(Marlborough Sunworthy Wallfashions, date and designer unknown)
Why does the human race persist with wallpaper? It never ages well. It bespeaks denial and a lack of moral fortitude. It is an absolute bugger to remove.
I say all of this because Dear Patient M and I spent most of the day contorting on ladders, spatulas in hand, steaming up the kitchen in my old house to a level that made us turn pink and almost caused us to expire. All of this in an effort to rid my kitchen of its pesky, cursed, grubby, shoddily painted-over by me in a fit of pique, pseudo-Laura Ashley wallpaper.
I was going to write some meaningful sort of reflection on the person I was when I bought the house five years ago compared to the person I am now. I wanted to write about how nothing ever really seems to get finished in life. How things that are heavy become light, and vice versa. How the ground seems to be constantly shifting beneath my feet, in a good way. But that all started to sound a bit like a voiceover from some NoughtiesTV show (you know the type, "funny, yet sad", with lots of boring indie guitar music accompanying montages of characters clinking glasses or staring vacantly at the TV or watching their lover sleep)(Ugh).
No, instead, I was overcome by a righteous fury and felt capable of little more than this hyperbolic rant. My fingernails are too sore to accomplish much else. So I will simply shake the scurf-like flakes from my head and surmise as follows: There is something naive about people who put up wallpaper. Short-sighted. Dare I say, selfish. If you know such a person, sit them down and ask them to take a long hard look at themselves
And, PS, do not even get me started on Wallpaper magazine.