The hardest bit about painting is choosing the paint, I always think. I’m not good with colour at the best of times but it’s one thing to have your socks clash with your jumper and quite another to paint an acre of wall in the main areas of your house only to find it looks naff with the curtains and makes the flooring look peachy-pink instead of the rough-sawn cypress you hoped for. I’ve repainted many a room in my time due to ‘choice error’.
Emersed in the complex, stress-inducing world of colour, I spread out on the floor in the paint shop with my floorboard sample and my curtain fabric sample. I’m overwhelmed by the time I reach paint sample number two and there’s 50,000 of them. Three weeks into this, I still haven’t picked a colour. I mean, why so many? Do we need a million shades of white? A plain and simple neutral? Forget anything called ‘beige’. There is no beige. Instead, the paint swatch sheet opens like the Dead Sea Scrolls and never stops unscrolling. There is Matchstick and Elephant’s Breath and Rum Camel (I ask you, who names paints?) and thousands of others which, depending on the light, look either grey or brown to me. Even a passing cloud can move the sample from the ‘this may work’ pile to the ‘yuck, that’s awful’ pile, which becomes the ‘this may work’ pile when the cloud scurries past and sunshine hits the fan of samples.
Did I mention there’s a time limit as the painting needs to be finished by March 1st when the flooring goes in? Darn this short month of February! Could you not at least be a leap year to help a decorator out? No? Matchstick, it is then.
With four days to deadline, I hump ladders and buckets of paint around and pick a million strands of dog hair off the paintbrush and make gallons of tea for the wall-building construction crew working outside. I remind myself to look up and enjoy the fact the UK lifted all remaining COVID restrictions. This should be something to celebrate after two years, right? Instead, there’s conflicting information on whether we’re too early and will we go back to hospital tents in car parks. However, I choose to celebrate the sentiment of lifted restrictions while still wearing my mask at Tesco’s as I pick up more industrial-sized sacks of teabags for all the workers.
I paint. And I paint. And I paint. The walls keep growing longer, the roller brush extension pole keeps getting heavier and don’t get me started on trying to reach all the nooks and crannies behind the toilet. I worry about the bird of paradise plant that came with the house. Will it survive in the elements outside the front door while I paint the indoor porch; the only home it’s ever known? It’s not exactly native to Exmoor. Fingers crossed the hurricane force winds of last week don’t return until BoP is back inside.
Anyway, there’s all this chaos around my not-so-nice-to-do list and just when my wrists decide to painfully spasm with each brush stroke and it all gets a bit much, Russia invades Ukraine. Now most of my disgust with February involves other people’s nice-to-do list. You know who you are, Vlad. You didn’t have to do this, either, but poof! just like that the world changes. Paint? What paint? Construction site mud? Gone from human consciousness. Now it’s all about the poor Ukrainians: frantic parents, crying children, bombed civilian apartment blocks, columns of cars stuck at borders, certain countries refusing Ukrainians visas (BORIS, for the love of Pete!!) while others (POLAND, bravo!!) allow even pets without passports to escape the hell that is Kyiv, a place that just last week was simply focused on what colour to paint its own walls.
I try to push the flooring company back a week but no can do. I have to keep painting, but my heart is elsewhere. Missed a bit? Don’t care. Second gloss coat on the cloakroom skirting board? Not happening. How to help Ukraine? No idea, but I offer my two guest rooms to any family that can get to the UK. Twitter and Facebook posts seem pathetic in the face of such enormous need, but what can I do? Once more, silly men with fragile egos and ridiculous bucket lists cast pain and suffering out into the world like most of us casts seeds into flower beds. A former clownish comedian shows true statesmanship while supposedly experienced ‘statesmen’ look clownish. You can’t make this stuff up.
I just want to write funny novels about average people searching for home and their humorous travel adventures along the way. Oh, and choose a paint to match the curtains. That’s it. Instead, I’ll spend my post-painting time trying to find out who to contact about offering a temporary home to yet more refugees running from yet another country destroyed for no other reason than to add a trophy to the wall of a bored multi-multi-billionaire. Why can’t they just find a wall to paint and spend all their time and resources choosing the perfect colour? February, I’m done with you.
Sending hugs to Ukraine. Your room is ready here, painted, if you need it.