The shower is now officially off-limits until Sunday morning when hopefully the newly painted bathroom walls and ceiling should be dry. I’ll have to shower at the gym until then. I’d guessed that getting rid of dark blue paint by painting over it with white wasn’t going to be easy, but it’s taken a whole day to do it and I’m sure when I see it again in natural light tomorrow morning I’m going to spot some patches where it’s a bit too thin to get rid of it completely.

I was planning on some kind of greenish-white so go with the bath, but B&Q didn’t seem to have anything I liked the look of, so ended up picking the plain white and then wandering around the aisles for half an hour looking for mildew remover.

The people at the customer services desk took a horrified look at me as though I was asking for something to get rid botulism when I asked if they had any. ‘Why have you got mildew on the ceiling?’ they asked, as though I was keeping it there instead of in a cupboard. I explained that I have a rather tropical bathroom and they called someone else over to deal with me. Buck passing, I think.

She walked me off to an aisle somewhere in the mid-twenties and tried to sell me more paint. In the end one of them advised me just to scrub the ceiling with bleech, which I did as soon as I got home. It got rid of most of it, and hopefully what’s left is dead and won’t creep back through the paint.

By teatime the first coat had been finished an hour but was still too sticky to be painted over, so I drove into town to get a new shower curtain and a mirror to replace the nasty Ikea mirror I got when I moved in. I was testing them out in the shop to see whether I’d be able to cut my hair in one of them when a member of staff wandered into my aisle. He took one look at me apparently admiring my reflection, turned on his heels and sped off. Strange boy.

I picked a curtain and a mirror, then went to the gym for a run, a sauna and a shower. When I got back, the paint was dry, so I got on with the second coat and ended up almost as painty as I had been before I went to the gym.

Got a text message from Paul, Trevor and Jon, who have gone off to Madrid for the weekend. It’s sunny, apparently, but cold. Pretty much the same as here, then.

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