Farrow and Ball

We are allowed to have workmen round. We are also allowed to be friends with people who are handy. Sometimes we can make this align to our advantage and have handy friends round to do some work.

My hands are covered in paint, the wall in the bedroom is covered in paint, the carpet in the bedroom is covered in paint. Tomorrow we’re going to cover the paint in paint. Tomorrow we are also going to paint the ceiling which involves pain(t) and suffering and a different spin on the idea of facepaint.

Over the last few hours I’ve occasionally wandered in to the bedroom, looked at the wall, smiled beatifically and wandered out again. Change.

I’ve been stymied a little bit so I’m absolutely thrilled to have started movement again in there. Nobody will be looking for a room in London any time soon, but I’ll have a lovely one for me in the meantime. I want to keep it sacred from clutter – a peaceful oasis that allows the ongoing series of explosions to continue in the other rooms while I peace out in there surrounded by candles and incense and plinky plonky music. You can come too. No touching.

Farrow and Ball make good paint, and they’ve spent on the marketing. If you live in the Cotswolds and you don’t paint your house in Farrow and Ball, there’ll be an angry mob with designer pitchforks politely using the doorbell so they can insist that you mend your ways. Likely either Alewishis Farrow or Nurgatiddly Ball knows someone in the current Tory cabinet. They’re the ferrari of paint, you see. I knew I simply MUST have the room painted in effybee, darling, I mean there just IS no other paint, d’you know? Effybee every week for me!

This all happened because you can’t buy less than 2.5 litres of the effing bastard. Jethro treated himself, and he’s treating me with his sloppy seconds. He came round armed with half a tin – plenty. We’ve done the first coat including the radiator. Now it dries. Then we use the rest of it up and hopefully avoid having to buy another tub since they come in at £54. Then, shiny room. The colour is Bluegreen. They don’t need to call it things like “Desperate Horizon” or “Cogitating Blackberry”. They aren’t afraid to say it like it is at Farrow and Ball, don’t you know. If it’s a grouse they call it a grouse, and shoot it. If it’s a blue-green they call it bluegreen and paint it.

I’ve had to look them up now. I got curious.

John and Richard. They met in a claypit after WW2 and wanted to make clayish colours, apparently. History doesn’t record whether or not it was daddy’s claypit. I’ll roll the dice that it was, even if Richard saw active service. They make the paint without all those nonspecific nasty things that their rivals put in that lesser paint – the one that’s reasonably priced and isn’t theirs. Somebody is good at talking and knows someone at The National Trust. Flagship store in Chelsea, darling. Crossed the Atlantic. The rest is history.

I like it. I’m a sucker. I like it. It’s nice. I’m a sucker.

I feel like I have good resonant moneypaint that will surround a peaceful bed in an uncluttered room from whence I will launch myself rocket-like on the world of dramatic employment when it all wakes up again. There’s the old idea that if it has cost more, you value it more. Capitalism has hungrily fucked that idea. But somehow…

Jethro is cosmic in a way I understand deeply. We operate in a similar fashion. I want his moneypaint in that sleepyroom, applied consciously with the sweat of his brow – (and mine). Two energy workers, changing the literal colour of a room. It’s gonna be a hell of a room when we are done, with the river matching the paint and clean in many many ways.

There’s a business here if we weren’t busy playing let’s pretend. Shamanic painters. “We change the colour and the energy in your room at the same time.” Flagship store in SW3. “I had my house painted by Barclay and Skinner and now I’m worshipped as a deity by a small community of hamsters in Staines.” We will be chanting and painting and making odd noises and burning things and you walk into your new shiny room and that thing you’ve had on your back for fifteen years falls off and jumps out of the window screaming in all eight dimensions and you spontaneously grow two inches taller and start glowing. “That’ll be eleventy sixteen dollarpounds and a horse. Thanks.”

I have all the best ideas.