Artex And Schnorbitz

I am a bit better today and have managed to keep down toast and a Jacobs cracker.
However, my bowels remain in a somewhat, delicate state.

This post is the result of one of the many surreal conversations Sassy and I share. Today we covered Mother/Daughter relationships, Belle and Sebastian, also, for some bizarre reason, Bernie Winters and Schnorbitz and 80’s fashion.

At some point during the early 80’s ATM acquired quite a serious Artex habit.
You know the stuff?
Slapped on walls and ceilings like plaster, then swirled about, patterns and ‘peaks’ made.
ATM blamed my sister and I for any speck or smudge of dirt in the house, so she chose her ‘Texture’ with that in mind.
Her actual words were,
“I want something that will keep these bastards off the walls.”

There had once been a fight and footprints had been left on the walls as we fell down the stairs.
That was also the day we found out just how purple the vein in her temple could go.
We decided it was Imperial Purple. (I Claudius had been on!)

Broken Leather was it’s cheerful name.
Broken bottles, razors and barbed wire was the reality.
Wheeling a bike down the hallway was a mixture of ‘Krypton Factor’ precision and running the gauntlet at a medieval joust to face the Gorgon of Greek myth at the end.
Firstly, the door was absolutely forbidden to slam open in to the wall.
Secondly, Portsmouth doorways are extremely narrow. You have to lift the bike in and then somehow stand behind it and wheel it, by the saddle, ‘no handed’ in to the house.
Holding the handlebars would result on lumps of knuckle flesh being gouged out by this shit on the walls.
Balancing the bike, you had to shut the door using the lock, no kicking or slamming it shut allowed.
No leaning the bike against the wall. No matter how carefully.
Bits of this vicious stuff would snap off and in a perverse reversal of ‘Hansel and Gretel’, would lead a raging ATM straight to you.
The hoover would be already plugged in, waiting for you, when you returned from the shed if there were ’bits’.
Then there is the awkward dogleg at the bottom of the stairs. Heaven forbid you get the line wrong and catch the paint on the banisters with the pedal.
Tippex worked a treat covering these up.
It didn’t last.
ATM was a smoker and after a while it became obvious.
Tippex doesn’t come in ‘White, with hint of 20 a day smoker’. Extremely remiss of them.
If you really fucked that up and grabbed for the handlebars, de-fleshing would commence.
You would snatch your hand back, thereby exposing your elbow to the wall of pain.
It was at this point ATM would appear from the kitchen and you’d get the first hint of which of her split personalities she was inhabiting that day.

See? I bet no one else had this kind of excitement each day!!