OK, so it's New Year's Eve and I'm
not in my flat. I'm in my cosy bedroom at my parents' house.
I'd
considered staying over - a symbolic gesture: "I've
still not moved in, but I've seen in the New Year in my own home" - but changed my mind for various reasons.
I went over to the flat early-ish in the morning to try to finish off the base coat painting in the kitchen. It took me several hours yesterday to do one two full walls and some of the tricky bits. Today, I took another couple of hours to repaint the same parts (only less) because the first coat of base coat wasn't up to much... And I'm still not finished.
I am making rather a mess of it.
Out of curiosity, I asked my mother how long she'd expect a room that size to take, and she offered "a couple of hours".
Clearly I do not have a future as an
Interior Decorator ahead of me.
All this, and I still don't even have the paint that'll be going
over the base coat. How many
more hours is
that going to take me? Why did I even
consider taking on the task of painting the kitchen myself? It's put me right off doing any other decorating, I can tell you.
Around lunchtime, I met up with my boss, ostensibly to check out the Annie Liebovitz exhibition at the National Gallery. The option of visiting Forbidden Planet was also floated, and lunch was a likely prospect.
When we got uptown, Forbidden Planet was our first port of call, followed shortly by Orbital Manga before heading to a Japanese cafe for lunch. With bellies full of fine sushi, we made the exhibition our last port of call for the day - London was, after all,
already filling with New Year revellers.
The first thing that struck me about the exhibition was the archaic way the photographs had been produced... but after scrutinising a good few photos, the reasons became obvious - even on a monochrome image, the depth of tone was astounding. Some of the colour images showed a strange bias, but this was likely intentional.
When we left to come home, I was still ruminating on the question of where to spend the night, but had decided on a nice, warm bed after a decent dinner by the time we reached the point in the route where the decision had to be made.
Looks like my parents are intending to sleep through the marking of the New Year... Hopefully I can do the same.
Tomorrow, maybe I'll spend the day at the flat, finish of that darned base coat, and spend the night there so I can go in to work on Friday from the flat, just to see how that goes...
