Life is also more fun if you paint glass jars.

Life is more fun if you play games. ― Roald Dahl

I spent the morning yesterday at a local furniture boutique, painting bits of wood for no useful purpose. It was a spur of the moment thing, I had been browsing in this shop for the first time last week and heard the owner mentioning classes to another customer. I booked and paid for a spot right there and then. I may or may not have elbowed the other customer in the eye and trampled over her with my hobnail boots in order to get on the list first. Likely not. I didn't think about anything much in that moment other than it would be fun, and I would finally get to use the Annie Sloan chalk paint that's been sitting on the top of my orange pine bookcase for over a year.

Three hours it took us, and you would think three hours painting four tiny pieces of skirting board and one small pot would leave us with about 2.5 hours in which to twiddle our thumbs, but no. We were racing to get those pots finished, though we did get to stop for a couple of minutes in the middle to drink industrial strength coffee and eat lukewarm sausage rolls. Mmmm. Yum.

Every time they brought out a new colour, I kind of acted like a two year old being handed a jar full of bright lollies all of their own. OMG THAT'S SO BEAUTIFUL, LOOK HOW LOVELY THAT IS, SO LOVELY, ISN'T THAT JUST BEAUTIFUL, WOW, GOODNESS, RIGHT THAT'S THE REST OF MY LIFE SORTED, I AM JUST GOING TO SIT HERE AND PAINT. It was a little much. A tad over the top. I kept trying to explain myself, muttering things like, it's like food isn't it, when you see something really delicious and you can't help but get all excited? Which only seemed to confuse matters. Perhaps they were worried I was going to start licking the paints off of the plates were using. I'm not saying I wasn't tempted. I'm not saying I didn't want to try it.

Colour does that to me, always. It's a deeply resonant and gratifying joy, and anywhere I can find it, in the garden, on a flower, in a photograph, on the canvas, in food, or books, or even boring-bloody-pinterest-I'm-so-over-it, I will find a child-like pleasure in it.

I often think there's little useful purpose to blogging pretty things and I can get embarrassed about that, like the Judge of Human Usefulness is sitting somewhere quietly in a corner putting marks in my 'wasted her time on frippery' column on his oversized black clipboard with his magically refillable red pen. But then I karate chop that supercilious bastard right on his smug chopper with my ninja thinking cleverness, because sod him. It's not about the pretty. It's about the colour, which is about the joy, and joy is not made to be a crumb.

Also, painted jars. Inherently awesome.