Perrin’s Blend looks exactly like blood! In case you haven’t come across it yourself, Perrin’s blend is a miracle cure for freckles, sun spots, and moles – well I hope so because, after using the stuff for three days now, I think I deserve to have a flawless skin. Yesterday my neighbour Ron called in for a chat, using my studio entrance, and thereby catching me out, not with egg on my face, but Perrin’s Blend that looks like blood. How embarrassing! I hope that the memory of my apparently bloodied face will not stay with him. Naturally, I explained what it was and we laughed about it. Now I come to think about it, yesterday I had put little bits of toilet tissue over the blend so it looked like I had cut myself shaving – I guess that’s quite funny in itself. Incidentally, I don’t shave my face, nor do I need to.

 Today was a different story; I left off the tissue so that no-one would think I had cut myself shaving (not that I shave!) and, to be perfectly honest, I wasn’t expecting any callers.However, this afternoon while I was painting my canal picture some people (Jehovah’s Witnesses, I found out later) came to the door upstairs and rang the bell. “Damn”, I thought. I didn’t want any interruptions of any sort and Chris was away in Gloucestershire picking up the new car, so I stuck my head out of my studio door (downstairs) and I called up. Now I knew I had Perrin’s Blend on two areas of my face, above each eye, (must have looked like I had been in an accident or a punch up) but I didn’t think the couple at the upstairs front door would notice from that distance.

“Hello?” I called out in a querying sort of way.

The middle-aged man and woman leaned over the railings and looked down to see who had spoken to them. I was like the troll under the bridge in “The Billy Goats Gruff”.

“I’ll just put this through the letter box,” said the man holding out a Watch Tower magazine. He stopped smiling when he saw my face besmirched with Perrin’s Blend. Perhaps he wondered for a moment if I had eaten other callers.

The lady was perhaps less imaginative.

“Are you alright?” she asked concerned.

“Oh, don’t worry, I’m fine. It’s not blood,” I assured without troubling to explain what exactly the red stuff was.

I could imagine the ensuing conversation continued out of my earshot. Don’t you think she might have said:

“That’s what all beaten wives say…”