Thursday 8th April 2010

We are renaming our painter as The Scarlet Pimpernel. We seek him here, we seek him there, but sadly rarely can we find him actually finishing the work. He was supposed to come at noon and we expected him to stay for the rest of the day. He arrived at 2pm and stayed for less than two hours. He is promising to be here by 9am today, but he hasn’t mentioned how long he is staying so we are fully expecting him to be off again by 10! In the meantime it would have been quicker for my Mistress to get up the ladder and do the finishing off and just deduct it from his bill. We will see what today brings. It is particularly hard for James as his room has the most to do. There is a large part of a wall that has been replastered that rather spoils the effect of everything else. Once it’s finished it will be one of the best rooms in the house.

The sage of the Whitney Houston concert continues. Having sold two of the tickets the original concert date has been rescheduled and so my Mistress is going to get a refund on the tickets she has still got. She emailed the person she sold the others to and offered them a refund, but they have already sold them to someone else. I hope that the poor person at the end of the line doesn’t lose out. It would be awful if they turned up in Manchester tonight only to find the concert isn’t until the middle of June. At least it means that my Master and James aren’t going to be away now, which will be much better for all of us, except perhaps Shadow who had already said she wanted to sleep in my Master’s spot.