that's MY seat thank you very much

Normally Nicky will hardly touch the computer except to check email, look at hilariously unaffordable housing on ESPC and vainly search for a barn for hire either around Ayr or Edinburgh. Today it was different. This may be something to do with it providing respite, distraction and avoidance of our week of alleged DIY as a follow-up to the previous one in January since which the floor has remained unquitefinished, the wall unplasterboarded and the stuff un-de-boxed. I'd had enough plasterboard for the day by the time the wee delivery bloke and I had managed to get it up the inconveniently narrow stairwell and past the spiky railings into the hallway. The difficulty in getting plasterboard into the flat is the only convincing reason I can conceive why whoever owned the flat in 1965 felt the need to apply lath & plaster to the walls which in turn required me to remove hundreds of rusty little nailthings from uprights. I am not a vengeful nor violent person but if I ever find the installer of the lath and plaster I shall capture them using the same claw hammer with which I removed the nails, entrap them in a cage fashioned from the splintered laths removed from the wall and make them drink a thin soup fashioned from their eyeballs.

If they complain about the thinness of the soup I shall thicken it using the copious quantities of dust generated by the removal of the plaster.

Still, at least they left a few pages of the Thursday, March 25th 1965 edition of the Evening News & Dispatch tucked behind the lintel of a cupboard. It seems that in 1965 there was little else for sale besides second-hand cars which were available for mere trifles from almost every street in the city. If you didn't fancy a car then a mere £16 per week would rent a two-bedroom apartment in Stockbridge, a mere four weeks' pay for the successful (female only) applicants to the Office Work positions offered by John McLauchlan Ltd. of 9, Victoria Street. That's for 16-year-olds, though. 15-year-olds were only paid £3/10s per week. I'll have to scan the pages before they're cleaned away for historical amusement value. I intend to leave a modern newspaper in the cavity behind the plasterboard I shall install on Tuesday though it is tempting to mock-up a pretend 1950s or 60s newspaper full of adverts for "PRETTY YOUNG THINGS required to enbrighten dull office. Ability to read non-essential. Generous ruination settlements negotiable. Send CV, pictures &c. to box 5308" or "UNINTELLIGENT STOUT GENTLEMAN required for door-keeping of fashionable drinking-establishment during hours of darkness. Must be willing to needlessly physically inconvenience those clad in insufficiently polished footwear. Bananas supplied."

Didn't get outside much until the evening but it felt like the lid had been lifted off the sky.