You
may be wondering what happened to the ‘ecstasy’ bit and so am I.
I’ve
been thinking of Michelangelo suffering atop his scaffolding as he painted the
Sistine Chapel ceiling because I, too, have been marooned on top of a scaffold
for four days now, inching my way across the web of beams that support the
porch roof on the back of the house.
Whereas
Michelangelo derived satisfaction (ie. ecstasy) from the fact he was painting a
first-rate, world-class masterpiece, I am getting nothing but pain (agony) from
the incredibly slow moving and tiresome process of staining the carpentry dark
brown.
The
porch is not particularly big – about 2.5x7.5 meters, or 8x25 feet – but
painting the beams requires balancing on top our aluminum scaffold and trying
to dab the three exposed sides of each plinth, plus its supporting columns and
slanted bracings. I began this morning at nine and at nearly one o’clock had
only managed to paint two sections, each about five feet in length.
The
structure is new so all the wood is raw and, not having been sanded and
finished so as to achieve a desirable ‘rustique’ effect, is like trying to
paint syrupy glop over very rough sandpaper. What might take a few hours to
paint on a prepared surface is taking me days – and I am sick of it!
Add
to that constant attack by mosquitoes and horse flies, dust filtering into my
eyes, the fatigue of climbing up and down, up and down, and moving the scaffold
this way and that, and you begin to get the picture.
I
took a break yesterday and popped into our local boulangerie to treat myself to one of the baker’s exquisite pain au chocolat. The girl behind the
counter looked even more timid and frightened than usual (her reaction to dealing
with me and my awkward French) and it was only afterwards I realized my face
was speckled with fine brown dots. I looked all the world like I’d fled from a
plague ridden city, a harbinger of death, a doomed man for sure - doomed to
continue staining that damned porch for God only knows how many more days.
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