Mosaic

It is 2.30 in the afternoon, and I am exhausted. I didn’t sleep at all well last night, and neither did Matt. He is a little tense.  Throughout the night something would wake him and he would demand ‘ What are you doing? You’re blogging again. Stop blogging.’ I would reassure him that I wasn’t blogging, I was in fact sleeping, and he would drop off again. The third time he woke he decided to watch a very good Taiwanese film called something like ‘Dog, Man, ….’  and something else I can’t remember, with the sound turned down, so it didn’t disturb Pam, who was in the room next door. Half way through the film, he fell asleep, but I didn’t find it so easy. I tossed and turned for hours, hatching plans to make a fortune by designing a contemporary chess set. They are horribly ugly, don’t you agree? There’s a lot of room for improvement.

We have been painting all morning, but the light is going, and Matt has cycled to Islington to deliver a book — a present he is giving as an apology to a friend he invited to dinner, and then shouted at. He can’t drive, as the oil light comes on and an alarm goes off every time you start the car.

The car dilemma reminds me of Vic Menozzi (see ‘I love Friuli’). We were off to Bath about twelve years ago, measuring up for a job restoring a mosaic pavement from the 1930s. Vic, who is a tall, elegant man with beautiful suits and a very smart car, picked me up from outside the house. He would be happy to go to Bath in my car he said, but it had been raining and the driver’s seat was wet. A few months earlier, some one had stolen my car radio. They had broken in with a crowbar, and the door hadn’t closed properly since. We went in Vic’s jag. As we set off, my bottom became strangely hot. ‘It’s a heated seat’ Vic explained. ‘Oh Vic, I’d love to have a car like this!’ I said. ‘ You will, Emma,’ he said ‘you will’. I am still waiting.

Other kinds of hot seats

Posted under: Mosaic by Emma Biggs | Tags: insomnia > Matthew Collings > mosaic blog > mosaic restoration