I'VE suddenly taken a great dislike to the Chinese.
Nothing to do with their demeanour, human rights record or even their food... no, it's more to do with the fact they are widely believed to have invented wallpaper.

Last weekend I started removing the paper from the living room, in readiness for painting the walls in the first leg of a mammoth redecorating stint.
Armed only with a sponge, a small bucket of water and a blunt knife, I attacked the walls with relish.
Several hours later I was to be found huddled in the corner, whimpering... I had forgotten how much like hard work wallpaper-removing is. And there's certainly something to be said about having the right tools for the job.
Over the next few days I spent every available moment on the back-aching, soul-destroying project.
Just when I thought I was getting somewhere, I discovered, lurking evilly underneath the paper I had put up some years ago, a complete wall of old, very thick wallpaper in a particularly horrible shade of brown. This, it transpires, had been pasted to the wall using superglue, and resisted every attack I made on it.
So off to B&Q it was. A new wallpaper-scraper and wallpaper-remover underneath my arm, I returned to tackle the problem afresh.
Even with these formidable helpers, however, it took me several more hours of painful work to get the walls paper-free.
The next day, I was speaking to Old Schoolfriend on the phone, and happened to mention what I had been doing.
"Oh, we've got one of those steamer things that remover wallpaper. You could have borrowed that. It's dead easy," she told me.
Oh bugger...

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