Painting

What do you think of while you are painting?  What are the thoughts that enter your head as you drag the brush over the skirting boards or pull the emulsion filled roller over the walls?  How do you relieve the boredom of painting?

It’s not so bad when you have something intricate to do such as round a window where you have to be careful not to edge onto the glass or round the door handles or hinges but painting a ceiling or a large flat wall seems endless and often pointless especially if it’s the same colour and it is then that the mind starts to wander.

It takes a trip to what you could be doing at work but you’ve taken time off away from work especially to get this job done.  It meanders through the murky world of politics and something that has been bugging you for some time now and it makes you angry.  It takes you to something interesting that you saw on television, something funny perhaps and you laugh out loud. 

You’ve spilt a drip on the laminate flooring and you mop it up with a piece of kitchen roll that you have stuffed in your pocket and you tell yourself to concentrate, keep your mind on the job, it’s not that hard, there’s not much more to do.  You pick the brush up again and stroke away but within a few minutes your mind is off again, off thinking thoughts that don’t help, thinking of things you would rather be doing or places you’d rather be.

Turn on the radio, that might help, a bit of background music could give you rhythm to the work at one hundred and twenty strokes per minute perhaps and that would be good for your productivity.  You put the brush down and tune in only to hear the start of the football match and that has to be worth listening to.  All goes well for the first few minutes and the painting is less tedious, less of a chore, less of a drag but soon the voices of the commentators get louder, they rise in pitch, the crowd is roaring and something exciting is going to happen and you lean towards the radio to get the best out of your failing ears.

The ball is in the back of the net, they’re one – nil up away from home, what a shot, what a goal, what a start and you turn around to find a great big streak of paint right across the very bit you were carefully trying to avoid and the offending brush that you had forgotten about still in your hand.

You can cover it with emulsion later.