New Directions in Tailoring

I am busy at work upon scaffolding to paint the front of my house.

So why did I resemble the other day a Michelin Man who has a copy of Vogue and a glass of beer aloft?

It is me there, if not sporting my usual stylish attire. To paint a house - in elegant shorts - is akin to surgery. Preparatory work takes time, increasingly so; each advance requires a step back (not literally, vertigo is bad enough), and contending with a revealed problem that, if unrectifed, would spoilt the eventual effect.

All of this brings into play - continual stretching and crouching - parts of the body that had not previously made themselves felt. The sweat even seems to creep into the brain as one juggles with these myriad matters while the scraper comes to resemble a scalpel. “Nurse, more primer!”

A friend was well aware of this, and suggested I experiment with a self-massage device to ease current aches, and be ready for the work ahead.

These have been around a number of years, and were bought mainly to ease medical conditions, in particular to push lymph lumps around the body to quell their lingering in one spot and causing such places as the ankles to swell painfully. That condition cannot be cured but this device eases it.

Meanwhile, the device has become a part of beauty salons for general purposes (and one imagines that it will be all the more so in these mask-wearing corvid times).

And so it was that I wriggled horizontally into the ribbed outfit - a high-tech wetsuit, perhaps - which, when zipped up, reached my chest. This is linked by a tube to a bedside pump which - variously programmable by time, condition and pressure - pushes air into the suit. Somehow or other, it begin at one's ankles and works northwards without fear or favour - medical neutrality - of what it finds along the way.

Chest reached, it deflates; and the process begins again. To reach out and increase the pressure means that the device duly presses one's body from beneath as well. All the while, there is a gurgle redolent of an iron-lung machine, and yet - unlike those attached for years to such a thing - one finds a measure of peace descend.

Thoughts of scaffolding and sandpaper evaporated, Sleep even beckoned - and then I jolted forwards to pick up a notebook and write “murder scenario”.