December: The Transformative Power of Paint

 

Only the other day... I was on my way back from walking the dog when two white-bottomed deer wandered casually across the road between our bit of wood and the farmer's on the other side. I can only describe their colour as a grey-brown shade of ground-cover. Daphne saw them and took off like a bolt of greased lightning. The two deer bounded into the woods and within seconds they were lost from view. I thought to myself, Isn't nature marvellous? These creatures are born with a colour so perfectly blended to their natural surroundings that they are rendered virtually invisible to the naked eye. And thank heavens, with so many hunters about (lockdown doesn't apply to the hunting fraternity, it appears).

Which leads me to the colour of paint. The myriad colours of paint. Now that The Daughter is back in the fold, deprived for the time being of her calling to design textiles and clothes, she has been casting her educated eye on her parents' environment. Our sense of interior design has been found wanting. Where there were a whiter shade of pale walls, let there be colour. Where there was bare wood, let there be more colour. To be fair (as footballers are given to start their proclamations), her mother has been looking at our bare wooden staircase up to the bare wooden floor of the mezzanine and saying for many a moon that we should do something about it.

I don't give her much encouragement in that respect, because I don't like disruption. But as soon as her offspring is back in town, she has a natural-born ally and the pair of them plot their campaigns like two umbilically-tied consultants. Last extended stay, it was walls and ceiling – and I have to admit that they've uplifted the place. The trouble is that our girl's tastes are in keeping with her ambition to work in some area of haut couture. So the paint has to be Farrow & Ball, because only Farrow & Ball make the necessary shade of day-room yellow, churlish green, cinder rose, hound's tooth, grizzled avocado, oatmeal compôte, dissatisfied cat and such like. Paint in France costs a small fortune, but Farrow & Ball set new eye-watering standards.

The colour chosen for the bare wood was peignoir, which is a French word for dressing gown. It's very nice, but to me it looks more like blueberry milkshake: a subtle blend of pink and purple. We ordered it from a small shop in Brive and they gave us a 10% discount, which made it 'cheaper' than buying it from the company's website. And you can't put a price on the sense of self-righteousness derived from supporting a small trader in a time of crisis.

The Kid and I did the painting, an opportunity to bond during confinement. She's a perfectionist, while I'm a pragmatist – certainly about painting. I'm quite fast and prepared to take a few short-cuts where things won't be apparent on a casual glance. I learnt the basics of painting by the side of my father when we moved from our first house in Belfast to our second. Like anything in life that involves effort, he was not the best person to learn from. Fortunately, in recent years, I've had the example to follow of my friend Bret, one of the best painters on earth: fast, efficient and thorough. I passed on as much of his wisdom as I could to my girl. She took it in rapidly, though her natural propensity is to be slow and meticulous.

Still... it went well. No stand-offs nor contretemps, just a few murmurs of discontent. I handled the underside of the floor between the beams, she did the stairs and we did the mezzanine floor together. Nothing could be finer (than to be in Caro-lina) – except for the major disruption that the joint element caused, because it meant moving my stuff, or schtooff, as a Spanish friend of yore used to pronounce it so endearingly. I have envied my brother-in-law's office and desk for many years: so clear and compartmentalised, so efficient and organised. I've tried, God knows I've tried, but just never manage to achieve anything resembling his level of order. I work surrounded by clutter, which probably explains my career trajectory. I am cluttered. Clutter and mouth ulcers are two perennial facts of my life.

So all those hundreds and thousands of tapes and CDs had to be taken off the shelves and boxed up, the detritus of insatiable decades on this earth. The shelves then had to be taken down because their feet stand on the floor. All the papers that found their way from the equivalent of my sister's 'piling pile' to what I laughingly describe as my 'filing system' had to be removed in order to move the filing cabinet to become a support for my desk. All the records in the free-standing shelves had to be removed and piled up against the door to the top balcony in order to move the free-standing shelves out of the way and then re-shelved because they were in the way, then re-removed and re-piled against the door when one half of the floor was done and dried before being re-shelved – by which time the approximate alphabetical order had gone completely awry. The sofa we discovered on moving had lost a foot and the head of the screw where once it had been had gouged a hole in both the rug and the floorboard under it.

While the paint was drying, I went through the video and audio cassettes with an eye for duplicates and I managed to fill one small boxful for disposal. Some people have the ability to throw whole collections away wholesale. I don't know how they can. It's surely better that they should be taking up space on our shelves than sitting for centuries in a landfill site – although my poor daughter will have the unenviable task of sorting it all out when I'm gone. Perhaps by then I will have come to terms with my addiction and joined some remedial support group.

In a concession to aesthetics, I even painted the spare speakers that are wired to the DVD player the same fetching shade of blueberry milkshake. And rather smart they look, too. Everything is now back in place and the gouges in the floor are painted and covered by a rug. Tilley the Kid asked me whether, in the final analysis, it was worse than I had imagined, about what I had imagined or better than I had imagined. Clearly she is of the generation that's comfortable with Survey Monkey. I reflected for a few seconds and came to the conclusion that it was just about as I had envisaged it. Grim and disruptive but ultimately no worse. It's one of the few comforts of being a pessimist, that you're mentally prepared for the worst. Moreover, now that I look around me and consider my changed work environment and take pleasure in the colourful floor and stairs and in the prospect of being able to find things just a little more easily, I consider it well worth the pain and discomfort involved.

And so to conclude, as the lecturer said to an enthralled audience, a lick of paint does wonders for the soul – even if that paint costs an arm and a leg. Able now to look forward now to the prospect of a slightly tidier New Year, I can wish my multitudinous readers a very happy 2021.