Zen In DIY

          It took me a while to work out that the heightened proliferation of St. George’s Cross flags around town was not down to a sudden increase in the political activities of the far right, but a show of support for quite another cause: football.

          It was the eve of England’s first match in the World Cup tournament, a fact which I had not troubled to register. You might think it curmudgeonly wilfully to ignore the progress of one’s national football team, yet I see a point of principle at stake: the hoo-ha around this tournament is boosted deliberately (by President Trump, for one) to distract attention from warfare and the transference of wealth and power from the many to the few. The Romans practised the same chicanery in their circuses. Why has the game still not been called out?

          Anyway, I spent three days last week in a sort of DIY trance, so I wasn’t taking notice of much in the outside world, never mind one of my least favourite activities, sports.

          After four months of waiting for builders to commit to doing some tiling on our terrace, I realised the job was of no interest to any of them and decided to do it myself (DIM). In an effort to encourage any builder to take an interest in earning some easy money I had simplified the original brief, but the lure had been ineffective. Eventually, I thought it through and realised the job had become so simple, I could DIM and spend the budget on having fun afterwards.

          But the builders, with all the benefit of their professional experience, may well be having the last laugh. Having decided to lay click-together wooden decking tiles over the existing ceramic floor tiles, thereby de-skilling the bulk of the job, I reckoned to have cracked the case. All that remained was to chip the vertical tiling from the retaining wall and paint it a jolly colour.

          My Other Half (OH) was away for a few days; the weather was set fair and my enthusiasm to get the job done could no longer be contained. The tiles came off in ten minutes, but my elation was to prove premature.

          The wall is only two feet high and twenty-two feet long, yet it took two days to clean off the tile adhesive and underlying coats of paint, then another to make minor repairs and prepare the surface for re-painting – and all this time my body was under the strain of crouching on a low stool or kneeling on a pad while leaning forward into the work. I avoided back injury by careful management of my posture, stretching during standing-up breaks and finishing the day with a hot bath.

          So, here comes the Zen part: the work is physically demanding but manageable; your focus is on a vertical surface about one foot away; your only objective is to remove all traces of old paint because, if any patches are left, they will show through the new coat; there is no one to distract you and no one to call you in for tea.

           I found that listening to music or podcasts over earphones lost its appeal early on. I could only get satisfaction from the work by concentrating on small achievements, like removing a particularly stubborn spot of paint in an especially inaccessible corner of the wall. I spoke to no one, didn’t shave, went to bed sober and arose early to the task. At last, I applied the first coat of new paint just as the weather broke, the rain set in and my OH returned. The nagging thought that I had just wasted three days of my life on something I need not have done was countered by the sense of satisfaction at having persevered and the appreciative remarks of the first beholder of the result.

          That evening, after dining out on the tiling budget excess, we got home in time to watch the second half of England vs Croatia – a very entertaining display of footballing skills. It’s not hard to see how immersion in such a spectacle is a useful distraction from the bleak reality of geopolitics.