life in the heart land

 

All Summer long I've been painting a pair of benches for a neighbour, my venerable Aunty Teresa.

A Summer is what it takes me apparently.

I don't rush.

Benches are like hedges.

You gotta get a feel for them.

Savour the moments.

Become one with the bench.

It's an Irish Summer of course so I've had to paint between rain storms and gales.

The sovietising Statists of the world  may have had some success in marketing their fetish for enslaving the gulpen citizenry with fictionalised notions of climate change and global warming but reality in Ireland never got the memo.

The Summers in Ireland are the same as they ever were.

Maybe a bit wetter and windier.

Aunty Mary's initial instructions were: "Will you paint the benches for me in the Mayo colours?"

Mayo's Gaelic football team colours are red and green.

The job sounded simple enough for a slosh on the paint man like myself until the aunt clarified that she didn't just want the bench painted half red and half green. She wanted the little roses on the metalwork painted red and the interlacing metal leaves painted green.

A month went by as I learned what Conan the Barbarian refers to as the riddle of paint.

I managed it.

Then the aunt clarified further: "Now put some stripes in purple and yellow on the wooden planks of the benches."

This was a bit more of a challenge.

The whole endeavour has been in fact something of a mystical journey.

Like in the Ralph Machio film the Karate Kid.

Perhaps I'll know Kung Fu by the end of the Summer.

In any case I've learned that you must treat the paint as your friend not your enemy.

On no account should you call the paint a ****ing ****.

Such talk upsets the cats and my dog as well as the paint and the universe.

This evening as I put the finishing touches to the thing, a bank executive who lives nearby caught sight of me in action.

"The artist at work," he called.

"Jackson Pollack," I called back cheerily, "not Van Gogh."

I was thinking to myself that Tom Sawyer in those circumstances would have made painting the fence look so enjoyable that the bank executive would have ended up doing the job for him and throwing in a ten billion dollar unsecured loan just for larfs.

Bank executives nowadays have grown a bit more wary than the ones Tom Sawyer encountered, probably since Sean Quinn and his hideous IRA brood persuaded Anglo Irish Bank to paint a fence, subverted it (the bank not the fence) systematically through the boardroom and the share register, and gave themselves multiple billion dollar loans thereby bankrupting Ireland overnight when a corrupt now conveniently deceased government minister called Brian Lenihan and his successors in office up to the present day, agreed to sign the Irish people up to paying the people trafficking, drug dealing, child abusing IRA terrorist mafia's bank debts.

Ho hum.

As the bank executive disappeared and dusk fell on the heartland, the garden filled up with peace and my venerable aunt emerged to view the splendidly renovated benches with their perfect red roses, bedded intricately in pristine glistening green leaves, all beckoning amid a haze of purple and yellow striped planks.

"What do you think?" I asked her.

"I was thinking of giving them to you," she replied,