Friday July 9, 2010
Ten days since my last post. It’s been a quiet time, you see, with a blank canvas on the easel (well, not blank exactly but we’ll come to that) and a largely blank mind along with a mostly empty to-do list.
Things hotted up these past three days with a visit to IKEA in Cardiff, a provisioning trip to Swansea, and the annual trip to Neath Abbey to take the little silver Ford in for MOT testing. All accomplished successfully, even the IKEA adventure.
I was proud of Graham there. We’d gone with the intention of buying pseudo-wood laminate for the second bedroom floor. I knew there was something wrong when I was sent off to find a chair while I waited. Some little while later, when I’d got bored, I made my way back to the aisle between the towering storage racks to find him with a sample of every type of laminate they do, fanned out on the floor in front of him.
“Wassa matta, chook?” I asked.
“Well, look at them. They’re all rubbish and I can’t choose between them.”
“If you feel like that there’s no choice at all. Put ‘em all back and we’ll have a re-think.”
“You may be right. Give me a bit longer, though. See if you can find a place to sit down again for five minutes.”
Isn’t it astonishing that a furniture store has so few places where customers can rest their weary bones these days?
So, anyway, he put them all back and announced that laminate wasn’t for us.
“Too cheap and clicky under foot,” he said. “I’m sorry to have wasted our time like this.”
“It’s not a waste. You’ve reached a decision and that’s a good thing.”
On the way home I asked him if he’d decided what we would put down in the two main bedrooms to replace the last of the old carpet we inherited with the house.
“I don’t think we should put cork down,” I said. “Too much like hard work, and not really bedroom friendly.”
“No. You’re right. Looks like it’ll have to be carpet, then, and after all the bad things we’ve said about dirty, smelly carpets.”
“Not to worry. At least it’ll be our dirt and our smell.”
So, back home, a welcome cup of coffee and a late lunch of hash and eggs cooked by Graham.
“I don’t think I’m as keen on IKEA as I used to be,” Graham said.
“Ah. Had to happen. Pass the ketchup, please.”
Finally, returning to my painting, I took a long time bringing up the work in progress to the point where it had totally and absolutely failed to please, gave a big sigh, and scraped all the paint off. Then I gave it a light coat of titanium white overall, using its translucent quality to my advantage so the main landscape and sky colours show through. And it’s been sitting on the easel drying off ready for a second go. That’s one colossal advantage of oil painting on canvass — you can make as many false starts as it takes, and it’s always easy to recover.
Starting over with a new house and a new hill
