Adventures in paint.

So I don’t know if it was the full moon on Tuesday night but the young man that shares some of my names, who has tormented me with very loud ugly rap music for the past 16 years or so, not only is going to art school, not only is outside painting as I write but is also listening to the Rolling Stones!!!!

For a moment I thought I had teleported to the sixties.

It’s just a shame that he chose the gloss paint and didn’t read the label before he started.

Back in my own just-after-the-sixties, early employment days I was working on an adventure playground in Reading England. I had had a very successful week phoning companies and had scrounged hundreds of tins of paint for the kids to experiment with.

On Friday morning whilst they were still at school I laid them all out along the fence that separated our corner from the rest of the municipal park that tolerated us, and waited for the school bell.

Alan was the first to enter that evening.
Alan was a regular.
Alan was about seven years old.

His eyes opened like pools when he saw the paint.

“Can I use it?”
“Sure Alan, but remember this – all the paints on this side are GLOSS and won’t come off with water, all the paints on this side are non-GLOSS and will come off with water”.
“Loss?”
“GLOSS.”

Do you remember those slides they used to project at rock concerts that looked like lava lamps in one dimension but with more colours?

Two hours later when he went home he looked like that.

It had been amazing to watch – his mind said no but his body was drawn magnetically to the gloss, like Dath Vader struggling with the dark side.

Head to toe in gloss paint, including his hair.

A calm descended on the playing fields.

Ten minutes later his mother stormed into the playground.

“WHO’S IN CHARGE HERE!!”
“Me?”
“What the fuck do you think…..?”
“I told him! I said – Alan – these paints are gloss be VERY careful.”
“Yeah, he NEVER listens.”

She became my first parent member of the committee.