Brush Strokes

 While it's diverting to do something out of one's comfort zone once in a while, it might be best if we don't do it too often. I undertook to finish the bathroom by painting it myself. It makes a change from stringing likely-sounding words into sentences. But whoever thought that academic work was somehow better than such artisan endeavour had it all wrong.

I've painted the bathroom once before and don't remember getting up into the top corners being quite such a challenge how ever many years ago that was. It's a young man's game on the top step at full stretch with one false move by someone so unused to such balancing acts offering a wide choices to bang one's head once and for all. This body, this vessel that I move about in, could once run or ride bikes for long distances, bowl eight overs at a time and do forward rolls at least into its thirties but aches and pains, not all of them psychosomatically, do their best to provide warnings. Early doors I was considering getting my favourite handyman to do it but I don't like to feel entirely useless just yet.

I can't do it all today. Maybe it's past halfway. I like the feeling of having done something useful, or tried, however badly. I have renewed admiration for those who can do such things, especially those one sees walking round on rooftops. They must know what they are doing.

There's probably a German word for 'the shame felt on realizing that what one does is of no intrinsic value'. What use have roofers for a theory that Shakespeare's kids weren't really all his own. What actual use is it to anybody compared to plumbing. What good is a write-up about a musical event or a book of poems compared to re-wiring the house. Is it the worst feeling one can have to end up thinking that one's life has been a waste of time.

Not entirely wasted, having enjoyed so much of it, but self-indulgent to say the least. And having enjoyed re-reading Benjamin Moser's The World Turned Upside-Down, I moved swiftly on to do the same with Laura Cumming's Thunderclap on very much the same subject and done in a similar way. Last year I think I preferred Laura but this time I'm more taken with Benjamin, notwithstanding his unnecessarily long coda, They are both fine writers and do much to enhance our appreciation of that exceptional period in painting but Benjamin demonstrates his Pulitzer credentials by finding more, possibly due to having spent twenty years on his book.

There. That feels a bit better already, back in the liberal arts and considering them of ultimate consequence whereas most people can manage without Carel Fabritius but there comes a time when bathrooms need some maintenance. There's painting and then there's painting. That could be the last time, I don't know.