainly inventive. It reached new heights when my two slices of thick Warburtons popped up out of the toaster and ‘sorry’ was indented into them by a shaky finger. Like Telly-tubby toast with bunny boiling overtones. How had she got in?

                Well thinking about it, she had access to my keys often enough. The more I thought of it, the more concerned I was. I found a Brazilian mahogany shaving in my bran flakes, just the one, but it didn’t get there by itself and Erica swore by Brazilian mahogany. She’d refuse to hang a front door if wasn’t made of the stuff. She once ran up a path and snatched a brush out of the hand of some old bloke who was about to paint his Brazilian mahogany door pillar-box red. The shaving must have come from her and seeing as I bought a new box of bran flakes after we’d split, then she must have been in here, my place.

                      I never got the chance to find out why the shavings were there. You see it all resolved itself. The call came at eight in the morning. I was wary of answering it, for up till now, Erica had not resorted to telephone harassment. It was a police officer. He’d got my number from a notebook they found on the body. He explained that Erica had really ‘Done It Herself’ and committed suicide. She’d put a hot air gun on a dollop of Nitromors paint stripper and with the fumes released, had died almost immediately. She’d left a note for me. It just said, ‘To my love...You were the cement in the bricks of my life, without you my walls come crashing down, leaving only the rubble of a broken heart.’ Well, at least at the time I thought the note was for me. You see, at the church, the first seven aisles resembled a builder’s cafe. The church car park was like a building site. Blue transits with rusty doors parked inconsiderately next to plaster-covered pick- ups with broken tail lights. Dusty overalled plasterers sat silent, next to rough- handed brickies who farted and jostled uncomfortably with slate roofers in combat jackets. From the coarse talk bandied around, I was, it seems, just one of many rough-handed lovers. Seems she was a bit of a one, you know, - flattened a bit of grass, sanded a fair amount of MDF in her time, or should that be creased a bit of 5 by 8 plasterboard? She’d have liked the coffin. It was Brazilian mahogany. It had been well sanded and as far as I could tell, being two plasterers, a plumber and a seven-fingered bench saw operator away from the aisle, had at least five coats of international high gloss varnish on it. I didn’t stay long afterwards, just a sausage roll and a cold chicken drumstick eaten in the time it takes for ‘no more nails’ takes to form a strong bond on an even surface. I had to bite my lip when a dusty, black-moustached man began to spout off ignorantly about non-drip emulsion based paint. ‘This is not the time to preach’, I thought. I had to walk into the other room though. I couldn’t have willingly listened to such lies about an innovative product. It arrived by post, about six weeks later. I had put an official claim on her estate and checked the post each day.

                      The solicitor’s letter was short and to the point. ‘Dear Sir, further to your recent correspondence and claim on the estate of Erica Wilmington, I have the pleasure to enclose one Harris two inch ‘no loss’ hog hair paint brush. Yours sincerely,  Yaffe, Jackson and Jackson’. I was ever so pleased. ‘Come to Daddy,’ I said. ‘Let’s see what the nasty lady done to my lickle one’. I’ve still got the brush. It cleaned up quite nicely, although it will always bear the scars of its abuser.     

                   Some nights I get it out and put it next to me and we watch Changing Rooms, or DIY Doctor together.

The End