For Sunday Miscellany on RTÉ Radio 1, and originally recorded as part of Kilkenny Arts Week in 2011, the late poet Michael Coady on always feeling at home in the world of painter/decorators - listen to Corpus Christi Varnish above.
When I was growing up in Carrick-on-Suir there were about a dozen painters and decorators in the town. My father, being one of that colourful brotherhood, I was literally at home with all the gear, smells and substances of my father's trade - paint and distemper, turpentine and linseed oil, methylated spirit and paraffin for the blow-lamp, wallpaper paste, putty and varnish, and brushes and scrapers, trestles and step-ladders and painters overalls..
It's a mystery to me now how all of it fitted in and around our 1940's council house beside the Fair Green, along with seven children, our parents and, near the end of her life, my paternal grandmother as well...
Listen to more from Sunday Miscellany here.
