Had a charming young man painting the outside of the house last week. Unfortunately I had no idea he was coming - the landlady called me on the morning of his arrival, so that the job could be done and dusted in that warm Spring sunshine that feels so distant now.
It wasn’t his fault that I was upset to see him. After the maelstrom of the move I’d been desperate to get back to work, to bring some dosh into my bank account, but such is the nature of scribbling for a living that having someone appearing and disappearing while playing a radio outside my office window is enough to stop my work in its tracks.
Wherever I went he was there, so in the end I lost three days work and felt fantastically frustrated. Poor lad must have thought I was a neurotic madman, but after reading an interview with Colm TóibÃn in which he describes his need for complete and utter solitude to work I felt much better.
Anyway, having given up on my work I did what anyone would do. I cooked up a huge Shepherd’s Pie from my roast lamb leftovers, with music pumping loud and funky.
If the painter was trying to work out who this grumpy bastard was and why I was giving him such a hard time, he’d have had an interesting time building a personality profile from the tunes that came up on my iPod shuffle, in this order:
Beethoven
Kylie Minogue
Leonard Cohen
Sex Pistols
Johnny Cash
Otis Redding
I love my taste in music, and strangely I love the fact that so few others can enjoy it all with me.
