Wallpaper troubles me

(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.

Comments

[Elizabeth]

I learned to hate wallpaper when I, too, was scraping it off my kitchen walls. And I think the film of grease that goes on it from years of cooking serves as a special bonding agent and preservative. I swear the wallpaper and accompanying paste could have survived the atom bomb.

Wallpaper should be outlawed, especially pseudo-Laura-Ashley wallpaper. Ours was, I guess, supposed to look charmingly floral, in a red, assertive and anally repetitive kind of way. Instead it looked like a swarm of red insects always poised to sting. Hated it. Why I waited till we moved to rip it down I'll never know....

[a thousand shades of twilight]

Ha! I did the same thing - lived with horrendous painted over dirty peeling wallpaper for years and only did something about it when I moved out. So now some new tenant can come in and trash my freshly painted walls..