Real Work

Painting's been on my mind of late. Not your Jackson Pollock, Henri Matisse, Damien Hirst variety but good old house-painting as was once falsely associated with old, or, rather, young, Adolf Hitler. (Funnily enough I was never able to convince Mum that der Fuhrer had genuinely been an art student, such was the power of British wartime propaganda.)

Both our house in KL and our Hall in this Far Place have been painted inside and out in recent months and the painters have done a very good job of both, I reckon, at minimum inconvenience to the residents of either. Watching them at work reminded me of a time when I seemed to do a lot of similar work. It was just before going to university that I found myself having to paint many of the interior walls of our house in Denton and it wasn't a lot of fun. At the same time I happened to be working weekends in a cleaning job mainly centred on Ciba-Geigy at Trafford Park and I remember watching a couple of guys painting a canteen ceiling there, a massive one. I knew that if I were to find myself doing the same job I'd have been exhausted in under an hour, but these chaps just kept going relentlessly. The secret was, they explained, to never, ever rush. The calm, unhurried smoothness with which they applied the paint had something of the quality of a exercise in meditation. 

Something of the same quality applied to the painters who've done such a good job for us more recently. These guys have been 'foreign workers' as I understand things. The ones in the Hall were from Myanmar, and I don't think they earn fantastic wages. Yet it seems to me they do necessary and difficult work extraordinarily well - as do so many so-called manual workers.

How it is we've come to somehow look down on such workers and their work I have no idea. What I do know is that we're wrong to do so.