The Russian border

I'm not sure where I first came across the art of zhostovo painting. It is true that my Porthos is half Russian, but I don't think I heard about it either from him or from his redoubtable mother, who was born in Siberia and made good her escape by becoming a first-class translator and then marrying an Englishman. All I know is that, when I did find out about it, I just had to try it for myself.

I picked a bad time. It would have been towards the end of 2018; I was living in a "quarter house" in an unremarkable village in the Fens, and that is exactly what it sounds like. One building divided crosswise into four houses. It's an unusual arrangement, and after living in it for a short time I could see exactly why. You get the noise from all three of the other houses. One of my neighbours, in particular, was apparently not entirely sure how to use his mobile phone; so he used to yell down it as if he thought he was talking through one of those tin-can-and-taut-string arrangements that children sometimes get to make (I didn't, because it would have required adult help to drill a hole in the bottom of the tins). However, apart from that, it wasn't a bad house, which was just as well since I was almost totally confined to it due to the vagaries of Squirty Sidney the Ill-Tempered Ileostomy. Unfortunately, it did have stairs, which I could manage at first, but my balance got quite a lot worse while I was there and I was starting to struggle.

And then my landlord decided to drop one of those no-fault evictions on me, the sort there's talk about making illegal at the moment. I hope they do make them illegal, or at the very least insist on something like six months' notice, because I was now up the proverbial gum tree. Trying to find affordable accommodation in the area is not easy at the best of times, and it becomes pretty well impossible if you know you're not going to be able to handle stairs. To cut a very long story short, I ended up in a homeless hostel for six months with the local authority doing all the hard work of finding me somewhere suitable to live. I hate to think how long it would have taken if it had been left to me.

Homeless hostels tend to get a pretty bad press. When I say I was in a homeless hostel, you're probably thinking I was in some grim little room in a ghastly concrete building in the roughest part of some nameless city. In fact, the place was very nice indeed, and at least one person mistook it for sheltered accommodation. I was still in the same village, the building was attractive and in a quiet area, and I had a little suite of rooms about the same size as my current flat, except that the entrance hall was a much better shape; it was square, so I could easily store mobility aids there without them getting in the way. Not only that, but they put me immediately adjacent to the laundry, since they'd heard all about Sidney; and for that I was deeply grateful, because I needed emergency laundry trips entirely too often. There were a few little quirks - there was no Internet, so what you had to do was get one of those wireless dongles; you couldn't pin anything to the walls (but the staff were very helpful and told me all about Command hooks, which I'm still using!); and I had to go to the main doors for grocery deliveries, because the drivers weren't allowed to come inside just in case any of them might be dangerous. I understand we had some women who had had to flee from domestic abuse, and the staff were being... well, very careful.

So I got on with life, including the zhostovo painting. The thing with zhostovo is that it usually has elaborate gold borders like the one you see in the photo; and I'm going to let you into a little secret now. They're not hard to do. Yes, you need gold acrylic paint, a fine brush, and a steady hand; but what you don't need is any great artistic skill. Your secret weapon here is an ordinary dressmaker's chalk pencil.

Zhostovo is always done on a dark background, usually black, so your chalk shows up perfectly. Measure up your tray and work out where your border is going to go; unless you want to drive yourself utterly mad, you'll want to make the border a whole number of centimetres long along each side, or whatever units you are using. (Centimetres are about right for a tray this size.) Put a chalk dot in each outer corner of the border, then mark dots every centimetre (or other unit) between the dots. Now decide on the width of your border, mark dots at the inner corners of the border, and do the same thing. Mark up a grid of dots in between.

Now paint a line. Any line you like. It might be straight, but more often it's a curve; all it has to do is connect at least two of your dots. Look at the upper edge of the lower border; it's basically U shapes. There would have been a chalk dot at the base of the U. I'd have connected the dot at the top of the U to the dot at the bottom with a nice curve, then curved up again to the other dot at the top... and then repeated round the whole border. Because the only rule here is: once you've painted a line, you repeat that line all the way round. (The corners are a little bit different, but you work those out as and when you get to them, and whatever you do in one corner, you do in the other three.)

That was the border. So far, so good. The next job was the flowers, and I wasn't so very confident on that, so I had to do a lot of practice pieces. The main thing to know about zhostovo flowers is that they're painted over white; you outline the flower, fill in the outline with titanium white (which is highly opaque), allow to dry, and then paint your flower over that, which gives it a very luminous effect against the dark background. Traditionally, zhostovo is done in oils, but it's perfectly possible to use acrylics, and that was what I did. I'm not a huge fan of oil paints.

So there I was, doing my practice flowers, and then the local hospital got in touch and told me they had an appointment available for surgery. The procedure is called anastomosis, which is a bit of a mouthful, but what it meant was they were going to take Sidney out altogether and convert Sibyl into a full-blown colostomy. (She'd been there since Sidney was installed, but for three years she'd just been a mucous fistula, doing nothing in particular.) And I said... oh, yes, please. I went in, they duly replumbed me, and a couple of days later my mobile rang. It turned out to be the council housing people.

"Good news," they said. "We've found you a flat. Can you come and look at it?"

"No," I replied.

"What?"

"I've just had major abdominal surgery and I'm flat on my back in a hospital bed. So, much as I'd like to, I'm not really up for looking at flats right now."

"Oh. Ah. Yes, well, that makes sense..."

To cut another very long story short, I took the flat sight unseen, having got the chap to describe it to me at length over the phone. However, there was a big rush to get me moved in, for quite a number of reasons, so when I did move I still wasn't at all well. I really don't recommend moving house while recovering from major surgery, but there was no help for it. Thankfully I had a lot of people around who could help me with the packing, and the movers were amazing; they could not have been any more kind or considerate. On the other hand, it did mean that zhostovo trays were rather the last thing on my mind.

What I didn't have, unfortunately, was people who could help me with the unpacking. I still have quite a lot of stuff in boxes, including that tray and the helpful book that tells me how to paint zhostovo flowers.

Oh well. The way I look at it, I'm going to have some fun when I find them!