A LICK OF PAINT

It's amazing what a lick of paint will do. I lived in Dar es Salaam for 8 years and I always thought that the city would have looked a lot nicer if more buildings had been painted. Here in Denmark most houses are rendered (i.e. a cement mix is smeared over the brickwork) and then painted. That makes a colourful contrast to the U.K., where most houses have unadorned and slightly boring brickwork.

In our back garden (the one I am currently turning into a lawn) there is one of those old-fashioned metal hand pumps. A rusty old thing, it sticks up out of the former well, which serviced the farmhouse before it was connected to the town's mains water supply. I have blocked up the entrance to the well, and today I painted the hand pump a metallic black. It now looks terrific. 

Walter Blotscher