I'd read a few comments around here pertaining to the fact that you get stuff done when you put down the cigarettes. Well, as I am but a human being and therefore more like you than you or I could possibly imagine then guess what?
I've been getting round to it.
Starting in my art room, southfacing, out back, these houses/flats go back centuries, Edwardian? Victorian? My room is on a slope, the left side a couple of inches lower than the right side entrance - I didn't really notice 'til I hung my dart board the other end and took about 43 throws to hit a cursory 100, oh... and when I freecycled a plastic red swivel chair with wheels - sat to my computer - and started gently sliding to the left (I re-freecycled).
As long as I've lived here though, there has been about half a wall of woodchip paper, stuck - fast to the left side alcove bit, I'd had a small go years earlier, to no avail. This time I looked. This time I was going to win! 3 days in and my (as they've been referred to before) 'piano fingered' arty farty hands are like that of a Navvy, swollen, nicked and cut at every knuckle, dried and sore.
This stuff was tough.
When I finally got through the 1970's (?) paper though, I found another 4 - 5 layers underneath. I am doing the job of generations. My mind starts wondering. What has my room been before? To others, like me, who think they are the only people who've ever lived somewhere. Was this an old Edwardian parlour room? Did they play charades? Read? Did the next family have it as a dining room?
I wonder if there had been beatings here? Victorian style... (well, they sent children up chimney stacks - no childline for those poor buggers), incest? Murder? (The Krays reached here or near here in the 1960's). Our rather eccentric neighbour on the ground floor says the previous inhabitants were heroin users - indeed my father in law found a used syringe under our cooker about 12 years ago...
We've certainly tamed wallpaper styles over the centuries though. There were two under papers that were just gaudy, garish, devoid of taste or style - although probably the height of fashion at the time. One was a green colour, with swirly white designs, the killer hand?
The dark purple, odd, odd, odd stuff at the very bottom. (Was this a whore house?! An opium den??!!) I swear I could smell the years through that must. I wondered if in some small, strange way I was inhaling a couple of centuries of atoms, carbon, or D.N.A through my stuffed dusty nostrils. Maybe we are not gone when we die, but, like some scientists claim - less orderly?
Funniest of all?
When I finally filled, sanded and painted barewall twice or three times, I was forced to see where I had been before, or actually, where I hadn't been - and like a nicotine Goldilocks - I could see the trails of where my addiction had got the better of me:
Ah... quick cigarette break, then...
or:
A well earned smoke and a coffee.
Usually the corners and tops of the walls, where I've done the main bulk - then had a smoke and forgot!
This New Year, we lost half of our trellising to the storms. I've had to dry rot a lot of supporting wooden structure, before replacing the busted wind battered stuff, painting, screwdriving, attaching, hoping, repainting, admiring(!), drinking from my Bobble.
I've even started pointing the Victorian chimney stack. (Here's where you re-trace the real cowboys, I reckon a Kilburn High Road roll up smoking Guinness supping London Irish) Ordered the lime mortar and have just managed to get old cement/mortar dust all over the decking which I'd just done twice in a nice teak finish. (grrrrrr)
The girl and I? Hey... we even got the neighbour to take down the intruding (ugly) satellite dish that had been attached to our side of the chimney stack. Assertive - part II!
Currently reading Neil Young's 'Waging heavy peace' and nursing a - so far - 3 day 'Winter vomiting bug'. The last two days I've woken in a pool of my own sweat, have about 30% energy, can hardly speak properly (hey... she gets a break now and then) but best of all?
I woke, this morning, with a nice plummy cold sore.
And I still wonder, who the hell it was that gave me that fatal kiss.
(the bastard).
Dear world,
Please stop using irreplaceable fossil fuels, messing with our weather flow, honestly... It's playing havoc with my viruses... All this simultaneous freeeeeezing cold wind and buuuuuuurning hot sun... means I now get a good 10 days of not being able to use the same towels, drying my face with tissue paper, keeping my hands MEGA clean, feeling run down, itchy, hoping the healing process won't be slowed by my mouth 'cracking' the scab.
Really... You non - cold sore-y types just have no idea...
(Having to replace half a roof terrace isn't my idea of fun, either...)
Let's get our thinking caps on scientists!
Good day all 🙂
ps: Album of the month - WIldflowers, by Tom Petty.
