PAINTING DAY

I've spent most of the day painting. Paint's amazing stuff: in the pot, in the tray, even on the roller, it's gloopy, swirly, sticky stuff like white custard in a tin. As soon as it's on the wall though, the paint seems to stick to the plaster without so much as a drip peeling down towards the skirting boards. Thixotropy, I think they call that. Magic, I say.

I was painting the walls of the new conservatory, and trying my best not to get annoyed. I'm not much of a do-it-yourselfer; I suffer from terrible clumsiness and a chronic lack of practical confidence when it comes to those fiddly little jobs that need to be done in a certain way. Quite why I volunteered to paint the walls today then, I don't know.

"I'll do it!" I'd said in a moment of enthusiasm. The Intrepids were taking Liam (my nephew) out for a day trip to what he's been calling the "Splitfire Museum" - I'd have the day to myself to get it done.

Stick the radio on, I thought, whack some old clothes on, get the roller and the paint. Boom. Simple.

Some hours later, with my face flecked with white paint, my splodged bare toes cold against the terracotta tiles, and two pairs of socks ruined, I was regretting the moment of enthusiasm and naivity that had led me to this splattered afternoon.

The radio annoyed me too. I was listening to people talking about football. They were talking about it as though it were the most complicated and important thing in the history of mankind. Nowhere else in society can people get away with saying absolutely nothing useful with so many cliches.

"Course, what City do well is they play from the back, so that they can push through the middle and they're strong up front." = they're a good team.

"Well Brendan's an experienced manager, he won't be treating this lightly; you'd expect the lads to be too strong for Bournemouth today, but you never know in this competition - anything could happen." = they'll win but don't switch off your radios, folks.

"There's no doubt he really believes in the romance of the cup; a great thing for top managers these days."

The romance of the cup? I'm no expert on romance but the unexpected triumph of a team of men kicking a ball around in a slightly luckier way than the other team, while thousands of other men cheer them on... is not particularly romantic.

I've misunderstood the beautiful game, haven't I? Probably because I disliked the way the beautiful game treated me at school. I quite like knowing about it - it gives me something to talk to people about - but I'm not a massive fan of the culture that somehow follows it around. And I can't play it for toffee.

I probably should have opened the windows. While the January sun poked its way through the clouds and burned through the glass roof, I rolled emulsion up and down the smooth walls inside. I don't know whether emulsion gives off fumes with the same potency as gloss - I do know that I was feeling a bit queasy by the end and I had to have a lie down. At least, that's what the purple dragons recommended.