You don't know pain until you've painted a ceiling

Illustration: Simon Letch.

• Have you succumbed to middle-class-benchtop syndrome?
• The noisy, dirty, smelly, ugly truth about open-plan living

The paint on the bedroom ceiling was flaking really bad but we managed to avoid thinking about it by never looking directly upward while we were in bed.  We learned to sleep on our sides so we wouldn’t accidentally catch sight of it, and when the flaking got worse, we learned to sleep face-down to block out all peripheral vision, making a little nose-reservoir in our pillows that held exactly eight minutes worth of oxygen before we’d have to come up for air.

But eventually the paint on the bedroom ceiling started peeling right off: a huge flap of it was hanging over our heads, vibrating whenever there was a breeze, and humming like a massive ceiling-mounted kazoo.  My beloved said “We can’t put it off any longer, it’s time to do something”, and I said “Yes, let’s start sleeping in the living room.  I bags the couch.  You can have the old lounge chair with the itchy upholstery”. But she wasn’t interested in this plan: she went out and bought some ceiling paint and a roller-brush, then she handed them to me and said “Here, I’ve done the lion’s share of the job.  Now you get to finish off with the fun bit!” and she went off to make a cup of tea, exhausted from her hard morning’s work.

Painting a ceiling would have to be the most joy-depleting, rage-inducing, life-crushing job that anyone can do, involving paint, a brush, and the delicate structure of the human spine. Architects are idiots: they put ceilings up high where no one can reach – ceilings should be on the floor, or in the backyard leaning up against a fence.

For the first hour, I balanced on the third-top rung of a wobbly ladder and scraped off flaky paint with a scraper, bending into positions that an inflatable windsock-man couldn’t get into without ripping. For the second hour, I balanced on the second-top rung of a wobbly ladder and sanded all the scraped edges, using my mouth and nostrils as a surprisingly efficient dust extractor system. And for the rest of the afternoon, I balanced on the very top rung of a wobbly ladder, holding a broomstick with a roller-brush gaffer-taped to the end, painting flat white paint onto flat white paint, no idea what I’d covered or missed, and making sure that all paint-drips fell safely onto floor towels, dropsheets and my wide open eyeballs.

By late afternoon I was aching, howling, cursing. Outside, a neighbour’s kid was crying because he fell off a trampoline, and I yelled “SHUT UP, YOU DON’T KNOW ABOUT PAIN!  I’M PAINTING A CEILING”.  On the bedroom radio, a newsreader reported another horrific ISIS militant attack, and I yelled “GET OVER YOURSELF, MIDDLE-EAST, YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND SUFFERING!  I’M PAINTING A CEILING!”

By nightfall, I was finished: I crawled down the ladder and looked up at my handiwork – it was worse than when I started, with unsanded edges, unpainted areas and unaccountable blotches. But I didn’t care: I just huddled in a corner and wept tears of flat white acrylic.  And when I blew my nose, out came a perfectly-formed brick of compacted sanding dust.

Danny Katz is a newspaper columnist, a Modern Guru, and the author of the Little Lunch books for kids, now a new TV series on ABC3.