I Grout My Tiles

I've added 'grouting' to my list of DIY practices, which now includes: changing washers, decorating bedrooms, and putting up sloping shelves. On International Women's Day, I feel it's important to make a point. I'll add 'making points' to my list too.

As a result of this latest act of independence, my bathroom looks more like a swimming pool than it did before - in a good way.  I didn't notice this till I went swimming again last week - storm Dennis had closed the Shrewsbury pool for a couple of weeks with his random acts of windy vandalism.  The tiles I chose are brick-shaped and coloured blue with a hint of green - Maybe they're called  'aqua'.  Steve put them on the wall, but said that I could save money by doing the grouting myself.

I've done minor grouting before, but this bathroom's major. I've been carefully scraping grout, this way and that, across the gaps between tiles to fill them. These gaps seem hungry, eager to eat the grout, and today I had to cycle to B and Q to get an extra tub. I appeared, from the lonely state of the bike rack, to be the only person who had arrived in this way.

It strikes me that grouting is more the work of a novelist than a poet. The gaps between the words are pretty much the point and attraction of poetry. So filling in gaps, making sense of the whole, making things watertight, seems, judging by my aching right hand, prosaic.

On the plus side, I reckon this venture into prose-style DIY justifies me eating the last of the 'For when you're writing your novel, Mum' biscuits that my son gave me at Christmas, even though the novel still has plenty of gaps in it. Yum.