Painting rooms

Recently I have spent a lot of time with a paintbrush in my hand decorating rooms (with a lot of help from the Folks!) often with the help of my little Niece, who has discovered the joy of smearing pigments all over the place (mainly herself and any other surface other than the paper that is put in front of her!)

Whilst it can be a real pain to get started it's really nice to be able to watch as your environment changes with each coat of paint, how suddenly a room becomes lighter or warmer. The whole experience becomes suddenly quite enjoyable as with each coat you can see the finishing line approaching.

This has not always been the case and in particular one incident soured me towards painting indoors for a very long time.

A few years after the sugar puffs incident we moved house. With Sister II now with us we needed more space, and the parentals had found a larger house only a mile or two from our first one (a house with its own bar – which was quickly removed after they found my Sister I and myself at a tender age helping ourselves to Babychams [bought in specially for Granny] from behind the bar – I admit that I started drinking early although I don't think either of us were aware that it was alcohol, just fizzy and sweet!) Into this house was bought a "beautiful" new WHITE shag pile carpet for Sister I's bedroom.

We moved in in the April and had been warned in no uncertain terms that nothing was to be taken onto the white carpet! NO drinks (especially not blackcurrant squash), NO food, NO shoes! (I think that if they could have found one they would have erected a sign on my Sister's door similar to the ones that you used to see in swimming pools warning people about the dangers of running, bombing and heavy petting in the deep end!)

By the Summer holidays we must have been driving my Mother mad, with two young children and a toddler to contend with, and my Grandmother had come over to help watch us. After running around for hours my Sister I and I decided that we wanted to paint inside. We'd had enough of climbing the trees, playing with a football, hitting each other with garden canes, and generally fresh air!

"You can't……the sun is shining and you have a garden to play in."

"but we want to paint and we are bored of the garden! It's too hot/ cold/ windy/ BOOOOORRRRIINNNGGG!"

"NO!"

So that was the final word……..we could either paint outside, or stay indoors and play with some toys in the house!

UNTIL we had the great idea of painting upstairs! (I'm not too sure who had the idea…..it was probably me and my Sister did tend to think most of my ideas at that time were really good [she was/is a Tomboy] – although she has fortunately changed her mind about most of my ideas!) We knew that my Sister's room had some paints…..and one of those really cheap colouring in books, which seemed to be printed on toilet paper it was so thin!

After what felt like hours of painting (although was probably only about 20 minutes) my Mother obviously got somewhat concerned about the lack of running footsteps, the slamming of the back door, and general noise of children destroying the place and asked us what we were doing!

"NOTHING!" (the response most guaranteed to result in the fastest 50 yard upstairs dash)

You can probably guess where this is heading…….caught red-handed with a rainbow of colour splashed all over the new carpet. We expected to catch hell from our Mother (which we duly did!) but even our sweet dear Grandmother had a crack at us, and after a swift sharp lesson we were thrown into the garden and the backdoor locked with the most dreaded phrase "Wait till your Father gets home" ringing behind us (there were many recriminations as to whose idea it had been, who had spilled the most paint, and generally who was the biggest pain…….I still maintain that my Sister smelled worse than me and that girls couldn't paint properly anyway!)

It was the first and last time that I was sent to bed without dinner (well through anything other than personal choice……and usually a large amount of alcohol!). I think if every tale has a moral then the moral for this has got to be:

"Whilst it is sensible to let sleeping dogs lie…….silence from children will only lead to trouble"

Aesops modern tales

One of my Mother's favourite tales, whenever she sees my four year old Niece with her finger (or anything else) up or around her nose, was of when I was about five or six years old.

We lived in a very nice house, with a breakfast bar in the kitchen. On one particular day my Mother had come back from shopping and left my sister (who must have been about three or four at the time) and myself in the kitchen with the shopping bags on the floor, including a box of sugar puff cereal.

She must only have been gone for a few minutes, but during this time we had managed to remove and open the box of cereal (a feat in itself which I am still often unable to manage without spilling the contents all over the floor) and positioned ourselves under the breakfast bar. She came in to see us shovelling handfuls of dry sugary goodness into our mouths when disaster struck. I must have inhaled whilst devouring a handful, as a sugar puff became firmly wedged up my left nostril (a particularly unpleasant experience at any age, but which seemed so much worse at that tender age!)

Panic ensued as I was unable to talk due to the tears coursing down my cheeks, and my sister wasn't fully conversant at that stage. As it was a mime that Marcel Marceau would have been proud of we established that a sugar puff had gone where no sugary cereal product should have gone. Probing with items (okay I admit it was mainly my finger) got us nowhere other than pushing it further and further up my nostril. My Father, who was (and still is) a General Medical Practitioner, and who was at his practice received an urgent call to say that his second (and I should imagine somewhat slower) son had managed nasal dilation by confectionary, and asked for advice. I was to be brought over for treatment, a trip of some 10 miles.

My sister and I were bundled into the car, strapped in (still in a lot of pain I have to say!) by a very aggravated and stressed mother. I seem to recall that the journey was fraught with red lights and other road users, and we had made it to about a hundred metres from my father's surgery when I felt the sneeze building, fifty metres and I knew what was coming, and turning into the car park when my mother was hit on the back of her head by a soggy sugar puff.

Of course I was flavour of the month for a while but I think that this story has a deeper message, namely:

"Don’t stick your nose where it's not wanted as the results are rarely very nice......and the resulting journey is often pointless!"