We have been at the farm doing things to the camper van.
Mark has been building the bathroom. It is going to look quite astonishing.
It took ages and ages. The thing about Mark is that he thinks it is a good idea to do an awful lot of what he thinks of as prep work and I can’t help but think of as faffing about.
He spends absolutely ages doing this.
Once he had got all of the wiring tacked to the walls and the plumbing ready in all of the right places, he took the shower tray out and cleaned all of the glue and silicone off it. Then he unscrewed the bit of board that was covering a mysterious Monsieur Banana Fingers hole in the ceiling and blocked up the hole. After that he went over the ceiling with a knife and scraped off some of the lumpy bits. Then he filled in some holes and made the walls flatter. Then he measured everywhere carefully and drew little diagrams.
I know that he does things like this so I wasn’t really terribly hopeful that we would have an exciting result by the end of the day. Obviously I understand that getting all of these things done should count as a result as well, however it cannot be denied that they do not add up to a very interesting result, because everything looks exactly the same at the end of the day as it did at the beginning. As achievements go it is a difficult one to feel delighted about.
I got on with my painting. I painted some more leaves on my lawless door. This took ages, and I should confess that actually I got a bit bored with it. It is not especially exciting to spend a day adding shadows to leaves.
Also it is hard to feel entirely satisfied with the result. It is a picture which is going to be viewed close up, not from a distance, and every little smudge and brush stroke shows terribly, in a way that they don’t on the outside of the van. Most people who are looking at the outside are looking at it from the other side of a busy dual carriageway. You can get away with an awful lot of smeary lines on a picture like that.
I keep reminding myself that I am painting the inside of a lavatory door in an ancient camper van, not preparing an exhibition at the Tate, but all the same it is hard not to become astoundingly obsessive. I have carefully shaded and outlined and blended until I can’t remember what I am trying to achieve any more.
In the end I ordered a new fine paintbrush, because mine was just not painting properly any more. It has become dishevelled and hairy. It is hard to paint fine lines when your paintbrush looks as though it has been back-combed. I am ridiculously excited about this, my once-fine paintbrush must have painted miles and miles of lines and shading by now. It is also the one that the dogs ate, and so actually the brush bit is still glued into a pencil instead of a handle, it is going to be brilliant to have a new one with all of the hairs pointing in the same direction.
Eventually, when it was almost time to go home, Mark announced that he was ready for the exciting part of the day, which was sticking the first bit of our oak-plank-pirate-ship lino to the wall.
He cut it out carefully, and I helped in a hovering-about-excitedly sort of way. We covered the back wall with glue and he eased the lino into place.
It went on ridiculously easily. We started at the bottom and unrolled it upwards, and it fitted perfectly and stuck instantly.
The picture of it is at the top.
We had got to leave it then and go to work.
Imagine it all done with the lawless door and the stunning emerald-green sink that I might have forgotten to tell you about.
It is going to be absolutely astonishing.
