Craig’s got himself some pet tarmac. This isn’t a quaint way of saying he has a favourite stretch of road, though he may well have. It is literally a pet piece of tarmac that sits beside his desk at work and which he occasionally pats.

We’ve got a new edition of the Steps Series in the pipeline. It’s for Handsworth and Aston Parks and for it we are going to be experimenting with some temporary paint. The idea is that you we can paint footprints paths in the park with this paint, it will stay there for six months, then we return, paint the footprints with a special solvent and they disappear.

Before getting busy with paint in the city’s parks it seemed wise to test out the paint. Craig waited an age for a dry day, then leapt out into the courtyard @ A E Harris with his roller and the special paint. We were dismayed to discover the next day that the paint was rather too temporary and had run rather badly in the rain. A call to the distributors confirmed suspicions that a cause of the impermanence could have been that the temperature hadn’t been above 10º C long enough for the paint to cure.

Craig’s imaginative solution was to get some pet tarmac in a container and bring it into the office. Heaven knows where he got hold of it but it’s there now, beside his desk. He’s now waiting for the tarmac to set so he can paint the paint onto it to see if that sets so he can take it outside into the rain to see if it runs. The only flaw we can currently see in this strategy is that it requires the temperature in our office to climb above 10º C for four hours.