The day before I even did the course, I’d visited a second-hand furniture shop and bought a crappy little brown cabinet for thirty euro. Then, the very moment the course ended, I bought paint and brushes and wax and spent the rest of the weekend transforming the crappy little cabinet into a charming blue thing that was fit to grace even the most high-end of homes. It was FECKEN lovely!
I know it’s unseemly to boast – good manners dictate that when we’re praised we should say, ‘Ah no, no, God no, it’s awful. Look at how streaky it is and see all the bits I missed here.’ But when it comes to my upcycled furniture, I actually egg people on, drawing their attention to features they might have missed. ‘Isn’t it fantastic?’ I say.
I’m excellent at getting obsessed with things – I’ve always got some fixation on the go – and overnight, my obsession shifted to chalk paint. I was perpetually online, purchasing the stuff, and every time I thought I’d accumulated enough colours, I suddenly needed more. Barely a day passed without a new delivery of paint arriving – blues, turquoises, pinks, more blues, a white because you’d always need a white, a green, although that was a mistake (gank), and another turquoise. I couldn’t find any lilacs for sale in Ireland or the UK, but I found a US company doing it – at a very reasonable price. Well, it was reasonable, until the day it was delivered and I discovered I had to pay about an extra £8,000 on import duty, but shur, we live and learn!
One of the techniques I’d learnt on the course was ‘distressing’ – by going over certain areas of the painted surface with sandpaper, you make your piece of furniture look wrecked, but ‘good’ wrecked. Not just cheap, crappy bad wrecked, but charming wrecked, like it had spent the last forty years being bleached by the sun, in a delightful beach house in New England, three doors down from Martha Stewart.
Now, a little aside here: the Keyes siblings co-own a holiday home in Lahinch, County Clare (west coast of Ireland, on the Atlantic, lovely spot, salty air, full of surfers), which had been furnished on the extreme cheap – brown melamine left, right and centre. I decided I would go there with a carload of blue paints and utterly transform the place into a billowing-white-muslin-curtains, lime-bleached-floorboards, shell-strewn, dreamy seaside home that might appear in an interiors magazine. (Apart from being prone to obsession, I am also prone to delusion.)
Because the term ‘Shabby Beach Chic’ already existed, I decided to invent my own name and settled on ‘Beachhouse Banjo’. (‘Banjo’ being Irish slang, meaning wrecked, broken, in smithereens, hungover, in rag order, etc., etc. I thought the two words together were euphonious and ‘catchy’ – it would be sure to lodge in the minds of the editors of the interiors magazines. I had vague plans that I could take this thing ‘global’.)
Then, looking for dust sheets, sugar soap, white spirits and other exotic items, I – voluntarily – went to a hardware store, which was like visiting a foreign country: they spoke a different language and the men were very flirty. (Honestly, if you’re looking for love and you’re not too choosy, hang around a hardware store, fingering the screws.)
At this stage, I’d spent about a million pounds on brushes and waxes and paint and more paint and knobs (a whole other subsection of obsession), yet I was still feeling delightfully thrifty and ‘make-do-and-mend’.
I had the most wonderful few days in Lahinch, Beachhouse Banjoing™ every stick of furniture in the place. As it transpired, I was on my own for a lot of the time because Himself was away up a mountain or something, and although the Redzer family were there at the start, they went off to Cork, visiting friends of Jimmy. I had no telly, no phone, no internet connection and no one to talk to, yet I couldn’t have been happier. I was totally at peace, immersed in a world of blue upon blue.
The way I’m constructed is that I’m never fully at peace. Down in my depths, something’s in perpetual uneasy motion and I’ve spent fifteen years trying and failing to calm myself with meditation. Mindfulness is another thing that baffles and tyrannizes me. But when I’m painting furniture, I lose myself entirely and I’m fully in the moment. Hours can pass by without me noticing and mostly I’m utterly at peace. All I’m focused on is the paint and the colour and the brush and the wood.
Stuff unravels in my head and if I find myself remembering painful patches of my life, instead of my usual knee-jerk attempts to escape (like jumping on Instagram or eating something sugary) I do what any expert would advise: I stay with the feelings.
The soothing back-and-forth of the paintbrush enables me to examine whatever it is until eventually the discomfort subsides. I can honestly say, I’ve (dread phrase) ‘worked through’ more of my issues while painting lopsided drawers bright pink than during any other of the (many, many) therapies and fixes I’ve tried over the years.
For me, painting is like meditation except that at the end I have a colourful piece of furniture.
When I ran out of stuff to paint in Lahinch, I left. And although I understood that the house wouldn’t be featuring in any interiors magazines (the silk purse/sow’s ear thing), I’d made my peace with it.
Home I went to Dublin, where I continued to Beachhouse Banjo™ anything I could lay my hands on, and suddenly there was nothing left to paint and I started to get EXTREMELY twitchy. I was all set to go to the second-hand shop but I had to go over to Mam and Dad’s (a mahogany wonderland, crammed to the gills with mahogany cabinets and nests of tables and console tables and telephone tables and hall tables and all kinds of other furniture), to spend time with Dad while Mam went to bridge. Before she left, I insisted on getting out my phone and showing her pictures of all my Beachhouse Banjoed™ handiwork and she oohed and aahed and made suitably impressed noises. ‘That’s lovely, Marian. Good girl, Marian. Great girl, Marian.’
Buoyed up by her encouragement I said, ‘Well, while you’re out, I could paint your hall table pink.’
‘No!’ she all-but-shrieked at me. ‘No! Stay away from my good furniture with your horrible paints!’
I drew myself up to my full height (not very high). ‘I see,’ I said stiffly. ‘Well. The truth will out.’
So I started haunting the second-hand furniture shops in my local area and kept buying dressing tables and painting them pink, then gifting them to people even though they didn’t want them and they had no room for them. And I literally couldn’t look at anything without wanting to paint it – at a funeral, I was jolted from my grief when I found myself eyeing the carved pew-ends and thinking, ‘Heliotrope. With a dry-brushing of Silver Pearl.’
Visiting my parents became exquisite torture but Mam refused to surrender anything so, in three separate instalments, I stole a small nest of tables from her sitting room. (In fairness to me, when I’d made them far more beautiful, I offered them back. However, she declined. What can I say? Her loss.)
And then I got a commission – oh yaze! One of the tables I’d purloined from Mam’s ‘nest’ I’d painted a spring green with coloured butterflies stencilled on them. I brought it over to Mam one Friday night (where the Keyesez gather for our weekly dinner) and Redzer the Elder lay immediate and passionate claim to it. Right away Redzer the Younger started bellyaching that he wanted a table too and Rita-Anne said, ‘Auntie Marian will paint another table exactly the same for you.’ And I said, ‘Auntie Marian will not!’
Rita-Anne looked a little shocked and I explained, ‘Redzer the Younger is his own person with his own tastes,’ and I invited the young man to sit down beside me for a ‘clee-yong consultation’. I asked him what colour he wanted his table painted and he shouted, ‘Black!’ And I had to say ‘I’m very sorry, my clee-yong, but chal
k paint doesn’t come in a true black, it would be more of a charcoal, and I’m not sure that’s what you’re “feeling”.’
At this stage, RTY had hopped off the couch, run into the kitchen, kicked the freezer door, thumped back into the sitting room and stood on Redzer the Elder’s head, and I suggested, in only slightly strained tones, ‘What about blue?’
‘Yeh!’ he yelled. ‘Blue!’
‘What kind of blue?’ I asked. ‘Light blue? Mid blue? I can put together a mood board? Or would you trust me to choose on your behalf?’
‘I want a Mint Magnet!’ he declared.
‘You’ve to eat your dinner first,’ Rita-Anne said.
‘Blue,’ I said, putting a tick on a receipt I’d found in my bag. ‘To be chosen by me. And what about a pattern?’ I was considering the stencils I had. ‘Might I suggest an animal print?’ ‘Seeing as you’re a bit of an animal yourself,’ I was thinking, but didn’t say. This is how it is with commissions from clee-yongs – diplomacy must be your watchword. ‘How about leopard print?’ I suggested. ‘Or zebra?’
‘Which one kills the most people?’
‘Probably leopards,’ I said.
‘Yeh, LEOPARD.’
‘Very well,’ I said. ‘I think I have a good grasp of your sensibilities. A blue table with blue metallic leopard print.’
‘No! A black leopard.’
‘I don’t have black paint. You’re getting blue.’
‘It can’t be for girls.’ He cast a scornful eye on the butterfly table that his elder brother had laid claim to. ‘Not like that one that Miss Dylan has.’
‘It won’t be for girls. It will be specially for you.’
So I went away and painted his table, and I really put my heart and soul into it because even though he’s only four he’s a contrary live-wire with strong opinions. He can take agin something for the most capricious of reasons and I really wanted him to love it. And he did!
Because he has such a short attention span (probably age-related) he’d completely forgotten I was doing a table for him, so when, the following Friday, he arrived at Mam’s and saw it and realized it was for him he went all red and shy and seemed like he might be on the verge of crying, and I swear to God, it made me feel fantastic.
Since then I’ve been ‘swamped’ with commissions. Well, I’ve had three. And everyone keeps saying, ‘You could set up in business doing this.’
However, the thing is I couldn’t. I spend a fortune on supplies, particularly the knobs, which I ‘source’ from around the world, at outlandish prices (made more outlandish by the inevitable import duty).
And if I set up in business, not only would I be bankrupt in a matter of days, but my hobby wouldn’t be my hobby any longer. And I really love my hobby …
From an article first published in the Sunday Times Style, April 2015.
Guilty Pleasures
We all have our guilty pleasures, but as I’m focusing on mine to write this piece I realize that a disproportionate number of them involve food. I have zero restraint around anything containing sugar so I can’t keep any in the house, but if I’m having people over, well, of course I have to get them something nice for dessert – to offer them a satsuma would be the height of bad manners!
So I go out and buy something fabulous, like a triple-chocolate cheesecake, and from the moment it enters my house I never stop thinking about it. When my guests arrive and I open the fridge to get drinks, the cheesecake winks at me and says, ‘Come on, you know you want to.’ As I dish up whatever dinnerly food I’m providing (and really I’ve no interest at all in that side of things), I’m thinking, ‘Cheesecake, cheesecake, cheesecake.’
So the night proceeds and we’re all chatting away and I’m becoming tighter and tauter as I watch the others savour their lamb tagine and a voice in my head is shouting, ‘Eat faster!’ Then they ask for more lamb tagine and I suspect they’re only doing it to be polite but as their hostess I’m obliged to fulfil their request and as my access to the cheesecake is deferred even further I become somewhat enraged and shrill, then I fall into despair and become surly and eventually monosyllabic.
Until I hit on a magical solution: whenever people are coming over to be fed (did you notice how I refuse to say the dread words ‘dinner party’?), I have my dessert before they arrive. Yes! I have a fine big slice of the cheesecake about fifteen minutes before kick-off, then I am calm and happy and at peace. I can go about my hostessing duties with charm and zeal – nothing is too much trouble. Seconds of the lamb tagine? Of course! Why not make it thirds? Would they like a lengthy break between their main course and dessert? They should take as long as they like – what’s the hurry?
And when the time for the cheesecake eventually arrives, in the privacy of the kitchen I cut several slices and rearrange them on the plate to disguise the gap. Then I feign a will-I-won’t-I attitude of indecision about having any and eventually say, like I’m making a big concession, ‘Okay, just a tiny slice.’ (Which always impresses people, especially other women.)
As I said, because of the powerful hold sugar has on me, I can’t keep any in the house. But as luck would have it, I live five minutes’ drive from my parents, which is Trans-Fat Central – if you open a cupboard in their kitchen, you’re in very real danger of being brained by an avalanche of biscuits, and their freezer is so jam-packed with Magnums I sometimes worry that when I open the door the ice creams will explode at me, like chocolate-coated bullets.
Oftentimes, while I’m out and about in my car, I think, ‘I’ll just pop in and say hi to Mam and Dad. They’d like that, a visit from their eldest daughter. And I’d like it too, because at some stage they’ll be dead and I’ll be grateful for the memories.’ So I arrive at their door and my poor mammy eyes me warily and says, ‘Are you here to steal more of my furniture?’
‘Not at all,’ I say heartily. ‘I’m here to see you. I’m creating memories for –’
‘– when I’m dead. Yes, I know.’
So we go into the sitting room and I lie on the couch and put my feet in her lap and we chat for – oh, thirty seconds or so – then I say, ‘… any Magnums?’
Because I’ve somehow convinced myself that if I haven’t personally bought the Magnums, they don’t count.
Mam gets to her feet. ‘What flavour do you want?’
‘What flavours have you got?’
‘All of them.’
And to be fair, she does. Which brings me to another guilty pleasure: Redzer the Younger has a charming approach to certain words, he unilaterally changes them, and he’s adamant that ‘Magnums’ are called ‘Magnets’. So every Friday, when the Keyes clan descend on my parents for dinner, I’m just DYING for it to be time for Redzer the Younger’s Magnum. And because Rita-Anne (mother of the Redzers) knows I get a kick out of it, she tells him to ask me.
‘I want a Mint Magnet,’ he says.
‘A what?’ I ask.
‘A Mint Magnet.’
‘A Mint what?’
‘A Mint MAGNET.’
‘A mint biscuit?’
‘No. A MINT MAGNET!’
‘I can’t hear you. Say it louder.’
‘I WANT A MINT MAGNET!’
… and then I kill myself laughing. Wrong of me to take pleasure from the foibles of a small child? Well, I do feel guilty. A little bit.
Walking
Fresh air – funny stuff. Smells … of stuff. And brings sensation to your face and hands and other exposed body parts. Between ourselves, I’ve never been a fan.
It was the way I was brought u
p – the only childhood memory I have of a window being opened was after the bedrooms had been repainted and the painter managed to convince Mam that we’d all be poisoned if we didn’t let some air in. To this day I don’t like opening windows. Even when the sun is splitting the stones I’m happy to keep the windows closed, and once they’re open I always feel anxious and on edge till they’re shut again.
I don’t think I’m alone. It’s definitely an Irish thing – maybe it’s down to our epic rainfall. Over the centuries, our DNA has been re-hardwired into recognizing the value of a closed window: it lets in the light – no problems with that – but keeps at bay the air and the wet and the damp and the mist and the rain and the general misery of ‘out there’.
I think it’s our biggest difference with the English. The English are divils for opening windows, they’re at it non-stop. And they’re mad for their gardens – any chance at all and they’re out there, ‘taking’ their breakfasts in the morning sunshine and admiring their lupins.
I admit I have a garden, it’s mostly gravel and bamboo and low-maintenance stuff, but it’s nice. I like to look at it. From inside the house. On the odd occasion when there’s no good ads on telly. The only time I’ve ever been in it is when there are visitors over and they insist on going out there – it usually involves young lads wanting to kick balls. But I have never – and I genuinely mean never – sat out there by myself.
Now and again, when the weather is roasting (almost never, I need hardly add), Himself and I entertain wild plans of having our dinner in the garden. There’s a little table out there, ideally situated to catch the evening sun. ‘It’ll be like being on our holidays,’ I say. But at the last minute, as I have the plates of food in my hand, I waver. ‘Are we really going to do this?’ I ask. ‘I don’t know,’ he replies.