The Great Tile Race

The Great Tile Race by Neil McCall

It all started when we got Mick to do the kitchen tiling. Mick's the
church odd-job man, an ex-crim who's going straight and trying to built
up a legitimate business and as such deserves a lot of respect. But
could he tile? We decided to give him a go.

We went to the local Wickes which had a sale of packs of 10cm by 10cm
ceramic tiles; Mick reckoned we would need around twenty boxes - ours
is a big kitchen - so we picked out the black ones, stacked the car and
took them home. For the first couple of days all went reasonably OK as
Mick made a start on the largest wall, but from then on it began to go
downhill. The trouble was that we had decided to lay the tiles in a
diamond formation rather than square, so this meant a lot of
tile-trimming at the edges and Mick's tile cutter wasn't
state-of-the-art, and produced more problems still when he attempted to
tile around the plug sockets. Eventually the progress made became
indiscernible and, as we'd agreed to pay by the hour, we called it
quits, paid him off and determined to get the job finished by a
professional. Fortunately the intranet site at work has a list of
recommended traders and, although these are often relatives of other
employees, it's a good insurance against being ripped off. These people
are often in great demand if they prove to be competent and reliable,
so we had to wait over a month for the tiler's first vacant slot.

He set to work and made short work of the tricky bits that had stumped
Mick, but soon hit upon a problem; the stock of tiles was rapidly
diminishing and Mick's estimate had been light by around five boxes. So
I went to Wickes after leaving work, only to find that, of the tiles on
sale, the black ones had all gone and it was a discontinued line. The
teenage girls on the tills looked absolutely clueless, so I dashed back
home empty-handed and got on to the Internet. The two next-nearest
Wickes branches were in Stockport and Salford so I took the precaution
of ringing them both before going anywhere; they confirmed that their
stocks of the black discontinued tiles had also gone. My son Nathan had
been on an earlier expedition to assess the tiling options and
remembered that B&;Q sold similar tiles, but with a slightly
different finish; I rang the tiler for an opinion, and he thought that
Topps might have been able to get the ones I wanted if they could
determine the manufacturing source, but it would have to be a special
order and they wouldn't take back any unused boxes. After dragging my
wife away from patient care to answer the hospital ward phone for a
further opinion I took the line of least resistance; I grabbed some
food and went off to my writers' group, leaving her to decide what to
do the following day whilst I had the luxury of being at work and away
all the pandemonium.

Well, she did. I rang Nathan at home mid-morning to discover that the
Great Tile Hunt was underway; Debbie had rung around several Wickes
stores in the North-West and discovered that a few did have a small
supply of the discontinued tiles in black, so she enlisted the help of
Tim, our older son, who drove all the way up to Morecambe whilst she
took the two slightly nearer sites of Preston and Chorley. And between
them they managed to obtain twelve boxes (Preston having found some
extra), the bonus of being half-price as an end-of-line more than
offset by the cost of driving around two hundred miles to get them all.
My work colleague, who's approaching sixty and therefore entitled to
lecture me as though I were a small child, pointed out the folly of
compromising a multi-thousand pound kitchen by buying discontinued
tiles in insufficient numbers and then allowing a well-meaning bodger
to slap them on the walls and break half of them. Yes, I know, I
know.