The Decoration Game

Blokes love stuff.  They just do.  Those chaps that live in caves subsisting on rice and calm thoughts, they are all very well and may go for minimalist chic atop a Hymalayan pea but, given the choice, by which I mean given an Argos catalogue, they’d swap zen for a karoke machine and a snack and sandwich toaster faster than you can chant ‘Om’.

Bluntly, blokes acquire stuff because it is useful.  William Morris (inventor of many wallpaper prints and the classic Minor) was of the opinion that you should have nothing in your house that is not beautiful or useful.

And it’s that ‘or’ which allows blokes to possess items such as replica sonic screwdrivers because, while they may not actually be able to defeat an actual Dalek, they are jolly nice to look at, and hold, and play with when the wife is out.  Screwdrivers plural of course because let’s face it, if you are the sort of chap that owns a replica sonic screwdriver, you are the sort of chap who is going to own more than one replica sonic screwdriver.

Chaps of a blokish tendency, however, tend toward the useful possessions, and oddly enough this too involves collections of screwdrivers.  To begin with, you need at least two types, normal and Phillips head.  Then you need different sized ones, and ones of different length.  Then you need an electric one because once you have used an electric screwdriver, you will be wondering why you have been wasting your life tightening and loosening screws like some sort of bloody serf from the dark ages.

Obviously you will need a shed to store all of this stuff in.  Luckily, you have an electric screwdriver, so putting one together will be a doddle.

Gear is useful, it’s a fact.  There comes a point in a man’s life when he will finally have as many tools and as many jars of assorted nuts, bolts and screws as his father did.  It’s quite a proud moment and one to be celebrated with a cup of tea and most definitely not telling the wife how right you were not to throw anything important away for the last two decades.

The right tool for the right job is important.  A bad craftsman blames his tools but I can tell you with absolute authority that a bloke decorating who discovers on the second brushstroke that his brushes, or roller, are inferior is instantly on the web to Screwfix, in the car to pick it up his order and back in time to pick the moulting bristles or roller pile pillings from the still moist emulsion, and then do the job right.

I have recently been decorating.  There is nothing quite like being in a room with all the windows closed on a baking hot day wondering if the paint is supposed to be that colour or if the fumes are making you hallucinate, listening to Radio 5 because that’s the law.

The latest discovery to vastly improve my life?  Selotape for carpets.

Previously, to protect carpets one would spend time and masking tape sticking down sheets of polythene, or sheets of newspaper.  Not any more.  Now you can buy these big rolls of selotape that stick to the carpet.  Down they go and you can start splashing the gloss about the place without fear of sticky stains on the tufted wilton.  Fantastic.

I am for anything that makes DIY less of a chore.  If you have the means, I heartily recommend getting somebody else to do it for you, but if you must DIY, then at least try to get some cool kit out of it.

My decorating collection is not quite complete.  I rather fancy some working lights, that permit one to do a decent job after dark.

I also rather like the idea of one of those paper suits to keep the paint off you.  Although, one person’s ‘disgusting track suit bottoms that you never wear anymore and looked horrible when you bought them what were you thinking?’ is another man’s Painting Pantalons.  And remember, a shirt is never at the end of its useful life until it’s rigid with dried emulsion.

Man Cave

Back in The Good Old Days when the only qualification required to become an eminent natural philosopher was the possession of a beard so huge, established and respectable that it had its own mistress, Britain’s museums were stuffed with stuff.

Often, stuffed stuff.

The glorious age of Victorian Empire era expansion allowed the British to roam the world, identify interesting bits of it, and then either chip them free for relocation to Islington or shoot them, skin them and then put them in a glass case, in Islington.

This then was the golden age of museums.  Truly, wonder houses, the most wonderous thing about them being that a Briton could see the creatures of the African Interior without risking the twin perils of the age normally associated with seeing a lion; catching something vile and perishing in a sweaty heap of linen in a hammock or, being eaten.

These museums were curated by Men.  Men with beards, men who may have been the most learned of their age, but did not know the word ‘cluttered’, men who, when faced with the problem of housing another thousand startled looking exhibits of creatures newly discovered/slaughtered, would simply add another wing the size of a cathedral to their museum.

Men love stuff.  Men love to collect.

Women do not.  The exception is when certain women do the menopause.  They then start to notice the ads in the back of TV Quick offering them the opportunity to purchase a thimble collection that will be the envy of their friends.  Particularly acute cases collect cats.

Men collect.  They start as schoolboys collecting footie cards, comics, stamps, coins, anything that can be collected.  And they never shake the habit.

Men collect so much stuff that an astonishing 80% of them invest in specialised off-site storage, commonly known as a shed.

A shed owned by a woman will contain: a lawnmower, half a bag of compost, curtains that she has put up at the windows.

A shed owned by a man will contain at least: two lawnmowers (one working, one awaiting repair or resurrection), a dozen tins of paint, each with an inch of paint in the bottom that is now so hard it could survive re-entry, a failed attempt at home brew, a successful attempt at home brew, porn, a Playstation 1, more porn, a collection of ‘Commando’ comics that the missus thinks you threw out two years ago and which she would be more upset about than the porn you still have, a stuffed animal.

This condition has led directly to the creation of the Man Cave.

If you spend any time at the sort of edge-of-town industrial areas that feature DIY superstores, areas of waste ground with weeds pushing through broken concrete, and invariably somebody with a caravan who is selling ‘hamburgers’ and ‘hot dogs’, then you might have noticed self storage units.

Such places are actually mundane.  They are mostly used by businesses storing stock and, depressingly, food banks (surely we all hope for the day when the only food banks in operation are those that supply blokes with forbidden treats that The Wives will not permit them, leading to the glorious prospect of a self storage unity filled floor to ceiling with boxes of Curlywurly) and not, I suspect to the disappointment of those who enjoyed ‘Silence of the Lambs’ a little too much, used as trophy rooms by serial killers.

They are though, apparently, used as Man Caves.  When a woman likes a bloke enough to commit to a long term relationship with him, so that they move in together and she can Fix Him, a chap is often confronted with the bewildering notion that his collection of 120 mint in box Transformers are not welcome, and there’s this thing called eBay.  Or Oxfam.  Or the tip.

Up and down the country, there are men who spend a couple of hours a week just…sitting, in their ‘comfortable’ armchair, amid their collections of replicas (never ‘toys’ or ‘tat’) or vinyl or books or VHS or Betamax or footie game programmes and just…being.

Somebody with a beard should build a monumental self-storage facility, so that we can all enjoy the Museum of Bloke.