Painted

I have painted and painted and painted.

I have painted my way up the stairs and around to Oliver’s room.

This was more exciting than it sounds because that flight of stairs has got a very high ceiling, and there was a rather thrilling one-legged stretching and balancing adventure with a wobbly ladder and a paint roller. I felt I gave a very creditable account of myself, maybe I could become the circus tent acrobat after all.

It is six years since the last time we painted that ceiling, and since then we have set the house on fire a couple of times, which has not improved the decoration.  Smoke, as you know, rises, and this ceiling is getting very close to the highest part of the house.

This was apparent from the sooty yellow and black smears around the tactically-placed smoke alarm. The fire brigade installed lots of these, irritably,  after one of our chimney fires, but there is only one of them left now. The rest went into the dustbin, because they used to go off when we opened the bathroom door after we had showered. This is all right if you have a shower like normal people, either at about half past nine in the evening, or perhaps seven o’clock in the morning, but we don’t. We usually shower after work at around four o’clock in the morning, and deafening sirens are not good at that hour, either for sleeping children or terraced-house neighbours, especially when you have got to rush around in the nude trying to find a stool upon which you can balance to turn them off.

There was a picture and a mirror hanging on the wall above the stairs. They were so smoke-stained and dirty you could not really see yourself in the mirror any more, and if you had not known what the picture was you would have had to guess. It is of a lady in a huge dress. I am too old to wear a dress like that these days, and I was not presented at Court in my youth, and so I did not wear one then either, but I would have liked to.

I would not have liked to be presented at Court, really. I know some people who have done that, along with the whole Coming Out season, and it sounds very expensively dreary. I would just have liked to wear the beautiful dress, even just for an evening. It looks as though it swishes softly when it moves, and feels silky and cool and smooth.

I took them down and cleaned them as part of the house-restoration process. It felt very nice to have the picture bright and sharp again, although less so the mirror. When I looked in that, a scowling old lady with paint in her grey hair and all over her T-shirt looked back.

I do not go up the stairs very often. The children’s floor has long been their territory, and I discovered that one of the very nice things about being up at the top of the house was that I could happily eavesdrop on Oliver’s computer gaming.

He was playing some thrilling game with his friends from school, adventuring their way through the imaginary cyber-world on their computers. It sounded very exciting. They were in the Wild West, where they were busily shooting people and taking hostages for ransom. I could hear them all chatting to one another and laughing together, and being rascally in ways they would never consider in their normal lives.

It is a magnificent world. I am so glad that we have invented computer games before we invented social distancing. It would have been terribly hard for Oliver without them, but as it is he has barely noticed, because all of his friends are here, and playing hard beside him.

Mark repaired the shelves in the bathroom. These are splendid arched mirrors set into the wall and we think they are very beautiful. The problem arose because they took him ages to build, years ago. At the time I was getting cross about the length of time it was taking him to finish them, because obviously I wanted to have a shower. Hence he rushed, made the shelves out of an old mahogany shelf he had found somewhere, and did not sand it off and re-varnish it.

The original varnish has all come off now and black mould and soapy stains have taken its place. The shelves were no longer lovely.

Today he sanded it all off and rebuilt them.

This was terrifically messy. Imagine red sawdust sprayed all over a bath and a carpet. Our bathroom looked like a murder scene in a joiner’s shop.

We have cleared it all up now, but it took ages.

We are going to have a shower and go to bed.