O'Keeffe's Working Hand Cream

A manly pot of hand cream

Most plumbers like to talk, in fact I suspect some enjoy it more than plumbing. Yet, within in that broad, eclectic, lexicon of learned conversations, I have never come across a single one that dwelt on the wonders of moisturising cream!

Now some may say that that’s no real surprise, after all plumbing is still a male dominated industry and men are not renowned for their fascination for hand cream. However, plumbing, building and most of the other trades can create havoc with hands and most tradesmen seem to have some level of dermatitis, usually in the form of cracks in the skin at the end of their fingers. At best this is uncomfortable; at worse it’s downright painful.

So it was with relief and some surprise that I discovered O’Keeffe’s Working Hand cream propping up the counter at our local Travis Perkins.

“What the bloody hell are you doing selling moisturiser?” Was my first, and I thought fairly obvious, question.

“I don’t know” was the reply, “We got some in from God-knows-where and they’ve been racing off the shelf every since. It’s very good I hear!”

So, being a sucker for the hard sell I bought a jar... and it is very good.

As you might imagine from the name it’s not designed for wishy-washy-girlie types, so there’s no essence of Ylang-ylang - whatever the hell that is. It’s just a plain old fashioned white cream with no scent and the consistency of lard. But it does work really well and after only a few days my finger tips are markedly better.

But that’s not actually the reason I bought it. No, being a modern, trendy, plumber I turn up to a fire or boiler service these days with a PC tablet loaded with most of the world’s boiler and gas fire manuals. This is supremely handy but has one drawback; these new touch screens rely on your fingers actually having a bit of moisture in them and after a hard weeks plumbing mine often don’t.

There are few things more annoying than not being able to load a service manual because the bloody screen refuses to accept that you are actually prodding it with a genuine finger. Fortunately those frustrations are now behind me as, after applying this cream to my hands every evening, I can pick and flick through boiler manuals with ease.

Alas, it hasn’t helped with my Angry Birds score but I guess there’s only so much you can expect from a cream.

PS: I have just discovered that my wife has been nicking this cream from me and applying it to her eczema with apparently marvellous results.

Tradesman morality

Money, what a drag..

Last week David Gauke pronounced that it was immoral to pay tradesmen in cash.

I confess to being a little peeved at this statement. Not because he doesn’t have a point but because a lesson on morality from a politician is like being lectured to by a sewer rat on the virtues of good hygiene. What makes it even harder to take is when that self same politician attempted to avoid stamp duty and fees on the purchase of his second home by claiming them back off the taxpayer to the tune of £10,248.32. That he saw nothing immoral in his own actions but sees immorality everywhere else speaks volumes about the man.

That said I guess he does have a point in that some of that cash probably won’t go through the ‘books’  and as a result HMRC might be down by as much as a few quid. And that is why it was such a pointless statement to make; the sums involved are so utterly trivial when compared to the large corporate tax ‘avoidance’ schemes that plague this country.

If tradesmen had their wits about them they would be scoffing at such minor sleight of hand. Instead they’d be spending everyday at hard graft within their local communities and then declaring to the tax man that all that money was actually earnt by the missus, who is currently sunning herself on a beach in Monaco and is therefore exempt from UK tax.

If the lady of the house is allergic to sun, sea and sand they could always opt for the corporate classic of running most of your business through the UK but then insisting that, despite an enormous head office that’s sited in what looks suspiciously like London, your actual base of operations is a small, bijou, maisonette in downtown Luxembourg. Where by happy chance you pay a heavily discounted level of corporation tax.

If this all sounds too complicated why not just claim that the cash was actually a loan that, for some wholly unexplained reason, doesn’t have to be paid back!

Of course tradesmen don’t get involved in such shenanigans, partly because they don’t make enough money to warrant such deviousness but mainly because they tend to have a much firmer grasp of morality than those people running this country.

Of course there are exceptions. There are people who set themselves up on the sly, don’t register their business with the tax man and hide all of their earnings under the mattress. However, to describe these fly-by-night operators as tradesmen is like describing a politician as honest. In fact these are the people that ruin the reputation of the trades and under-cut honest businesses with their cheap, shoddy work. 

As such I’m more than happy for the chaps down at HMRC to track these people down and throw the book at them... with one caveat; when you do so could you please stop saying that you’ve caught a “plumber” or an “Electrician”. You haven’t! You’ve caught a fraudster who’s been masquerading as a tradesman.