Conversation

Twelve hours yesterday hanging wallpaper in a room with all the challenges - old plaster walls that I had patched and primed, complex ceiling angles, almost nothing true or square, random electrical fixtures. Weirdly, the indicator of success at the end is a total *lack* of salient features; all the wobbles and skew lines vanish in an anodyne haze of textured wallpaper blandness.

It's some sort of anti-Daoist triumph: enormous effort, no natural quirks remain. I would far rather live among the roots and branches of a vast, gnarled tree on a sunny mountain, but Northeast Scotland is too harsh for such impractical thoughts, and the sun is too weak to sustain them.