I'm down in Devon at the moment, catching up with The Boy. We had father and son time yesterday assembling one of those 5 different-sized picture things of Jimi Hendrix.
The problem started a few weeks ago with neither of us realising the beautiful framed canvases were destined to arrive from China neatly furled without the frames that appeared in the advert.
No problem.
Dad went into the shed and emerged only a few hours later with 5 stunning frames, an inability to access anything relying on fingerprint recognition and a surprisingly large bag of off-cuts and bits of scrap.
Now that the glue has come off my hands, I've brought the 5 frames down to Devon and delivered them to The Boy with a staple gun.
We've watched how to fix the canvas on Youtube, decided that we don't have the canvas-stretcher they are advocating, watched myriad more versions of the same thing and taken the staple gun apart. Strictly, the last exercise wasn't shown on any of the Youtube videos, but it did provide an interesting diversion for The Boy because it is a) shiny, b) mechanical, and c) something new to take apart.
The next half hour was spent working out how to re-assemble the staple gun and included more visits to Youtube. With everything now ready, we were good to go. Well, we would have been had we not forgotten what we saw in the original round of Youtube videos.
Having watched the canvas-stretcher video again, we eventually found the version we wanted to watch and set off on the task.
Who knew it would take three hours to tack 5 canvases onto 5 wooden frames?
Later I'm scheduled for the next event - hanging them at the right height.
I don't foresee any issues with that at all.
I'll report back with a picture when that is done.
Oh, yes, and I'm writing two things at the moment.
The New Book - in a very different style
A Follow-Up to Scapegoat - which takes up where the last one leaves off. I won't say too much, but it does involve the delightful Krantz, many of the same cast of characters and Alan flying transatlantic...
...sorry, did I just use those words in the same sentence?
Alan/flying/transatlantic.
I imagine that'll go smoothly.