I am in love.
My builder has longer hair than me, and his carpenter has bigger breasts. He also has a small goatee, a sprout of hair on his chin that makes him look like the Billy Goat Gruff. He wears cut offs and a regulation plaid shirt, with cuffs rolled up to expose forearms like the ropes on a suspension bridge. In two days he and his fellow Poles have ripped up my kitchen floor, removed a rotting cupboard and replaced it with sound wood and shiny Ikea laminate that no longer springs ominously when you stand on it. He's screwed all the doors back on all the cupboards, sanded the worktops and on Saturday will bring someone else along to cut the granite and place it round the sink. The burlier of the two companions, the one with the D cup, is broad and fleshy, with skin the colour of alabaster, and a broad belly. I've had the chance to admire it as he strips out of his overalls, down to his pants in the kitchen, and then dons his street clothes. I don't really like big men, but this one is incredibly hulking, reassuringly solid, sweet-faced and capable. He could pick you up like a twig. And he can use a drill.
I go home and admire their workmanship wishing I could find something else for them to do, or more accurately, something else I could afford for them to do, just so I could keep them, captive with their toolboxes and sawhorses and power tools; and I'm not talking euphemisms. This isn't workmen porn, it's just workmen. After decades with a man who thought the ability to turn an Allen Key made him 'handy' I actually long for someone who knows how to lay a floor rather than me. Preferably both. It's viscerally thrilling that ability to just 'do' stuff, heavy stuff, physical stuff, clever stuff with pipes and wires and wood and nails, and to transform something dilapidated and broken into sleek, shiny, sorted and fixed.
Sod intellectuals and 'good sense of humour and a love of the theatre'. Forget Match.com and Toyboywarehouse - what about Polishbuilders.com? You could go on a date, make them dinner, offer them a drink and get your sink boxed in, all at the same time.
My builder has longer hair than me, and his carpenter has bigger breasts. He also has a small goatee, a sprout of hair on his chin that makes him look like the Billy Goat Gruff. He wears cut offs and a regulation plaid shirt, with cuffs rolled up to expose forearms like the ropes on a suspension bridge. In two days he and his fellow Poles have ripped up my kitchen floor, removed a rotting cupboard and replaced it with sound wood and shiny Ikea laminate that no longer springs ominously when you stand on it. He's screwed all the doors back on all the cupboards, sanded the worktops and on Saturday will bring someone else along to cut the granite and place it round the sink. The burlier of the two companions, the one with the D cup, is broad and fleshy, with skin the colour of alabaster, and a broad belly. I've had the chance to admire it as he strips out of his overalls, down to his pants in the kitchen, and then dons his street clothes. I don't really like big men, but this one is incredibly hulking, reassuringly solid, sweet-faced and capable. He could pick you up like a twig. And he can use a drill.
I go home and admire their workmanship wishing I could find something else for them to do, or more accurately, something else I could afford for them to do, just so I could keep them, captive with their toolboxes and sawhorses and power tools; and I'm not talking euphemisms. This isn't workmen porn, it's just workmen. After decades with a man who thought the ability to turn an Allen Key made him 'handy' I actually long for someone who knows how to lay a floor rather than me. Preferably both. It's viscerally thrilling that ability to just 'do' stuff, heavy stuff, physical stuff, clever stuff with pipes and wires and wood and nails, and to transform something dilapidated and broken into sleek, shiny, sorted and fixed.
Sod intellectuals and 'good sense of humour and a love of the theatre'. Forget Match.com and Toyboywarehouse - what about Polishbuilders.com? You could go on a date, make them dinner, offer them a drink and get your sink boxed in, all at the same time.
