Wound

When we were doing our pottery painting at Bridgewater on Friday there was a lady and her three small children painting at the table opposite us.

For the duration they were there they had me and my mum in fits of giggles.

I’m afraid we were very irreverent.

After they had gone I got a fantastic backhanded compliment from my mum.  She said: ‘Well. She made you look very relaxed didn’t she?’

I will elaborate.

Children, as you may have heard in the newspapers, can be quite messy.  Particularly around art and craft equipment.  It is a little known fact that babies do not arrive on the planet with the inbuilt ability to colour in the lines and create harmonious colour groupings.

Mostly they like to go for the more is more approach I have found, in my twelve years at the coalface of child rearing.

I had decided, when we undertook our own pottery painting project, that as long as the mess was kept within reasonable bounds, i.e. on their persons rather than on passersby, and they didn’t actually smash or destroy any bits of pottery, that this would be a good thing and I would be content.

I did urge them at the beginning to think about things like colours and designs, and was also quite fierce about them listening to what the kind lady who helped us set up was saying.

After that it was every man for himself.

Which is why we ended up with pieces like this:

I admit that I have had to learn this from bitter experience.  Matilda was a great one for doing forty seven crafts before breakfast when she was a toddler.  Her painting approach might best be described as ‘all inclusive’.  She did spend six months of her young life stripping herself naked and painting her entire body all over with what she called ‘watches’.  She would start at the wrist with something approximating a wrist watch, and then get steadily more frenzied, clearly possessed by some kind of Dionysical spirit, until she was jet black all over.

I used to try and run damage limitation.

Then I just put down a lot of newspaper and looked out the window.

The lady opposite us had clearly not laid her demons to rest like I had.

She was very insistent that each child produce something of great beauty.  She knew exactly how she wanted each piece to look, and by golly it was going to happen, even if she had to snatch the thing off the child and paint it herself.

The poor children looked totally perplexed.  The outing had clearly been sold as something that would be fun, yet every time they tried to have fun mama went insane and vetoed it completely.

Some of the best lines we heard were:

‘If ANYBODY puts a dirty paintbrush in that palette again there will be trouble.’

‘You are NOT ALLOWED to mix those paint colours together.’

‘WELL. If you want something horrible then go ahead.’ This was followed by a snatch and swoop manoeuvre which prohibited any chance of them making anything horrible at all.

My favourite one was:

‘If anyone else gets the paint water dirty we are going home.’

At the end of forty five minutes of artistic anguish, she trooped out triumphantly with three mugs, beautifully decorated, with nary a smudge or clashing colour to be seen.  The children followed sheepishly behind her wondering where their afternoon of fun had gone to.

The irony is that when they arrive at her house, after they have been fired, she will display them proudly as something her children made that is so very special and perfect because it is an expression of their inner souls, and a wonderful momento of a lovely day out.

Advertisement