Social distance

Today I am jolly glad that we are not going to be going anywhere for a while.

Whilst cleaning the fire out this morning I got my fingers covered in the sooty tar that coats the inside of the fire box, and all attempts to scrub it off have so far been unsuccessful.

Most of it has come off my hands, but it has completely blackened the skin under my fingernails and makes me look as though I am an oik of the least-abluted variety.

I am, for the moment, relieved that it is lockdown, and that I will not be obliged to shake hands with anybody distinguished. Mostly when I am requested to shake hands I decline anyway, because usually it is drunk taxi customers. These tend to be people who believe that they can be tiresome, rude and irritating all the way to White Cross Bay, after which they can offer to shake my hand in a ‘no hard feelings’ sort of way as they get out. I always refuse this, partly in insulting retaliation, but partly because I never feel very confident of the hand washing activities of intoxicated taxi customers.

The advent of bat flu made me feel completely vindicated in this small but satisfyingly malicious behaviour, and indeed, my very last customer, the very final one before we were isolated and locked down, tried to do exactly that, even though all of the fuss about hand washing had already started. He offered me his fat greasy hand, at which I looked in distaste and declined, so he called me some rude names and staggered away. The next day I started with the dry cough and temperature, and wished that I had accepted after all, but you can’t have everything.

Apparently is is a problem faced by door staff as well. Probably it is why we are all dying like flies now.

Anyway, just occasionally I am obliged to shake hands with people whose good opinion I would like to preserve, like the headmaster at Oliver’s school, and today I am rather pleased that I will not need to concern myself with such social niceties for a while. Every cloud has a silver lining.

Mark has been off in Barrow again today, and I have been left to my own devices.

I thought that I would carry on with the circus tent, since I had got some time to myself.

I had to stand on a wobbly stool, because I was painting the hanging yellow bits. It is jolly hard to paint folds in fabric, especially when you are mixing emulsion and acrylic. The two paints have got a completely different consistency, wouldn’t blend to the shading I wanted, and no matter what I did it looked completely rubbish.

It was not just the paint. That is a Bad Workman Blaming His Tools thing. It was mostly me getting the light bits and the folds wrong, so that they were the wrong colour of yellow and looked all right close up but very peculiar indeed at a distance.

I have got loads of them to do, and eventually I got bored and irritated with myself. I stopped trying to do artfully-shaded creases and just slapped loads more emulsion on and added some bits of shading, in black. This looks very amateur but functional, and when I gave up for the evening I thought that probably it would do just fine.

I had almost finished when I realised that I had dropped the cloth that I had hung over my shoulder to save me hopping on and off the stool too often. Instead of wiping my brush on the painty rag I had been wiping it on my shirt, and my shirt was smudged with enough shades of black and yellow yellow to paint the shadows on a swarm of bees.

It would not come off.

It is a jolly good job that we are not going to be going anywhere for a while.

I believe I might have mentioned that already.