Sorry if I’ve been suffering from blogger’s block (or whatever) these past few weeks, but I’ve had other things on my mind. Like paint!
The house in France has not wintered particularly well. The once-smart wooden shutters look rather shabby, and the “Breton Blue” which had been applied to windows and woodwork by the house’s previous owner is looking drab and flaking away. So it’s been a time for action, for a visit to Homebase to buy paint and brushes, and for a few days in France to smarten the place up a bit.
Now the wife comes from the school of D-I-Y that insists on thoroughness in everything. The old paint has to be stripped off, surfaces rubbed down, primers applied, and surrounding surfaces covered or taped lest a single drip of gloss paint runs astray.
Surprisingly she has always harboured dark thoughts about my D-I-Y skills because, quite frankly, I do tend to get a little over-excited when it comes to wielding a paintbrush. A. A. Milne’s Tigger comes to mind and for the best part of forty years I have been more-or-less banned from interior decorating following a run of disasters when trying to smarten up the small flat in Kensington which was our first home together.
Not to bore you too much with things that happened before most of my readers were born, I came home from work one day to find painting going on and so I immediately rushed to help. Maybe it would have been more sensible if I had changed out of my smart city suit and clean black shoes before I lifted the paintbrush. Maybe it would have been more sensible to stir the paint with something more appropriate than my hand. Maybe it would have helped if I had not been a heavy smoker at the time and not felt the urge to light up after ten minutes of industrious painting. The paint stains on my suit trousers (where my paint-stirring hand had delved into a pocket in search of a packet of Rothmans) rather stretched our young relationship.
Anyway, back to France. The Dulux Atlantic Surf gloss paint is a bit darker than the Breton Blue and goes on to the old shutters like a treat. Some of the shutters have been given the proper treatment - dipped in an acid bath to remove the old paint, sanded and given a coat or two of good primer before the paint is applied. Other shutters have been painted by me.
But this is the new me – dressed in old clothes, and using dustsheets and generally clearing up afterwards so the result is not too bad. The problem arises in that the gloss paint tends to creep off the brush and onto my hand. From there the paint mysteriously transfers to objects and utensils. It transfers onto kitchen cutlery and beer bottles; my hair turns blue when I scratch it, somehow the paint gets onto a pair of my best trousers (which I wasn’t even wearing at the time). Alarmingly the lawn-mower develops a blue streak, as well as some of the grass. We don’t talk about the steering wheel of the wife’s car, or the keyboard of her computer. And then the beer started to take effect and I paid a quick visit to the loo …
