Back to painting the bathroom today – when you’re spending most of your waking hours on one task, there’s not much scope for getting out and encountering exciting blog subjects, so those planned posts about composting, beekeeping and the bond between man and dog will have to wait a little longer. 

Instead of ranging far and wide into the world, activities like painting encourage you to journey inwards – into the very psyche, you might say. So, standing on the toilet seat, applying anti-mould primer to the ceiling architrave, my thoughts naturally tended toward – and bear with me here – Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel.   

Seriously, what did the old chap think about, lying on his back atop a rickety scaffolding for four years, daubing the Creation of Adam with a rag on a stick? Was it high-flown theological theory, as befit his subject matter? Or the complicated mathematical equations underlying the 3-D illusions he was creating? Or was he muttering under his breath about Julius II and his unreasonable client demands?

Early on in my bathroom mission, I tended to wander back into the rosy realms of memory – particularly painting-related memory. I mused about stippling faux camouflage onto model tanks and planes, creating big black-and-white murals for a Hall Ball at uni, redecorating my flat in London Fields after my girlfriend departed, and later, helping a lovely gay couple renovate their 19th-Century terraced house in Camden Town.

This job was fascinating: using a blowtorch and scraper to strip back centuries of paint from the window frames was like one of those movie sequences when you go rapidly back in time, seeing each period displayed in the colours in fashion at the time. The oranges and browns of the ‘70s; the sombre greys of the ‘30s; the dark greens of late Victorianism, and so on. Maybe it was the heady bouquet of lead vapour and linseed oil, but to me that old place came alive with the generations of people who had lived, loved and died there.

Putting the new coats of paint on was satisfying in a different way. It’s wonderful how modern paints come off the roller evenly and easily with a slight popping and sucking noise. There’s a rhythm to it: nice, long sweeps down, up, and down again, moving across the room leaving a transformed surface behind you. It wasn’t so much covering up the past as readying it for another century or two of lives to be lived. 

These meditations took up the first couple of days in the bathroom, but today I got weary of my own thoughts and faux-philosophical musings, and cranked up a bit of music. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before, but you can really get motivated by a stonking playlist of Elvis Costello – the early stuff, of course, with the Attractions (Imperial Bedroom’s a great album; I don’t think Elvis ever addressed any of the other rooms like bathrooms in musical form). This was followed by some ‘60s Motown and R&B that really fired me up.  I may have bust a few moves while tackling the tricky spot next to the extractor fan – I’m not confirming or denying. 

Anyway, imagine what Michelangelo could have achieved with a bangin mix of dance tracks or some AC/DC – Highway to Hell would have offered an interesting counterpoint to those ceiling frescos. But for that, his four years might have taken two – although judging by our bathroom, four is quite a reasonable timeframe for an enterprise of this scale.