Tired and Emulsional

Under Oat Milk

Tall Tales of an Alternate Totnes.

The poets of Totnes have long gone. Routed from their woodland hovels and spartan garrets by the Airbnbians.  Muse-less and bruised by rejection slips, many so penurious church mice sent them food coupons, their inkwells ran dry.

The final straw, the real kick in the feels, came from the multi-national paint companies, and their Frankensuarus scrabble to brand paint colours with increasingly outlandish names.

Ring-fenced by trademark, catalogued by colourists, and labelled by marketing wonks, all too keen to foist their wall-paint wares on lifestyle fashionistas that sport wicker trugs when out shopping for vegetables on market days, the poet’s argot – their beautiful descriptors – became sullied, their currency devalued.

However, one fabled Totnes poet – a last man standing, and now long gone – remained steadfastly true to his craft.

Down on the Longmarsh Trading Estate, across the river from The Baltic Wharf Flume Park, sits the now derelict Broadstroke & Smears Paint Factory.

Built in the late 1900s, with bricks hewn from moorland granite, its gothic edifice belies  its once colourful interior. A family-owned business, that in its heyday was a global player in the manufacture of house paint and its myriad, must-have hues.

The secret of its commercial success lay deep in its vaulted basement – for this is where the Thumb Poet of Totnes sought refuge.

Wizened in years, and steeped in cheap cider, he spent his days Kazooing ditties through an old comb wrapped in tracing paper, waiting to be called to the factory’s Naming Chamber.

When summoned, in a fugue state, he would enter the Naming Chamber. A granite altar stood in its centre, upon which a tin of newly-concocted paint sat. A prised lid lay by its side.

The Thumb Poet would slowly approach the tin, muttering indecipherable shibboleths. At arm’s length, he’d proffer the thumb of his right hand, and slowly dip it into the paint. The anointed thumb, would then be retracted, and when the sacred-paint drips came to halt, the trapdoors of the Naming Chamber would swing upwardly open, and the Thumb Poet, unkempt, wild-eyed, and layered in tweed, would shuffle forwards to tread the worn-stone steps up into the light, ready to wander our land, like a holy-man ascetic.

He would travel far and wide, his permanently extended arm brandishing the painted thumb, seeking by juxtaposition, the perfect alignment of colour and a bat-shit-crazy paint name.

Some of you may remember the popular “Stitched Kipper” that graced our walls many years ago. Described as a “burnt beige, with a hint of forest soot – pairs well with inglenook areas, will readings, and Victorian ghost children” – it was a perfectly-pitched piece of nonsensical nomenclature – and all because our man, in passing, jockeyed his painted thumb outside a fishmonger’s shop window in Bermondsey.

“Clock Tick, Muffled Bell, Christmas Bin, Tendon Squeak, Fatberg,” and somewhat bizarrely, “Eric” – the paint-tin hits kept coming from our wandering wordsmith.

In the end, worn down by the enormity of his task, he could give no more.

In the terminal stages of exhaustion, his thumb held resolutely high, he returned from his final foray to the Naming Chamber.

Maidens of good virtue laid him to rest in a woven-hemp hammock. The chief paint mixer stood expectantly by his side, pen and pad in hand. The Thumb Poet, now circling life’s drain, with one last effort, achingly offered up his painted thumb, and whispered “Dead Seagull. Clacton Beach. It’s all I got,” and as softly as his last breath, he passed away, finally unshackled from his travails.

The factory print-labelling machines whirled into action. Palletised tins of Dead Seagull were soon loaded onto vans, then dispatched to eager retailers.

Tosh-Pot paint magazine extoled ‘Dead Seagull’  as an “Azure-grey. With a salt-tang of despair. A crayoned graffiti heart, scrawled upon a cold concrete promenade in an off-season seaside town,” and the paint-rolling public went mad for it.

It was the Thumb Poet’s swansong.

Reverently embalmed in oil-based primer – it’s what he would have wanted – and  ironically buried in an unnamed grave overlooking the River Dart, a colour swatch of his past pairings lies atop in a rusting paint tin, weathered with wind and rain, soon to fade and be forgotten.