Paint Stalactites

 

I’m not very good at painting.

My window sills over the years have all grown stalactites.

These have been formed as the white gloss paint slowly drips after I’ve finished painting a window sill.

It was the warm sunshine that got me painting.

It’s a nerve-wracking procedure for me as I have to use the step ladder, and just climbing onto the first rung is scary.

I also tend to get more paint on the glass than on the window frames.

This year I sellotaped around the glass, close to the frame so that when my brush inevitably erred I could then remove the tape, and revealed… drum roll… a perfectly painted window.

That was the plan.

A week later, I removed the tape.

I even scoured along its edge with the sill so that the paint would not be pulled off the window frame itself as the tape was removed.

Sellotape has a mind of its own.

Somehow despite the soaring temperatures that week and having left the gloss paint a week to dry, some of the paint on the sellotape was still wet.

The sellotape then snapped as I tried to pull it away, leaving long thin tapering fiddly sections that I had to prise away from the glass.

I realised that somehow the paint had  seeped under the sellotape.

How could that be?

‘That’s from last year’s paint job,’ I kidded myself.

The tape having broken would then writhed like a snake into as many different formations of the figure eight as it could possibly invent. Wrapping itself tightly around my fingers, so that I had to prise it off, before placing it in a heap at the top of my wobbly step ladders.

Soon there was more paint on the windows, on my fingers and on the step ladders than on the window frames themselves.

As for a nice clean paint job… well no, I’m afraid not.

And when I last checked, all the paint stalactites had grown a little longer to show that yet another year had passed.