November 6, 2009 The Right Trousers
Left leg
Glue and silicon, paint and varnish, grout and wood-filler. Traces on his clothes. The trousers especially tell the story of my friend’s most recent jobs. There was that shower to fix urgently in Hackney one night last week, and the bathroom to sort out after a would-be plumber with too many tools and too few skills had been let loose in Hampstead. At the ongoing job in South London, he’s supposed to be doing the plumbing and not general building work, but it’s hard to keep the boundaries firm once on-site and when the other guy is not so confident. And working on his own place in the meantime means more varnish and paint than usual.
Right leg
The photos show the sides of his trousers, where his hands reach his upper leg. The marks on them are more than evidence of what got spilt or dropped. They indicate gestures of work. And how the right side (yes, he’s right-handed) takes the strain. And how if you’re going to do stuff like this, where you can’t help yourself wiping the residue of the materials that fix and cover and generally hold things together in houses and bathrooms, well you wouldn’t want to have the wrong trousers for the job.